Our Highlight Reel
Turning the calendar page to a new year is natural time to look back and reminisce about the year just past. Today’s Monday Morning Eye Opener does just that, with a look back at 2024 service highlights and continuing education achievements.
Transitioning to the WorkDay Learning platform takes the top spot in our 2024 highlight reel. This was a very big endeavor—and an unexpected one—when we learned that this switch was to be required for all the agencies within the Dept of Administrative Services (DAS) That’s the State Library’s new Department home, so the move was on! Continuing Education Consultant Samantha Bouwers took the reins and won an MVP award from DAS for her work on this project. Thank you, Sam!
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Samantha Bouwers (2nd from left) with DAS MVP winners for efforts above-and-beyond 😊 |
In June, we added an important new resource to our “Toolkit” page: The Public Library Compensation Toolkit. This Toolkit provides library boards, directors, and staff guidance needed to address these inequities and request fair and competitive compensation. Two webinars in August stepped library directors and boards through this new Toolkit, find those webinars on our Continuing Education YouTube Channel.
in 2024, we launched a mini-series called “Lunch & Learn with State Library Staff.” These 30-minute ZOOM sessions over the lunch hour focused on State Library people, programs, and services. We covered a lot of ground: from the role of District Staff, to Specialized Consulting Services, to the State Data Center. We also talked about Bridges, SILO-ILL, WhoFi, and more. Each one was recorded, find them on our Continuing Education YouTube Channel.
The People’s Law Library continued to expand its offerings: in 2024 came Voting Law, Insurance Law, and Workplace Law. This is an impressive resource to share with your patrons, we hope you’ll link to The People’s Law Library from your own website and encourage your users to go there—actually, this would make for a nice informational program @ your library in the new year!
Even More Highlights From 2024
- District consultants delivered a wide range of library-focused presentations, both in person and online. They provided CE for countywide meetings, for staff development days, for individual board meetings, and orientations for new library directors. District Consultants made 423 in-person visits to libraries and provided 129 virtual training sessions.
- Trauma Informed Libraries: Reflective Practice Sessions launched and Staff & Administrator Endorsement Modules were added to WorkDay Learning
- Successful launch and completion of the Supercharged Storytime Cohort
- Successful completion in September of our Federal 5-Year Site Visit
- WhoFi's Question Sets has been live for one year and libraries that used this service were able to have their data imported into their Public Library Annual Survey.
We experienced key staffing changes as well this past year, with the retirements of Mandy Easter and Scott Dermont, while Brenda Hall took the helm as Interim State Librarian in October. Here’s a toast to 2024—a busy and eventful year at the State Library and all across the Iowa library community. Looking forward to a successful 2025!
2024 was quite a year for the State Library’s Continuing Education Program, most notably in successfully moving from IALearns to WorkDay Learning. Added thanks to Sam Bouwers for providing this CE summary about 2024:
“The CE Team reflected on all the fun stuff from last year, including:
- A combination of 93 webinars and in-person workshops attended by 4,200 people
- Over 800 people attended the in-person events. These included Pop YS Con, Director Roundtables, the Learning Circuit, and the Space Planning workshops. One attendee called the Space Planning Workshop the best she’d ever been to 😊
- The amount of training hours offered by the State Library in 2024 was longer than the length of every Emily Henry audiobook combined!
- We approved over 870 requests for external CE credits—meaning credits from other education providers—and Iowa library staff logged over 500 training hours in WebJunction.
Sam adds these stats about WorkDay Learning: "Our 'Partridge in a Pear Tree,' so to speak, was the unexpected transition from IA Learns to Workday Learning. This project included cleaning up more than 4,000 user accounts, recreating about 200 webinar archive courses, and manually tracking about 2,000 endorsements.
What was your favorite webinar or workshop from 2024? Do you have suggestions of any topics you’d like to see covered in 2025? Is Workday Learning giving you fits? Let us know! We're excited for a New Year of Learning in 2025 !"
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STEM Fair Call for Proposals Closes This Friday
We need your help to make the STEM Fairs a success! If you have a great STEM program or service for youth or teens that you're passionate about, consider submitting a proposal to present. These fairs are structured in such a way that we need 4 presenters at each location, our target date for proposals is January 10.
This gig will be so fun--and easy! Potential presenters are only asked to prep a 30-minute program showcasing STEM or STEAM programming at their libraries. Actually, it's a 15-minute presentation, followed by a 15-minute hands-on demo of the STEM / STEAM activity with the audience. The Fairs run all day, with the sessions repeating so that attendees can come for either the morning or afternoon. For that reason, we ask that all speakers be available to present their session twice that day: once in the morning, again in the afternoon.
The link below takes you to the "Proposals" form, complete with presentation topic ideas. Again, the deadline is this Friday January 10 by 4:30PM. Contact Janeé Jackson-Doering with questions Janee.Jackson-Doering@iowa.gov.
Attend a STEM Fair Near You
Are you new to STEM and need some inspiration to get started programming in your library? Or are you already doing STEM activities and need some fresh ideas? If you answered “yes” to either of those questions, then join us at one of six locations in March for the 2025 STEM Fairs sponsored by the State Library!
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