Peer Picks…Meet Our Newest Peer Picks Selector

Posted on November 11, 2015

Robin BradfordRobin Bradford is currently the collection development librarian for fiction, Large Print, DVD, music and world languages for the Timberland Regional Library System in Washington. Prior to moving to Washington a few months ago, she was the fiction collection development librarian for the Indianapolis Public Library. She has worked in a variety of libraries, academic and public, in a variety of positions, from student assistant to librarian. The one thing that has been a constant throughout, however, is a love of reading. When she isn’t working, or tweeting, or blogging, or reading, or at a conference focused on books, Robin is looking at the map and planning her next adventure.

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Social Skills in the Digital Age

Posted on November 10, 2015

Note to librarians: This blog post is for you to share! If you have this title, be sure to link it to your GVRL collection. If you don’t have this title and want to learn more, access a free trial today!  

Communication is more complex than ever.  Today, we tweet, chat, blog, email, text,…and, oh yeah…talk.  New tools that enhance communication can also complicate it, making it difficult to navigate professional communication and steering people away from face-to-face communication that was more typical for earlier generations.

To support the development of social and professional communication skills, your library is offering a new online resource.  Life and Career Skills: Social Skills provides simple, straightforward guidance to enhance verbal, written, and non-verbal communication that’s useful in all aspects of life.  It’s designed especially for young adults who are entering the workforce or transitioning to new environments.

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From Toddlers to Seniors: Learning at Every Life Stage

Posted November 6, 2015

By Rosemary Long

Libraries continue to be represented in popular media as book repositories, a place for story time, and – in the most progressive TV shows – a place where people use (get this!) real, live computers!

Popular culture hasn’t caught up with the reality of today’s public library, where the mission has transitioned from providing information to delivering outcomes-based learning. Not just information seeking, but engaging in active learning. Gale’s online education programs helps libraries impact lives by supporting education, skills development, and personal enrichment.

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Encourage Literacy with NaNoWriMo!

Posted on November 5, 2015
By Anne Nagrant, Customer Success Manager

I enjoy the act of writing, and I used to write really long essays in college, but I’ve never tackled a major project like writing an entire novel. It seems so daunting. I think I might have trouble staying motivated long enough to really make progress. Luckily for people like me, November brings us NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)!

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Tools of the Trade: Empathy, Respect, Openness,
Communications, and the Library Mission

Posted on November 4, 2015
During the time of unrest in Ferguson, we at the Ferguson Municipal Public Library (FMPL) made a conscious decision to simply stay open for our community. We forged many vital relationships during those difficult days by providing empathy, respect, and comfort to the people in our community.

Empathy and Respect – Keeping our doors open during the hard days created a shift in how the people of Ferguson thought of their library. The empathy and respect we showed our patrons created a synergistic boost to the community as a whole.

Understand patrons, and respect them as people. Everything else grows from this, but you have to really mean it. If you care deeply about your community, it shows in every conversation, decision, and service. This cannot be an abstract thing—caring in aggregate but not in specific. It’s about building actual relationships. After all, we serve each patron as a person, individually.

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Communications, and the Library Mission

Gale Technical Solutions: Think Like a User

Posted on November 4, 2015

By Scott Steward

Welcome back. Last time, I gave you the first tip for organizing your electronic resources: using context. Today, I’d like to help you think like a user.

It doesn’t really matter if your user is a patron, student, teacher, or facility. At the end of the day, they all need to be able to find what they’re looking for, and if they can’t, they’ll go somewhere else. So, let’s make it easier for them.

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Success = Aligning Library Services to Support Community Goals

Posted on November 2, 2015

By Susan H. Hildreth, Executive Director, Califa Group, Pacific Library Partnership, Peninsula Library hildreth4System, and Administrator, NorthNet Library System

I believe that the future relevance and success of the public library is dependent upon the library’s deep knowledge and commitment to community growth and success. Although many libraries have had stated commitments to community priorities, I do not think that we have been disciplined or strategic in effectively deploying the library’s assets to support those priorities. I want to highlight two resources funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that can provide a framework for integrating community insight into the ongoing program of the library.

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Digital Solutions Promote Pre-K Literacy Development and School Readiness

Posted on November 1, 2015
By Diane M. Sweetwood

Many research studies have shown the positive effects of quality early childhood education on future academic development, educational attainment, and earnings later in life. Yet, 59% of preschool-aged children across the nation—approximately 2.5 million—are not enrolled in publicly funded preschool programs through state preschool, Head Start, and special education preschool services.
Although as many as 30% of three- and four-year olds are fortunate to attend private preschools and child care centers, hundreds of thousands of children have no access to the programs that can help them build literacy skills and prepare them for kindergarten and beyond. The U.S. Department of Education’s 2015 report, “A Matter of Equity: Preschool in America,” notes that “while both states and the federal government invest in early learning, these efforts have fallen short of what is needed to ensure that all children can access a high-quality early education that will prepare them for success.”

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Gale and Google Together for Success

Google for Education Partner

Posted on October 30, 2015

With more than 45 million Google Apps for Education users worldwide and an average of over 40,000 Google search engine queries per second [1], Google is indisputably the place where people get their answers.

As the library seeks to continue to be a valued educational partner in communities, schools, and institutions, bringing trustworthy digital content into the natural path of the student or patron has never been more important. To make it easier for people to find and use this relevant, authoritative information, Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, has partnered with Google for Education in two ways: providing intuitive integration of popular workflow tools through Google Apps for Education and indexing content in Google Scholar.

This new relationship exemplifies Gale’s effort to be a leading provider of educational technology, instructional tools, and content to help our users be successful in school, work, and life.

 

Gale & Google Apps for Education

The ability for students to seamlessly login using Google Account credentials is now available through:

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