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December 2024 |
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Adult Services Notes |
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Library of Virginia Training |
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Library 2.0 Trainings Now Available
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The Library of Virginia's Niche Academy now hosts 70+ new courses from Library 2.0.
The Library 2.0 "Safe Library" training programs for library staff and leaders cover service, security, safety, supervision, and even a little stress management. Their goal is to help to keep all library employees physically and psychologically safe, making it easier for them to serve all patrons in their facilities.
Presenter Dr. Steve Albrecht has trained thousands of library employees in 28+ states, live and online, in service, safety, and security. His programs are fast and entertaining, and Dr. Albrecht provides tools that can be put to use immediately in the library workspace with all types of patrons.
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Niche Academy is open to all Virginia library staff members and library associates such as trustees and Friends board members. If you do not have a Niche Academy account, please use your library email address to sign up. If you do not have a library work email, you may register with a personal email, and we will contact you to confirm that you are affiliated with a Virginia library.
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News from Library Development & Networking
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RUSA Online Training Reports
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In partnership with ALA's Reference and User Services Association, LDND is delighted to offer training opportunities for Virginia library staff.
Scholarship recipients are asked to report out on key points or topics from the programs they attend. Read the reports below.
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| Business Reference 101
Victoria Hauser, Henrico County Public Library and Carol Sties, Chesterfield Public Libraries
Business Reference was an asynchronous course taught over three weeks. The class included modules on company, industry, consumer, international, and nonprofit research, and small business and entrepreneurial support. There were also forums where students could introduce themselves, a section for "stumpers" for posting tricky questions, and brief assignments that allowed students to practice utilizing business reference databases.
Overall, the course was excellent for helping to demystify business reference and was an opportunity to explore databases. The instructor was enthusiastic and created modules that were easy to follow and humorous. She tied the resources back to library basics, including conducting a reference interview. The class may be better suited for public or academic libraries that have more business resources, but was also helpful to public librarians that encounter general company research or entrepreneurial questions.
The online layout of the course presented some frustrations. From the main page, there was no way to tell which modules or assignments you had completed, or how long a module would take. Some modules where much longer than others. Despite this, the course was an informative dive into BizRef!
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At Chesterfield Library, we strive to be first choice community for residents, businesses, and visitors in which to live, work, raise a family and play. Since the pandemic, we have had an uptick in business-related Reference requests, some of which are challenging for a "Generalist" Librarian to solve. Luckily, this course taught me about free and subscription-based resources related to business, how to navigate them, and their contents.
I gained a broader perspective on what our customers may see and curated a pocket list of free resources I can extend to the public and library staff. For example, CIA.gov (Central Intelligence Agency) has an online World Factbook on basic intelligence on "all the history, people, government, economy, energy, geography, environment, communications, transportation, military, terrorism, and transnational issues for 265 world entities." This would be a great starting point for a K-12 school project.
For adults, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has public company 10K and annual SEC filings. There's also finance.yahoo.com for historical data on stocks and investments. I believe the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Yahoo Finance have the most application to library inquiries in most public library capacities.
With a subscription, libraries could get access to Data Axle, EBSCO's Business Source Ultimate, Gale's Business, IBISWorld, Morningstar, Plunkett, ProQuest One Business, RKMA Market Research, and Statista. However, after taking the course and comparing it to my daily observations of other subscriptions, I'm not convinced paying for these subscriptions would be worth the return of use. I found that many are more complicated than what the average customer comes into the library for.
I believe our community of public library users would benefit more from a Consumer Reports subscription or an expanded Gale subscription that encompasses more K-12 content. We aim to serve all customers to the best of our abilities, no matter what they are coming into the library for, but we must also be good custodians of taxpayer's assets.
I'm incredibly grateful to the Library of Virginia for sponsoring me to take Business Reference 101, an online RUSA training. I hope the Library of Virginia will be able to offer library staff similar professional development opportunities in the future so library staff can expand their knowledge of what is freely available.
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Supporting Small Business Owners
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Libraries can be great places for small business owners to find free resources to help them navigate the uncertain world of running a company.
When you get questions about these sorts of resources, where do you look? It can be a challenge to support business people, but fortunately, the Find It Virginia collection has some great places to start. |
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Accel5 provides curated collections of videos, articles, and book summaries that are great for those looking to build their skills in management, business essentials, or personal effectiveness. Management topics include, but are not limited to, Coaching & Mentoring, Conflict Resolution, Effective Meetings, Hiring & Dismissing, Managing Teams. In Business Essentials, you will find topics like Business Acumen, Customer Focus, Diversity, Finance Essentials, Project Management and more. The Personal Effectiveness pathway covers Career Management, Communication Skills, Emotional Intelligence, Networking & Relationship Building, and Time Management among other areas.
Gale Legal Forms has a wealth of forms relating to small business operations, including contracts, HR forms, finance forms, licensing agreements, articles of incorporation, and lots more, all with a Virginia focus.
For those just starting out, JobNow offers career and credentialling information for over 140 specific careers as well as live résumé and interview coaching.
In Universal Class, your users can find self-paced online learning opportunities in computing, MS Office software, business, entrepreneurship, web development, and office skills. Classes are from certified instructors, and often include practice exercises and quizes. Many classes offer CE credits.
