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Continuing Education Scholarship Program

Thinking about attending the fall 2021 WLA Conference in Green Bay? Apply for the new Continuing Education Scholarship. This new program will cover most, if not all, of the costs of attending an in-person conference. There are seven (7) scholarships available for the fall WLA Conference and the deadline to apply is October 20, 2021.

In addition to WLA Conferences, there will be scholarships to attend other conferences like the ALA Annual Conference, PLA Conference, ARSL Conference, and more.

The Scholarship program will complement our existing CE Grant funds. Applicants who don't receive a scholarship are encouraged to utilize the CE Grant funds to offset the costs of attending a conference. The limit for in-state conferences has been increased to $300.

This new program is funded in part with a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services which administers the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA). Thank you!

 

 

Equity in Action: Fostering an Antiracist Library Culture Course

Library Journal is offering the "Equity in Action: Fostering an Antiracist Library Culture" online course in autumn 2021.

South Central is partnering with Wisconsin Valley Library Service and NEWI to organize a group rate and can offer interested library staff a discount from 15% to 35% off the regular $245 per person course fee when you sign up using this form.

Read full details of the course. Key features:

• The interactive online course consists of live sessions that are bridged with online workshops, video lessons, assignments, discussions, and resources.
• Live sessions are 1-3 pm on Tuesdays September 28, October 5, and October 12; they will be recorded and available afterward.
• You will have access to all course content for six months after the course ends.
• Upon earning a certificate of completion, the course is eligible to count as 15 contact hours of continuing education.

The more people who join the group rate, the lower the per-person fee will be. Library Journal's group rate fee schedule:

# in our group	discount	your fee, based on # of people in our group
3 - 4	15%	$208.25
5 – 10	20%	$196.00
11 – 20	25%	$183.75
21+	35%	$159.25
NEWI will invoice SCLS (for SCLS member library staff) in mid-October for the discounted fee, which will be based on the number of people in our group who sign up.

NEWI will register you for the course, and in mid-October will invoice SCLS (for SCLS member library staff) for the discounted fee. SCLS will use CE Grant funds for the cost of the course.

Multiple staff at your library may sign up. Deadline to join the group purchase: 5 pm on Wednesday, September 8, 2021.

July 15, 2021 Update: SCLS will pay for up to five (5) course registrations per library. Libraries can register as many staff as they like to get the group discount.

 

 

OverDrive Audiobook Update & Sora

The WPLC Digital Library Steering Committee recently met and voted to change the maximum loan period for audiobooks to 21 days. Previously, the maximum loan period was 14 days. This is great news for those of us who listen to lots of audiobooks and sometimes needed two loan periods to finish a book.

There are two ways you can make this change. From the desktop version of Digital Library, sign in to your account and then select Settings from My Account. The first setting is your loan periods and you can select your default loan period of 7, 14, or 14 days for ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines or 3, 5, or 7 days for video. On the Libby app, you can change your loan period when you borrow a title. The loan period you select will now be your default loan period for future checkouts.

On another audiobook note, the Audiobook SYNC program is about halfway through the season. The program uses the Sora App (also by OverDrive) and recently some users noticed that the previous SYNC titles weren't accessible. To fix this, SYNC help says to log out of the Sora app and log in again. This should solve the problem (it did for me!). If it doesn't, the recommendation is to delete and reinstall the app.

Happy Listening!

 

 

 

Virtual Conferences

Like many of you, I've been attending a lot of virtual events. SCLS has hosted webinars for many years so virtual events are nothing new. Now, however, events that were normally in-person are being moved online like the recent American Library Association Annual Conference and the upcoming Association for Rural & Small Libraries Conference. I recently attended the Denver Public Library's Advancing Racial Equity and Inclusion in the Workplace Symposium (more about that in a minute).

