Happy Holidays!
A New Year's Present for Your Library
Consider this a present for your library, for programming, and for patrons year-round: it's PLA’s Early Literacy Calendar for 2025. Each day features an activity to boost basic literacy skills including reading, writing, counting, singing, and playing. These are reproducible calendars, available in English and Spanish, to share with families who visit your libraries.
A Look Inside
- 12 months of learning activities, with each month offering interactive activities designed to inspire young learners
- Curated book lists with handpicked books that foster a love of reading
- Nursery rhymes and song lyrics to boost language development through music and rhyme
- Early literacy tips that equip parents and caregivers with expert advice to support early literacy
- Suggested reading materials for exploring stories that captivate imaginations
This is a customizable calendar, so you can add your library logo and other details to personalize it. On one side of the page you’ll find daily literacy activities, on the reverse side find nursery rhymes, song lyrics, and more.
PLA promotes these benefits of their Early Literacy Calendars, among them helping families make literacy a part of everyday life, encouraging habits of curiosity and learning in young children, and find year-round fun in the daily literacy activities.
The cost is $26.99 for ALA members / $29.99 for nonmembers. You don't need to be an ALA Member to purchase from the ALA Store, but you'll be asked to create an online account profile during the checkout process. This web account is for both members and nonmembers. If your are an ALA member, your member discount will be applied at the final step of the checkout process. Learn more and purchase at the button below
Our customer service rep at WhoFi, Christian Gutteridge, has this news regarding WhoFi’s Meeting Rooms features. Christian writes “we’re excited to share some exciting updates designed to make managing meeting rooms and showcasing their impact even easier for libraries.”
Meeting Room Rules
To help ensure fair access by patrons, WhoFi has devised Meeting Room Rules—a set of customizable tools that make room scheduling more equitable. These include:
- Limiting the duration of a single booking
- Restricting how far in advance bookings can be made
- Capping the number of requests that a patron can submit in a set timeframe
These rules empower staff to mange the library's meeting rooms effectively while keeping the spaces accessible to all. In addition, there are updated Director and Board Reports designed to illustrate the value of your meeting spaces with library management and library boards. These two reports are ready to download and include
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Board Report: An infographic summarizing room usage, perfect for sharing at board meetings
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Director Report: A detailed trend summary to highlight key usage patterns
The State Library of Iowa offers WhoFi services to Iowa’s public libraries: find background information, plus helpful tutorials, at the button below. My thanks to Christian Gutteridge for this update; you're welcome to contact Christian with questions at support@whofi.com
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ILOC Registration Now Open
Keynote Speakers Announced
The New Year is almost here and that means that ILOC is right around the corner. Join the fun on January 30, 2025 as library staff and trustees statewide gather for the 18th annual Iowa Libraries Online Conference. With the theme “Assess, Adapt, Act,” the 2025 conference will focus on library evaluation.
The full schedule will be available soon, but today we can announce the three keynote speakers who will be joining us throughout the day:
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Erica Freudenberger (Southern Adirondack Library System in New York) Measure Up! Evaluation as a Springboard to Success
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Jessica Hilburn (Benson Memorial Library & Crawford County Federated Library System in Pennsylvania) Digging Into Data: Where to Find It & How to Use It to Maximize Your Impact
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Kevin Unrath (Vermont Department of Libraries) Evaluating Your Library’s Value Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis
Plus this sneak peak at a few of the
breakout sessions in the works:
- Building a Culture of Evaluation
- Using Specialized Software to Wrangle Evaluation Results
- Finding Data Sources to Compare Your Library With Peer Groups
We’ve always encouraged ILOC to be a staff development day, ideally allowing as many staff as possible to login all together and make it a day of learning. Some libraries are even able to close to make the most of the ILOC Conference as a staff development day. The evening session is aimed at library trustees, making that program perfect for a “watch party” at the library. And a classic way for boards to meet their continuing education standard.
All this with ample CE credits in the offing as well. So join us for as much of the day as your schedule allows. Wear your coziest socks, settle in with your beverage of choice, and log into ZOOM for a day of online learning from the warmth and comfort of home!
Watch this space for more announcements about breakout sessions
planned for ILOC 2025. In the meantime, avoid the
Christmas rush and register today 😊
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