October 2022 Newsletter

Vermont Book Award News

Nominations Now Open, Including Reinstated Children’s Literature Category

The Vermont Book Award is now open for submissions in four categories: fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and children’s literature. Books published in 2022 are eligible.

The Vermont Book Award was created in 2015 to honor the literature of a state uniquely suited for creative enterprise. Three Vermont organizations run the prize in partnership: the Vermont Department of Libraries, Vermont Humanities, and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Children’s Literature wasn’t given its own category last year, although books for children were considered as fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction nominations. Kekla Magoon, for instance, was a finalist for Creative nonfiction for her Young Adult book Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party's Promise to the People. This year children’s literature will be considered separately from fiction, CNF, and poetry for adults.

Nominations are now open for books of excellent literary merit published by Vermont authors in 2022. To be eligible, the author must live in Vermont more than half the year. Self-published books are not eligible. Books can be nominated by the independent booksellers of Vermont, Vermont librarians, and publishers. When nominators click on the nomination form, they’ll be asked to indicate whether the book is fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, or children’s literature. The nomination form is here: https://vthumanities.wufoo.com/forms/vermont-book-award-nomination

Nominations will open to the general Vermont public later this year. Nominated books are read by a team of judges, who are looking for literary excellence as they pick finalists and then winners. The winners of the Vermont Book Award will be revealed at a spring event hosted by Vermont Humanities. 

For State Employees

Vermont State Employee Book Club

Farm Workers Discuss Life in Vermont

Recorded Book Training at the ABLE Library

Chris Mundy, a quality assurance specialist for the National Library Service, came to the ABLE Library to provide training on September 20 and 21. The training was on recording audiobooks in-house, preparing the audiobooks to NLS standards, and encrypting and uploading the files to NLS for national distribution. Nancy Gahagan-Leonard, who is the Studio Manager at the Perkins Library in Massachusetts, attended the training as well. We had several reasons for requesting this training: most of our volunteers who narrate our audiobooks are newer to the program, and we wanted to ensure that we were training them properly; we formerly sent our audiobooks to the Perkins Library for editing and uploading to NLS, but now our Program Technician, Wendy Clark, has begun to do that work at the ABLE Library; and finally, the NLS has a new protocol for uploading audiobooks, and we wanted to make sure we understood the new procedure and were completing it correctly. Chris left us with a better understanding on these topics and a better idea of how to improve the audiobook creation process at the ABLE Library. 

ABLE Book Club

New ABLE Library Website

The ABLE Library has a new website! VTLIB designed the site to comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Level AAA. These guidelines are international standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium that are aimed at improving the accessibility of the internet for all users, but especially for those with disabilities. Our hope is that the new website will be easier to use and provide our patrons and partners with the most up-to-date information on the ABLE Library.

Cataloging Spectacles

Noteworthy Finds from the Cataloging Desk

The Department of Libraries (VTLIB) in partnership with the Agency of Education (AOE), will provide free movie streaming and public performance licenses through  Swank Motion Pictures, Inc to VT public schools for the next two school years, 2022-2023 and 2023-2024. Educators can use the Swank K-12 Streaming platform to incorporate movies and documentaries into lesson plans. The service also gives every student access to teacher-assigned films for in-person or remote learning.

The AOE is supporting the service financially, using ARPA ESSER state set-aside funds intended to expand remote learning opportunities to support a robust educational system that provide high quality learning opportunities despite geographic or other barriers. VTLIB will continue to provide administrative access, support, and training for school librarians. School librarians support educators in providing these services to students in their districts and schools.

VTLIB was able to provide free Swank movie streaming for all Vermont schools for the past two school years, thanks to ARPA funding through the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The IMLS ARPA funding was limited to two years which would have meant that streaming would no longer be available after October 1, 2022. 

You can learn more about these services on VTLIB’s Movie Performance License for School Libraries page. 

Image: Freepix

Continuing Education & Small and Rural Libraries

The Department of Libraries is offering fall workshops on a range of topics to support public libraries as they deal with practical, everyday issues and as they look at more broad, long-term priorities. October features workshops on public health and how libraries can optimize Front Porch Forum as a communication and promotion tool. There will also be a budget series and a session on library renovations and project planning for historic buildings. The Department continues to host informal meetups and topic-specific round tables in addition to trainings. These groupings are determined by common interest such as Inter Library Loan, or shared geographic location or library size. They are a good opportunity for library staff, many of whom work alone or with only a few co-workers in their own libraries, to spend time with each other, learn from each other, and develop a community of practice with colleagues around the state. 

The Department of Libraries is especially excited to host two series of trainings with guest presenters over the next four months. In October April Doner, from the Asset-based Community Development Institute at DePaul University, will offer a series of workshops on libraries and Asset-Based Community Development. This will give libraries tools and techniques to engage more deeply with their communities, and in particular, will help them connect with local people and organizations who may not currently be library users.

Building off of that, there will a series of interactive training sessions on strategic planning. Library staff and trustees will have the opportunity to learn how to do effective community surveys and data collection, then move from there to creating and beginning to implement a long-range plan. There will be follow-up office hours and individualized consultations available as planning committees make their way through this process. People are encouraged to join this training wherever they are in the process, whether it has begun, or they hope to do a plan in the future. As with most of the Department training, trustees are encouraged to attend with library staff. Details about these opportunities are on the Department of Libraries website Continuing Education page: https://libraries.vermont.gov/services/continuing_ed/

Governance & Management

Library board meetings are an important time for the trustees to gather and conduct the business of governing the library. Each meeting includes agenda items that need to be covered, sometimes with a tight deadline. Of course, each trustee is also volunteering their time to attend the meeting. Since everyone’s time is valuable and library business needs to be conducted efficiently, here are some best practices to help the meeting run efficiently and effectively.

