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Director's Thoughts #12 – Office Space (or Mantras to Work By)
My office has some fairly hideous carpet – dark green border with a pale lilac faded interior color, which makes decorating my office extremely difficult, but what I did find were some of these absolutely adorable children’s book posters that I use as my director mantras (it also helps that…
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Popular Trends & How to Incorporate Them into the Library
Popular trends happen in a blink of an eye – a book becomes popular after being a sleeper when it was published, a movie becomes the most quoted movie of the summer or a toy becomes the must-have of the holiday season. As libraries continue to fight for funding and…
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Early Literacy At Its Finest
There’s a great article on the School Library Journal’s website about the positive effects of storytime on young children. Storytime began in the late 1800s and has changed drastically over the years from a time when children were expected to sit quietly and listen to an adult read books to…
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Director's Thoughts #9 – Telling Stories
I’m trying something new with my staff as of the end of this week. I’ve been asking the question lately, “How do we make people care?” People being our staff, stakeholders, supervisors, etc. I want our staff to know that we’re making a difference every single day, I want our…
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Director's Thoughts #8
Last week we introduced our Coffee Cart to the public – our library doesn’t have the space for an actual coffee shop, so this is what we came up with! This was an idea that’s been circling around my brain for quite a while and after discussing it with my…
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Blogging Challenges
I’ve been struggling lately with my blog – it started out as a suggestion from my boyfriend a few years ago and at the time I thought, “Who would ever want to read anything I wrote?” and since, I’ve come to enjoy sharing my programs, discussing issues and connecting with…
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Strategic Plan Involvement
You may or may not know that our library is currently in the midst of developing a strategic plan. As a new director, this was my first goal for our library, creating a roadmap for the future, that can be adjusted as times changes, but provides us with a guide…
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Federal Budget Cuts, or What Is the IMLS?
As I promised in a previous post, this is not a blog to become political, but it is a blog to be educated about library issues and this issue is too big to ignore. This post is longer than usual, but I really want people to understand what the IMLS…
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Community Survey Results
We created a community survey using Survey Monkey and also had it available on paper for people who stopped in the library and were willing to fill it out. After about six weeks, we gathered 333 responses, about 1/3 of which were gathered online, while the majority were gathered on…
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Snow Day!
We have a snow day today! And it’s the perfect timing – I’ve had a rough couple of days and without going into a lot of details, work has been absolutely crazy and stressful, so I’m planning to spend my snow day with a pile of books, a cozy sweatshirt…