Time flies! It’s been 200 years since Mary Shelley published "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus." The literary world is celebrating, and there are plenty of ways for you and your library to take part.

Most of us are familiar with TED Talks, a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas through short, often powerful, talks. As librarians, we can use the format of a TED Talk to engage students and teachers with research and encourage them to spread their ideas.

We chose to incorporate TED-ED into our ninth-grade programming — with excellent results. In fact, we are now hoping to spread it to eighth and fifth grades as culminating projects during those capstone years in our district.

The L.P. Fisher Public Library is well-known in our community (Woodstock, N.B., Canada) for our board game programs, like Connect Four Tournaments, Family Game Nights or our (competitive!) Chess Club.

 Actual text message exchange between one of the authors of this blog and her child:    

Programming is the ultimate time balancing act. How do you do it all? If you’re like me, it’s a mix of very carefully planning and plunging wildly headfirst into your to-do list. Both require a level of organization that you have to consistently keep up with. Bullet journaling is my personal pie-in-the-sky of organization; however, I find it requires too much of a time commitment to do it exactly how I'd like to.

“Students are too busy nowadays.” I’m sure we’ve all heard it. So here are a few tips — from my own experience and crowdsourced from other very helpful librarians — to break through the haze of busy-ness and reach students.

This month, I’ve handed the spotlight to a dear friend who always knows what obscure holiday it may be and how to celebrate it! Kami Bumgardner is the youth services coordinator at Maitland Public Library in Maitland, Fla., and works primarily with toddlers and kids through fifth grade. Any questions or comments will be forwarded to her. Enjoy!

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Last year, I wrote about how you can use conditional formatting in Excel to track important deadlines for promoting library programs. In order to ensure that I remember to send something out to the more than 14 communication channels that we routinely utilize at the William H. Hannon Library, these customized spreadsheets have been indispensable.