It is important to come to the meeting on time and prepared. Be ready to discuss the items that are on the agenda. It is helpful for trustees to receive the agenda and any related items in advance of the meeting. Given the volunteer nature of the role, it is helpful for trustees to have these items a week in advance.

The agenda should include start and end times on it. To help keep discussions on task, include estimated discussion times for agenda items; this encourages members to keep the conversation moving. If your fellow trustees seem to be stuck on a particular detail, it’s a good indication that the topic merits more information and discussion. While your meeting may run over, be considerate of how much longer the meeting is running over and consider whether a topic merits going over the allotted time. Check in with board members to make sure they are able to stay longer.

During the meeting, be prepared to participate and allow others the opportunity to participate. Arriving prepared empowers you to have questions ready and to fully engage with your fellow trustees in conversation. Take care that no one trustee dominates the conversation; everyone should have time to talk on any given topic. Conversations should be professional and respectful.

Finally, be mindful of the role of Open Meeting Law and how it impacts your board meetings. It is best practice for boards of all types of libraries to follow Open Meeting Law as doing so encourages public participation and transparency. 

Image by macrovector on Freepik

Information & Access

Online Resource Use August 2022 

We’d like to share the August stats for the online resources offered by the Department of Libraries. Learning Express and Vermont Online Library are free to all libraries (public, school, or academic), while Universal Class is only available to public libraries.

Learning Express

Learning Express provides training to develop workplace, academic, and job-hunting skills. It offers training for occupation exams, skills for school, exploration of careers, resume and interview help, and more.

Note – We’ve changed our approach for Learning Express statistics. The spreadsheets will now be broken down by calendar year, with a different tab for each month. You can find them on the Learning Express Stats Page.

Sessions – 38 | Registrations – 17

Tests – 21 | Tutorials – 0 | Computer Courses – 4 | eBooks – 6

Resumes – 0 | Cover Letters – 0 | Job Searches – 0 

Most Used Resources:

• Tests – GED Social Studies, Praxis Elementary Education, MCAT Practice, Paraprofessional Exam, ServSafe Food Handler, CLEP Accounting
• eBooks – Conversations for Career Success, Becoming a Healthcare Professional, Middle School Algebra, ParaProfessional Test, Public Speaking
• Computer Courses – Intro to Personal Computers, Social Media

Universal Class

Universal Class offers a wide range of online courses (from business to cooking, computers to social work) that are led by a real instructor, and that can be completed at your own pace.

New Registrations – 62 | New Courses Started – 215 | Login Sessions – 814

Lessons Viewed – 10,048 | Videos Watched – 6,917 | Student Submissions – 9,972

Most Active Classes – American Government, 20 Women Who Changed America, Pre-Algebra, Accounting, Writing Basics, Medical Terminology, Fashion Design, Ecology, Advanced Dog Training, Film Appreciation, Goal Setting

Vermont Online Library

The Vermont Online Library covers everything from magazine and newspaper articles to DIY car repair and business help, Vermont Online Library can help with any topic. Users can (with a bit of work) even read articles by issue from some popular magazines, such as The New York Times, Economist, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Highlights for Children, National Review, and Runner's World.

Sessions – 11,871 | Average Session Length – 17.35 minutes | Text Retrievals – 5,137

(Note about Sessions – This number is a bit misleading, as it counts multiple sessions when a user searches multiple databases at once)

Most Used Databases – Academic OneFile, General OneFile, News, Opposing Viewpoints, Virtual Reference Library, Biography, Science

Chilton Library Retrievals – 24

Read more about Learning Express, Universal Class, or Vermont Online Library, or email Josh Muse (Joshua.Muse@vermont.gov) with any questions.

Image credit: Creative Commons By John Morgan

CLIC’s Legal Self-help Books Libguide

The Community Legal Information Center has around 150 legal self-help books that are available for use by Vermont residents.

Legal self-help books can provide much-needed background information on a topic, or provide-much needed answers to legal issues that arise in life. CLIC's books can help Vermonters decide which form of doing business is best for them, help them write a will, help explain what disability benefits they are entitled to, and what rights they have against debt collectors. They are essential resources for individuals who choose to handle a legal matter themselves. And for those who choose to work with an attorney, reading on a legal matter before meeting should enhance their ability to direct the services that they need and want to pay for. 

This guide provides a comprehensive list of CLIC's titles that are available for in-person use or check-out. It attempts to arrange CLIC's self-help books according to the area of the law that the book addresses. For example, Vermont Court Rules Annotated, is included under the "Civil Court Procedure--Trials and Appeals" tab, The Veterans Benefits Manual is included in the "Military/Veterans" tab, and Special Education Law is found under the "Education Law" tab. For each book listed within the legal subject area, there is a blurb summarizing the content of that book. You can view the LibGuide and review our self-help book collection here: https://libguides.vermontlaw.edu/CLICself-helpbooks.

CLIC does not offer library cards, so we cannot directly check-out books to patrons. But we can send them to the patron's local public library, where the books can be checked out with their local library card. To check out a legal self-help book contact us at clic@vermontlaw.edu or (802) 831-1313. 

CLIC self-service is open during normal VLS Library hours, which are Monday through Sunday from 8:00am to 8:00pm. 

Watch the Vermont Historical Society's newest video Vermont Historical Society: Our Legacy for the Future.