In This Issue
Library Director
Hartford City Public Library
Floating Librarian (Part-Time)
Hancock County Public Library
Circulation Clerk (Part Time) – Cicero Branch
Hamilton North Public Library
Customer Service Manager
Brownsburg Public Library
Circulation Assistant (Part-Time)
Pendleton Community Public Library
For a complete list of library jobs click here.
Ball State prof asks: Was black Civil War soldier from Indiana poisoned in 1865?
Bracken Library - BSU
Latest Issue of Indiana Libraries
Indiana University Libraries
Indiana superintendent hoping film will launch an education movement
Indianapolis Public Libraries
KHCPL Russiaville receives ‘We Love Libraries’ grant
Kokomo – Howard County Public Library
New Year’s Eve fun offered for kids
Maring-Hunt Library (Muncie)
Library patron finds another option for library cards
Peru Public Library
2014 in review
Westchester Public Library
 Email your news for inclusion
in The Wednesday Word
Train the ECRR 2.0 Trainer
When: January 8, 2014
Where: Johnson County Public Library
Every Child Ready to Read 2.0
When: January 15, 2015
Where: Tippecanoe County Public Library
Every Child Ready to Read 2.0
When: February 12, 2015
Where: Brownsburg Public Library
Teaching Books Webinar: Literacy Connections Across the Curriculum
When: February 17, 2015
Where: Webinar
Teaching Books Webinar: Literacy Connections Across the Curriculum
When: February 18, 2015
Where: Webinar
Teaching Books Webinar: Summer Reading Program Supports.
9:00am-9:50am
When: Tuesday, April 21
Where: Webinar
Teaching Books Webinar: Summer Reading Program Supports.
4:00pm-4:50pm
When: Tuesday, April 21
Where: Webinar
The application process is now open for the 2015 LSTA grant program. Applications must be received by 4:00 PM EST on Friday, March 13th, 2015 and include the following opportunities for Indiana libraries and partnering historical and cultural organizations:
• Technology Grants
Technology Grants help Indiana libraries provide their users with the new and improved technology necessary to meet their residents’ ever-changing needs for library services and access to information.
• Digitization Grants
The suggested theme for the 2015 Digitization Grant Program is the Indiana Bicentennial. While adherence to the theme is not required, projects incorporating this theme are encouraged.
If you have questions about your eligibility, a grant application requirement, or anything else concerning 2015 LSTA grant opportunities, please don't hesitate to contact Jennifer Clifton, LSTA Grant Consultant, at (800) 451-6028. Visit the LSTA homepage to learn more how LSTA grants support Indiana libraries.
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Jaffarian Award Winner Leslie Preddy (Center), with Program Partner Suzanne Walker (Left) and Award Committee Chair Nancy Keane (Right)
This week the Indiana State Library welcomes Perry Meridian Middle School. Students will learn about researching and primary and secondary sources.
Because of the large number of students, Perry Meridian Middle School will make multiple visits to the Indiana State Library between the dates of January 8 and February 5.
Splitting up the visits will give students the opportunity to work in our computer lab and explore the microfilms area.
In the computer lab Genealogy Librarian Jamie Dunn will give a short presentation about how to start genealogy research and how to use Ancestry Library Edition.
Perry Meridian Middle School Media Specialist Leslie Preddy recently won the 2014 Sara Jaffarian School Library Program Award for Exemplary Humanities Programming for her “The R.O.A.D. I Travel (Research, Observe, Analyze, Discover)” program she put together. For more information on “The R.O.A.D. I Travel” program please click here.
The Indiana State Library would like to congratulate Leslie Preddy on this achievement.
If you have a school that would like to visit the ILS, please visit our website at www.in.gov/library or contact Associate Director Connie Bruder at cbruder@library.in.gov.
Click here to visit our Talking Book and Braille Library Page
Click here to visit our Evergreen Page
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MIS Division Supervisor Jason Boyer
Jason joined the Indiana State Library in 2013 as the Evergreen Indiana Systems Administrator and in mid-December 2014 became the MIS supervisor. He is responsible for the growth and management of the systems that serve Evergreen Indiana to over 100 Indiana libraries and overseeing the MIS department of the ISL. Before coming to the ISL Jason was the IT Specialist for the Jackson County Public Library for over 13 years.
Please join us in congratulating Jason on his new career opportunity.