Here is a list of upcoming virtual conferences:

• United for Libraries Virtual: Trustees - Friends - Foundations, August 4-6, 2020. The cost for this conference is free for members or $49 for non-members ($99 for your full board).
• Library Advocacy and Funding Conference from EveryLibrary, September 14-16, 2020. The cost for this conference is $75 ($100 after August 14, $125 after September 4). For every Wisconsin librarian that registers, 25% of the registration fee will go to WLA.
• Computers in Libraries & Internet Librarian Connect 2020 from Information Today, September 21-25. The cost for this combined conference should be available later this month. 
• Association for Rural & Small Libraries, September 28-October 2, 2020. The cost for this conference is $50 for ARSL members, $65 for non-members, and $25 for Advocates (Trustees, Friends, and Foundations).
• Back in Circulation Again Conference from the Information School at UW Madison, October 19-20, 2020. The cost for this conference is $250.
• Lead the Way: Libraries at the Heart of Community Engagement from the Information School at UW Madison, November 16-17, 2020. The cost for this conference ranges from $56.75 - $225.

For SCLS member public library staff, you can use CE Grant funds to offset the cost of attending these conferences.

I mentioned the Denver Public Library's Advancing Racial Equity and Inclusion in the Workplace Symposium earlier and wanted to tell you more about it. Originally, this was to be a relatively small (about 125 people) in-person symposium held in Denver, Colorado. When the pandemic changed everything, the planning committee changed this event too. The event grew into a three-day virtual conference with more than 1000 people attending. The recordings of most of the sessions are available for you to watch here. This was one of the best virtual events that I've attended. The organizers, especially Ozy Aloziem from Denver Public Library, did a fabulous job bringing together a wide variety of speakers and artists in a really thoughtful way and acknowledging the hard work that needs to be done around racial equity.

One thing I learned from attending DPL's Symposium is to treat attending a virtual conference like an in-person conference. While you may not be physically leaving your home office or library to attend, you owe it to yourself (and the conference organizers and presenters) to block out your calendar, turn off your email, and be present for the conference sessions. It's worth it!

Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay

Updated 7/27/2020 to add CIL & Internet Librarian conference.

Compassionate Accountability: Resources to Help Library Staff

As libraries are working on their re-opening plans, one of the questions that has come up is how staff can best de-escalate challenging situations that may arise. Dealing with challenging behavior or situations isn't new in libraries. Our new reality, though, is bringing new worries into the mix. While I don't have all the answers for you, I wanted to share some resources for you and your staff.

First, SCLS is hosting a webinar on June 11 from 10 - 11:30 a.m. called Compassionate Accountability: Dealing with Problem Behaviors in the Library. In this webinar, Emily Rogers and Karla Giraldez from Brown County Library, will explore ways that library staff can explain changes to library services and enforce existing and new guidelines. Register here! if you're not able to attend live, the webinar will be recorded. (Updated 7/31/2020 with link to the recording)

Next, all Wisconsin library staff - including SCLS - have access to Ryan Dowd's Librarian's Guide to Homelessness online training. The Core Training is especially helpful in working with all patrons, not only those who are experiencing homelessness. In addition to the Core Training, there are 8 additional one hour webinars on a variety of topics. If you have any trouble accessing the training, please contact Jean.

There are several recorded webinars that are about security, safety, and service in the library:

• Dealing with Challenging Patrons: Safety and Security in our Libraries (Wild Wisconsin 2017)- slides, recording
• Teaching Patrons to be Successful in the Library (Wild Wisconsin 2017) - slides, recording
• Hospitality in the Library (Wild Wisconsin 2016) - recording
• Defusing Tense Situations and Setting Effective Limits (WLA 2019 recorded presentation) - recording

And, finally, Reb Kilde with the IFLS Library System recently wrote a post called The Big Mask Ask: Can you really make anybody wear a mask?  In addition to great information about using empathy to encourage compliance with library guidelines, she's created a couple of great posters to use in the library and includes instructions on how to make them yourself. Thanks Reb!

If you have other resources to share, let me know in the comments.