🥇 Library Champion Newsletter | 🏘️ Communities with libraries are better off 📈
Library Champion,
The library fuels your community!
Did you know that by simply having a library near you improves property and business values, graduation rates, education levels and overall satisfaction with life? Those with access to a library has free books at their fingertips. No community was worse off for having the ability to increase it’s literacy. Children have the opportunity to learn and have fun at the library and community members can take part in lifelong learning opportunities. All told, your community is better off with a library in it!
We are in the beginning stages of our annual fund drive and we would like to mention that the support of your individual municipality helps solve specific issues in our area. Each township and borough can donate to the library and guarantee their residents are living in a first-class community. To the officials in each municipality: you have the following number of library card holders in your community and they checked out a lot of books last year! Consider giving just $1 per card holder. Every dollar counts!
Here is one book I am reading and a book that I just bought for the library’s collection.
Over the weekend I read the short book A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport. This was an interesting book. The title makes you think it could be self-help, but it really isn’t. Newport is an engineering professor at Georgetown and a lot of the book is quite technical. However, I did come away with some practical tips:
1) You can bend email to your will. I am guilty of having my email accounts (yes, more than one) open all day. I am guilty of thinking that working my way through email is actual work. Staying glued to my email all day hinders my ability to accomplish deep work. I basically tell myself to stay on call, for what if I get an urgent email? But this book helped me see that I can (and I actually did) bend my email accounts to my will. Here’s how:
I created 2 new email addresses. Each were for specific correspondence I get on a regular basis: newsletters and industry emails. I love newsletters and feel they are an easy way to get information (hence why I started this one). I subscribe to a lot of industry emails, such as listservs, and while they are not usually urgent, they help me stay current on things pertinent to my work and the library. The problem becomes that I get a lot of both types of email each day. They can blend into my actual work emails and keep me on the hampster wheel.
Back to my 2 new email addresses. I added some filters and updated my subscription information and now both types of emails go to those separate email addresses and not to my main email address. This took me from getting over 40 emails a day to now under 10. If I want to check newsletters at the end of the day or listservs at the end of the week, I can do that and not get bombarded with them each day.
I’ll be honest: this was a no-brainer decision that had an immediate impact on my mental health and professional performance. Give it a shot and see what it does for you.
2) I began using Trello again. Trello is a web-based, Kanban-style, list-making application. Basically an online bulletin board that allows you to add note cards to different topics. I previously used my email to keep track of things, such as the progress on a project or what I am working on with an employee. Again, these emails would blend into my regular work emails and like #1 above it can get overwhelming.
By separating these projects and putting them into Trello, I can visit them on-demand and not have them always in-front of me. Before email, we would get mail and papers and organize them in certain ways (trays, shelves, drawers). I am basically learning how to do that digitally.
Newport went into great technical detail about the history of email, how we arrived at using it, why we keep using it when it makes many of us miserable, and the way teams can (and do) work both past and present.
I have on-again off-again been reading The Terror by Dan Simmons and after reading two nonfiction books back-to-back I wanted to read some fiction next.
The story is told through the eyes of several characters, including the expedition’s leader, Sir John Franklin, co-commander Captain Francis Crozier and the ship’s surgeon Harry Goodsir. The author jumbles the chronological sequence, beginning in October 1847 with Terror (one of the expedition’s two ships; the other was Erebus) trapped in the ice north of Canada, where they have come in search of the Northwest Passage.
The initial scene immediately introduces the novel’s main supernatural element: a giant bear-like entity (the crew call it the thing) that preys on the explorers and appears invulnerable to their weapons. The expedition is in enough trouble without this hostile being’s attention. Food is short, thanks in part to improperly prepared canned goods; the ships have been frozen in thick sea ice for two consecutive winters; many of the crew show signs of scurvy and the ice continues to contract and expand, which will eventually lead to it crushing the ships; and temperatures have been consistently 50 or more degrees below zero.
Overconfident Franklin has disobeyed orders to leave behind messages detailing his movements, so rescue expeditions have no idea where to search for him. Crozier, for his part, is a chronic drunk, although it doesn’t seem to affect his command of his ship and men. Simmons convincingly renders both period details and the nuts and bolts of polar exploration as his narrative moves back and forth in time to show the expedition’s launch in 1845, time the two commanders spent in Australia in 1841, and its early days in the Arctic.
This isn’t a book I can mindlessly read as there is so much detail in it, but I am finding myself able to push through it faster now than before.
Click here or on the image below to follow my reading on Goodreads.
A book we bought today that you should borrow:
On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed
(Adult nonfiction, American history, racism and slavery)
In today’s example of “everything in politics is a fight”, the Pennsylvania State Police took issue with Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf’s comments on Juneteenth.
Juneteenth Day is a holiday that marks the emancipation from slavery for African-Americans.
On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed is a good book to read that gives you a primer on this subject. With partisan bickering only increasing on seemingly everything, its important to read up on hot button topics so you can get the facts, not just opinion.
Is your library card current? If you have to think about it, it’s time to renew it! Click here to get started. It’s one of the most powerful things you can have.
Your support ensures that a library card is valuable and free to all!
We wear masks to protect you 😷
On May 13th the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released updated recommendations stating that fully vaccinated individuals – two weeks after their final dose – can resume activities they did prior to the pandemic without wearing a mask or physical distancing except where required by law, rule, and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance.
As a workplace and a location that provides services to the public, especially to minors who cannot all be vaccinated at this time, we will continue to require patrons to wear masks when in the library. For those using the community room, mask use is recommended but not required.
Remember, all Pennsylvanians age 12 and older are eligible to schedule a COVID-19 vaccine. We at OCL hope you will choose to get vaccinated to protect yourself and others. Learn more about the vaccine. Find a COVID-19 vaccine provider near you. Access the Interim Public Health Recommendations for Fully Vaccinated People from the CDC.
You can make a donation to the library in under 2 minutes. Click here to do just that.
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Thank you for being a library champion. You make a difference each day!
–Vince Giordano
Librarian and Director of the Juniata County Library.
P.S.- You don’t need to make an account or jump through any hoops to be a library champion. I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true. You can make this happen in less than a minute. Just click here.