Believe it or not, adult literacy is still a concern in Indiana and the rest of the United States. Eighteen percent of Hoosiers above 16 years or older read below a sixth grade level.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, literacy is defined as "using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential."
In a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics, it was determined that 22 percent of adults were “Below Basic” in quantitative literacy. This means that those individuals posses no more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills.
The U.S. Department of Justice reports that nearly 70 percent of people in state correctional facilities have not completed high school and 14 percent have had no high school education. According to the report “Literacy Behind Prison Walls”, 70 percent of prison inmates are functionally illiterate or read below a fourth-grade level.
The National Center for Family Literacy reports that children’s literacy levels are strongly linked to the literacy levels of their parents, especially their mothers.
These statistics point to a literacy crisis across this great nation.
The Indiana State Library is initiating efforts to help support adult literacy and encourages public libraries to participate in our survey.
Please click the following link to answer a few simple questions that will contribute to our efforts in eradicating adult illiteracy in Indiana:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GDSG6PF
Crown Point Community Public Library – Selina Gomez-Beloz - director@crownpointlibrary.org
North Judson-Wayne Township Public Library – Jane Ellen Felchuk retired at the end of 2014 and Michael Booth started January 1st. His email address is njwtdirector@gmail.com
Bell Memorial Public Library – Any fans of Stephen Boggs will be happy to know he has officially been named director following Krystal Smith’s retirement. You can reach him at sboggs@bell.lib.in.us
LaGrange County Public Library – Diane Randall’s last day is Friday and Assistant Director Katie Bir will be serving as interim director. You can reach her at katie.bir@lagrange.lib.in.us
7-year-old Terry Miles from Muncie, Indiana recently wrote a book to stop gun violence in his community.
Following a letter Terry wrote in his classroom, the remarkable young boy met with Muncie Mayor Dennis Tyler and discussed Terry’s concerns about gun violence in his neighborhood.
The meeting led to the penning of the book “The Shot Heard around the Town: A Story about How One Boy Can Change the World”. Terry co-wrote the book with his teacher Brittany Cain. The book is available from Amazon and other book retailers.
Click here for the full story from WRTV-6.
The Indiana State Library’s Professional Development office is excited to announce the availability of Lego and Duplo kits for public libraries. These kits were created with the intent that they be used either in programs at public libraries or as interactive stations in public library youth departments. The kits can also be used as maker stations or as part of maker programs. There are a total of 14 kits available with nine of these being traditional Lego kits with the smaller bricks appropriate for children ages six and up with supervision and five of them being the Duplo kits with the larger bricks appropriate for children ages 18 months and up with supervision. The kits all come with a folder of resources to help librarians plan programs and events using the kits.
Delivered through INFO Express, the kits come in sturdy bins full of basic bricks, platforms, doors, and windows and must be taped securely before they are shipped. The Lego kits have around 7,000 bricks per kit and the Duplo kits have around 1,200 bricks per kit, but don’t worry about counting them. The only counting that needs to be done is the Lego Mini Figures, of which each Lego kit has about 35.
The State Library estimates that Lego kits can serve approximately 24 children while the Duplos are appropriate for about 12 children. Lego kits are usually comprised of one bin while the Duplo kits include three separate bins and a CD of additional resources for the Early Literacy crowd.
Libraries can check out one Lego kit and one Duplo kit per year. Kits are available to be placed on hold for up to two years in advance. Libraries can keep the kits for three months at a time, making them a perfect addition for Summer Reading or any seasonal program. In order to get in line for a kit, simply email statewideservices@library.in.gov and request your Lego or Duplo kit. Be sure to include the dates that you are wanting and indicate LEGO or DUPLO. These are expected to be very popular so send your emails soon to get your kit reserved!
It’s 2015! If you haven’t started thinking about your 2015 Summer Reading Program, now is the time.
If your library is participating in the 2015 Collaborative Summer Library Program, Every Hero Has a Story, there are training opportunities for you!
Also, the Teen Video Challenge is up and running. You can find the two forms you need by navigating to the Collaborative Summer Library Program resources I’ve put together for you here: http://www.in.gov/library/4642.htm.
I encourage Teen Advisory Groups, Teen Councils, and Wonder Teens everywhere in Indiana to enter the contest. I’m happy to answer questions about this.
Trainings will include 4 hours of training; 2 for the Early Literacy/School Age group and 2 for the Teen/Adult group. You may choose to attend all four hours or just the 2 hours that work best for you. Trainings are worth 4 LEU's total. Please visit the Indiana State Library's Calendar of Events for specific times for each training.
