Jackie Mills is a partnerships pro; she established library partnerships way before it was a trending topic. “Partnerships and collaboration are the future of libraries,” she says. “If the pandemic has taught librarians anything, it’s that libraries don’t exist within four walls anymore.”
A partnership between a public library and a school district seems like a no-brainer, right? After all, we both have the same basic goals when it comes to students: to create and nurture in them a love of learning. However, many libraries – particularly small, rural libraries – don’t actually have much of a relationship with their school district.
In this 60-minute webinar, representatives of the Zion-Benton Township High School Library and Zion Township supervisor’s office will share how they worked together to initiate a unique reading and discussion program to tackle issues of equity, diversity and inclusion among teens in their community. Learn how aligning library goals to wider community concerns can create positive partnerships that reap benefits for all stakeholders.
Participants of this session will:
The Keokuk Public Library conducts a Lego Club at the library one Wednesday and one Saturday each month.
After meeting with the CEO of the local YMCA to discuss ways our organizations could collaborate and connect our audiences, we decided to replicate our Lego Club at the YMCA.Â
Acknowledging the unique experiences of immigrants in our community, Traveling Stanzas: Immigrant Voices is an interactive exhibit that engages a dialogue through the intimate and inclusive voice of poetry. The exhibit, created with Wicks Poetry Center at Kent State University, includes creative writing tools and activities and incorporates original poetry written by people in our community.
Winterset is a community of 5,120 in central Iowa, about 40 miles outside Des Moines. Since 2011, a number of our local organizations have collaborated to present Wellness Wednesdays in Winterset, a program series that strives to improve the health and wellness of our residents. Programs run from early May to late October and are free of charge and open to all ages.
Failure happens. But, as Neil Gaiman says “If you’re making mistakes, it means you’re out there doing something.”Â
We were out there doing something. We were hard at work planning our Boomers and Beyond: Aging Well on the Peninsula program series. We had been talking about Boomers boomers BOOMERS BoOmMeRs until we were blue in the face. We had our offsite locations lined up, and we had phenomenal partners coordinating with us. What could go wrong?Â
In Cobb County, officials say about 20 percent of the 50,000 elementary school children alone would fail a vision screening, and about 8,000 will need glasses.
​Cobb libraries collaborate with the Atlanta office of the national nonprofit Vision to Learn (VTL) to host vision clinics for low-income communities. VTL provides on-site mobile vision clinics for children. The visits include free vision screenings and eye exams. Kids who get eyeglass prescriptions select free frames, and their new glasses are later delivered.
Our goal with this edit-a-thon series was to increase the number of new editors working within Wikipedia, as well as improve entries to the four neighborhoods in Lowell. This meant increasing citations, correcting information, expanding content and editing the readability of identified entries.
Little Havana Walking Tour, a three-hour tour of the world-renowned Miami neighborhood, was one of the events developed for Latino Americans: 500 Years of History, a grant offered by ALA and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