Virginia public libraries have free access to all the resources in the Find It VA collection, and can share direct links to them on their library websites. So check out these great tools for supporting the small business owners and entrepreneurs in your community.
Let Barry Trott know if you have any questions about access to the Find It VA resources. |
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Document Bank of Virginia |
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The Semiquincentennial of America is almost here!
As part of LVA's efforts to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and U.S. independence, the Education & Outreach staff at the Library of Virginia have been adding new entries to Document Bank of Virginia, LVA’s online classroom resource for teachers and students.
Explore the entries in the Revolution and the New Nation unit. |
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Document Bank of Virginia (DBVa) is the Library of Virginia’s initiative to get important primary source documents into classrooms. Using primary sources, teachers can make history relevant to students while helping them learn and understand state standards. DBVa will teach students to be critical thinkers as they analyze the original documents and draw their own conclusions about Virginia’s past.
Use DBVa to support students in your library, and be sure to recommend it to your school librarian colleagues in your community so that they can share it with their teachers. |
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By Andrew DeNicola Culpeper County Library, adenicola@cclva.org
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When a child plays with LEGO they instantly know how to make a stack of bricks mean something. For example, a child could take a handful of bricks and turn it into what they describe as a nuclear reactor. To adults, it may not resemble anything but a cube of multi colored bricks with a green dot in the middle. To them, they can tell you what each brick represents including that plutonium green dot.
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Therapists use play therapy to help them find the right words to describe their feelings. Why not do the same with adults?
LEGO Serious Play is a method in which LEGO is used as metaphor to assist with building communication. It can be used to enhance the function an executive board, problem solve a lack of communication between a group of people, be a fun team building program, even be used as a way for veterans experiencing PTSD to find the right words to describe their emotions. A facilitator of LEGO Serious Play could use make, for example, two teams that are at opposites. They build two ships going toward the same "goal" and the facilitator then asks them to find a way to communicate - maybe using a connector brick - and what it represents.
Recently, I was awarded a Technical Assistance Grant from the PATH Foundation with assistance from the Friends of the Culpeper Library. With it, I will be attending a full 4-day course in Washington, DC. to become a LEGO Serious Play Facilitator with a certificate from one of its early founders. Once I receive the certification, my grant responsibility is to facilitate free programs with non-profit organizations that serve Culpeper County. Culpeper County Library is evolving to where we wish to ensure life-long learning and “work-smarter-not-harder” by enhancing the non-profit organizations around us. The cyclical process of ensuring healthy and vibrant non-profits helps the people they serve which makes Culpeper County Library a continuing community center.
When putting bricks and words together, things just "click."
For more information, visit https://seriousplay.training/ to get an idea of what this program can do. |
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Readers' Advisory Tips and Tricks
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December NoveList Reading Challenge |
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Looking for a fun book prompt for your community of readers? Try NoveList's December reading challenge.
Have your readers finish out 2024 by trying an award-winning title published in the past three years. NoveList has a great list of possible reads that would make a fun display or quick bookmark.
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You can also check out hundreds of great award lists in NoveList. Award winners offer opportunities for interesting and successful book displays, and can be great in the holiday season when busy library users just need to find something quickly.
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Crime Scene Investigation:
Deadly Disinformation |
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Staff at the Dallas (TX) Public Library, developed an interesting approach to information literacy. The program was "intended to get patrons thinking about how information is disseminated and question sources of information."
Rather than simply present examples of mis/disinformation, library staff created a series of documents around a fictional crime scene and then invited participants to use their detecting (and research) skills to figure out which of the "clues" were false or misleading, either intentionally to unintentionally. |
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Featured Virginia Programs
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This is a passive program, but one that has quickly become popular with both staff and patrons. Every branch picks a monthly theme for the books that are face out in our stacks. Any patron (or staff member!) who can guess the theme gets a piece of candy. The themes are pretty tricky to guess. For example, in July, every book on display had a title that started with one of the letters that spells "JULY".
We even started doing this in our children's room, and the kids love it, too. Not only do our patrons look forward to the monthly theme, but they actually have started traveling from branch to branch to try and guess all the monthly themes. |
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What started as a whim has become a great way for us to interact with our patrons!
For more info, contact Maggie Albee, mallbee@cclibrary.net
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Prince William Public Libraries
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Virtual Travel: United Kingdom |
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This is an interactive presentation utilizing free library and online resources to travel (virtually) to the United Kingdom. We’ll use library resources to do “research” of where we want to go and what foods we would eat. Then, we will refer to Google Arts & Culture, along with various official sites for 360 tours of locations.
Participants will take home a handout with ways to access everything at home or
the next time they visit the library. The handout will also have some book recommendations. |
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For more info, contact Catherine Seavey, cseavey@pwcgov.org
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Based on a True Story: The Terror by Dan Simmons
and the Doomed Franklin Expedition |
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True Story is a program that explores the real events that happened that inspired work of the book The Terror by Dan Simmons, a captivating historical novel with supernatural elements based on the lost Arctic Expedition of Sir John Franklin in the 1840s.
The book was also the basis for the television series The Terror on AMC. It's the fascinating true story behind this compelling narrative about England’s race to find the Northwest Passage and the tragedy that ensued.
For more info, contact Phil Ford, pford@henricolibrary.org
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| Recent articles on topics of interest to Adult Services |
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This newsletter is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. It is published by the Library of Virginia Library Development and Networking Division.
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