Training Dates & Locations:
Jan 12 - St. Joseph County Public Library
Jan 14 - New Castle-Henry Public Library
Jan 28 - Morgan County Public Library
Jan 28 - Peabody Public Library
Jan 29 - Westfield Washington Public Library *Plus Rock Star Training*
Feb 3 - Frankfort Clinton County Contractual Public Library
Feb 5 - Vigo County Public Library
Feb 10 - Franklin County Public Library District
Feb 16 - Kendallville Public Library
Feb 19 - Wells County Public Library
Feb 20 - Perry County Public Library
March 3 - Bartholomew County Public Library
March 11 - East Chicago Public Library
March 19 - Knox County Public Library
Some additional trainings include:
Click Here for CSLP Webinars
Summer Reading Webinars:
Feb 23 - CSLP Summer Reading Ideas
March 5 - CSLP Summer Reading Ideas
Hoosier State Chronicles is operated by the Indiana State Library and funded by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act. We seek to provide free, online access to high quality digital images of Indiana's historic newspapers by digitizing our collection, and assisting other organizations in making their collections digitally available. Follow our blog to learn more about Hoosier State Chronicles, and read posts about yesteryear's news.
This online resource originated with grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities that enabled us, in partnership with the Indiana Historical Society, to digitize Indiana newspapers for the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). The Indiana titles digitized through NDNP are also available at the Library of Congress's Chronicling America, along with over 8 million newspaper pages from around the United States. You can find additional digitized Indiana newspapers in Indiana Memory and also listed on our blog.
The Indiana State Library Newspaper Division has the largest collection of Indiana newspapers either in print, microfilm or digital format. For an overview of the available resources for Indiana newspaper research visit their website.
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ISL PDO Supervisor Suzanne Walker
An Exclusive Interview with Suzanne Walker: Who Is Sammy?
By: Ryan Brown
In the following weeks, I will be presenting a series of videos that will feature Sammy the corduroy toucan.
The videos will outline some of the services provided by the Indiana State Library and answer basic questions on how the public and librarians can best utilize those services.
To kick off this new series, PDO Supervisor Suzanne Walker sat down with me and discussed her role at the ISL, as well as her relationship with the famous bird.
RB: Describe your former job at ISL and your new job.
SW: When I was hired here I was the children’s consultant. The job of the children’s consultant is to serve all librarians in Indiana who work with youth. That includes early literacy, people who work in schools…it also includes teen librarians. I don’t think of it as just children, I think of it as zero to eighteen.
Part of what I do is to work with trainings for them. So I provide trainings on everything related to children’s services; “Every Child Ready to Read” is all about early literacy. We do a lot of early literacy stuff because we have some grants that support that.
We also provide other types of services with our book clubs and our “Story Time Kits”. Those are for all ages.
I provide trainings on teens as well. I provide training on teen behavior – why teens are crazy – that kind of stuff.
RB: Did you have a background in education or do you strictly have a library degree?
SW: I have both. I have a weird background. I went to school to be a teacher for a while and I really was almost done. I just had my student teaching to finish and I had a part-time job at a public library. I really didn’t like the teaching stuff at all and the library I was working at said they would hire me on full-time if I would quit my student teaching…so I did. I became a teen librarian before I became an actual MLS.
So…I do have a background in education. I had about 36 hours of education courses – including an adolescent psychology class – which has been invaluable.
The big difference in being a children’s librarian as opposed to a teacher is that you are not with the students all day long and you have time to work on your collection, plan a program, do the program, and clean up after the program. You’ve got all this down time without children there. Whereas teachers, the only downtime they have is maybe 20 minutes without the children there during the day.
RB: Or sometimes not until you go home.
SW: Yeah exactly! But for someone in a public library, you certainly have kids coming in and out all day long, but they come and they leave. They don’t stay for eight hours.
So yeah, I have a background in lots of different children’s services. I was a teen librarian for four years and then a children’s librarian for about six years.
RB: And now you are the Director of Professional Development?
SW: Yes. With my…what’s it called…promotion? [Chuckling] Now I am the Director of Professional Development. That means I am in charge of providing trainings for all kinds of libraries and librarians. Not just children’s librarians. I will oversee the children’s consultant and I will also oversee the four regional coordinators. They have each corner of the state and Karen Ainslie has the center of the state.
The way I look at it is the children’s consultant has the whole state and then the regional coordinators break it up into parts of the state. Mostly what I am doing is making sure they have all the resources they need to do their jobs as well as they can, and right now we are down to two, so that’s rough. We have two brand new people also.
RB: Did you hire a children’s librarian to take your place?
SW: Not yet.
RB: So the search is still on?
SW: Well…the holdup is because I am new at being a supervisor and I have to do these trainings before I can hire someone.
RB: Who is Sammy?
SW: Sammy is a corduroy toucan.
RB: Not to be confused with Toucan Sam. We don’t want to get into any kind of copyright dispute or anything.
SW: No…yeah…If I had been the person who named Sammy, I wouldn’t have named him Sammy.
RB: So this wasn’t your creation?
SW: Um…No…I would say that Sammy kind of emerged. That’s kind of what happened. I was working in Mooresville, and I was working with a wonderful children’s assistant named Jaymi, and Jaymi and I were looking for a way to extend her story time beyond the walls of the library. What we decided to do was start doing some interviews with her after her story time to kind of say “this is what we did in story time today”, “you can do these things at home”. For a while we had contemplated a podcast, but we couldn’t figure out the technology because we just didn’t have time to work on it. So we decided that doing a video would be easier than doing just an audio thing. We used my phone and made these little videos. The first thing we were going to do when we did it was to interview each other. Jaymi was like, “I think that would be kind of boring with you and I just talking to each other.” And I think she had the idea to use the puppet, or maybe it was me, I don’t know who came up with the idea to use the puppet. One of us said “let’s use a puppet” and then one of us went into the program room and reached into this bucket and pulled out Sammy. I put the bird on and started talking, Sammy started talking immediately and I as Sammy asked Jaymi, “What’s my name?” Jaymi said, “You’re Sammy!” And so there it was. Sammy was Sammy.
RB: So is Sammy a boy or a girl?
SW: Everyone asks that! It’s very ambiguous actually [chuckling].
RB: [Chuckling as well] so it’s a non-gender puppet…
SW: Yeah, and I think it’s nuanced. I don’t necessarily that Sammy is non-gender, I think that Sammy kind of goes both ways. I don’t know?
RB: Like Elmo?
SW: I think so, but Elmo is a boy isn’t he?
RB: I don’t know.
SW: Sammy’s a little more ambiguous about that. People do ask Sammy that quite a bit, but Sammy is always like “I don’t know.” The funny thing is that Sammy kind of refers to himself or herself both ways.
RB: Okay???
SW: So I know, it’s a complicated question. Or maybe I am just giving a complicated answer.
RB: Describe some of the ways you use Sammy…
SW: Well I don’t like to think of it as Sammy being used. I like to think of Sammy as being a colleague. Sammy and I work together and some of the ways we work together are…initially it was interviews at Mooresville to promote library services. Then what happened was I went to the Public Library Association Conference – it was my first big national conference – and I took Sammy with me and Sammy proved to be a really great way to meet people. Sammy was a little bit like a reporter and I would film Sammy talking. I have one of us in our hotel room and he is chatting about the flight and what it is like to be at the conference and things like that. And then what happened there is that we got to meet Tom Angleberger who is the author of the “Origami Yoda” books. We got to do an interview with him and that was great. It kind of solidified that Sammy can seek out interviews, so that is what we have kind of done. Sammy and I have worked together to interview authors and illustrators and other people in the library field that are interested in children’s literature.
RB: That’s a good idea, because it’s kind of an icebreaker to have a puppet.
SW: It is, and the other thing is like…if you ask Jeff Kinney who wrote “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”, which is a really huge series, “Can I interview you for YouTube?” The answer easily would be no. Like, no “I’ve got all of these other things that I need to do.” But if you say, “can a bird interview you?” Then the answer becomes yes!
So we have interviewed Jeff Kinney, we have interviewed Katherine Applegate who is a Newbery Award winner. We interviewed Gene Luen Yang who is a graphic novelist. That one was a good one. We actually did some prep for that one. Normally we just fly by the seat of our pants, which is usually not a good idea and Sammy never wears pants because Sammy does not have legs – which is a fact that Sammy is sensitive about, so maybe don’t put that in there…
RB: It seems like Sammy is always to the left of the person being interviewed. Is there a reason for that?
SW: Because I am right handed [chuckling] that’s why, and that would be a secret. That’s a trade secret! Sammy of course does not want to be known as being connected to me in any way. We just work together.
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