Mohawk Valley Library System

Author: sharon

  • Grant Opportunity – The Yiddish Book Center’s “Stories of Exile” Reading Groups for Public Libraries

    The Yiddish Book Center’s “Stories of Exile” Reading Groups for Public Libraries is a reading and discussion program to engage teens and adults in thinking about experiences of displacement, migration, and diaspora.

    Using Yiddish literature as a portal, the program will feature works in translation that explore narratives which grapple with questions of homelands, journeys, identity, and belonging. Reading groups will compare these works written in Yiddish in the early and mid-20th century to works by contemporary writers from all across the globe. 

    The goals of the program are:

    • to introduce libraries and the public to Yiddish literature in the context of broader explorations of dispossession, exile, migration, and diaspora.
    • to help prompt and inform ongoing discussions about displacement, in the context of war, genocide, climate change, economic and political upheaval, and other conditions of homelessness and relocation in the modern world.

    Participating libraries will organize a reading group for adults and/or for teens aged 16-19, or for a combined group, to discuss three books of Yiddish literature in translation, as well as one book related to a community served by their library.  Libraries will receive books for participants as well as discussion and resource guides. The reading group facilitator from each library will attend a workshop at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts to orient them to Yiddish literature in translation. All travel, lodging, and meal costs will be covered by the Yiddish Book Center for each library’s discussion facilitator.

    The Yiddish Book Center will provide virtual public programs and downloadable discussion guides and reading resources for the reading groups.

    Complete details and the application, due August 19, 2022, are available at https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/reading-groups-public-libraries.

  • Free Webinar – Ready, Set, Policy! Using the 2022 Collection Management Guide

    Date: Tuesday, July 19, 2022
    Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
    Place: Online at https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_JsPlMyU-RbOUvFoFYWMtww
    Presenter: Stephanie ‘Cole’ Adams
    Cost: Free (MVLS members select CDLC as your ESLN Council at registration)

    Based on requests from public libraries across the state, ESLN and PULISDO partnered on the creation of an annotated “2022 Public Library Collection Management Policy Template & Guide.” Join us for this 1-hour session on using this resource to update or adopt policies to be ready for materials challenges…and more.

    We invite you to submit a question for the presenter – there will be a place to do that during the registration process. The deadline to submit questions is July 12.

    This event is being sponsored by ESLN and PULISDO.

    Speaker:
    Stephanie A. Adams, Esq. (Nickname: Cole), is an attorney practicing from her own law firm in Buffalo, NY. Adams chose a career in the law so she could focus her professional life on the law’s impact on creativity and communication. She has also worked as a print and broadcast journalist. Adams’s extensive writing on legal issues facing today’s libraries, including issues impacting the freedom to read, can be seen regularly on the “Ask the Lawyer” service, hosted by the Western New York Library Resources Council.

    Free to ESLN Members. Registration is required.
    Please note that this webinar will be recorded, and the recording will be sent to all registrants regardless of attendance. However, you must attend live to receive a certificate.

    All live attendees will receive a certificate of attendance for an hour of CE or CTLE credit.

    Live transcription and closed captioning will be provided courtesy. of Otter.ai and Zoom

  • Free Webinar – Social Media 101

    Date: Wednesday, June 22, 2022
    Time: 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
    Place: Online at https://tinyurl.com/4r2p7j7y
    Presenter: Maurice Coleman
    Cost: Free (MVLS members select CDLC as your ESLN Council at registration)

    Great, your library has decided to step into the world of social media! 

    Now, what? 

    This one-hour webinar will start you on your way to promoting, posting, tweeting, friending and trending. Learn social media basics, beginner best practices, management and policy tips, audience cultivation techniques, and some best practices around social media.  

  • Grant Opportunity – T-Mobile Hometown Grants Program for Small and Rural Communities

    The T-Mobile Hometown Grants Program intends to help build stronger, more prosperous small towns and rural communities throughout the United States. Up to 100 towns each year for the next five years will receive community improvement grants of up to $50,000 for projects to build, rebuild, or refresh
    community spaces that help foster local connections.

    The focus is on providing support to revitalize community spaces in towns with 50,000 people or less. Examples of eligible projects include revitalizing a town hall, a senior center, a library, or any space where friends and neighbors gather. Elected leaders, town managers and employees, and nonprofit leaders are eligible to submit applications. The full proposal should be three-five pages, and include a “shovel-ready” plan, and up to 5 letters of support.
     
    Deadlines – quarterly, the last day of each quarter.
     
    For more information and to apply, visit the website: t-mobile.com/brand/hometown-grants 

  • Nominate Your Library for a Makeover!

    Scribner, the publisher of Anthony Doerr’s glorious New York Times bestseller Cloud Cuckoo Land, and his Pulitzer Prize winner All the Light We Cannot See, is pleased to work together with the Heart of America Foundation on its “Cloud Cuckoo Land Library Makeover Campaign,” a contest that will award a makeover to an under-resourced public or school library within the continental U.S. Nominations will be accepted nationwide through a dedicated Heart of America site beginning May 25, 2022 and ending June 10, 2022.

    The campaign will seek nominations from libraries with librarians who are “book heroes,” and proposals should describe how a library makeover would impact the library’s community. Heart of America will select up to ten finalist libraries and the finalists will be posted on the site on July 25, 2022, for the public to vote on a winner. The library with the most votes will be notified this summer and will receive the makeover from Heart of America this fall. The makeover might include new furnishings, equipment, paint, carpet, a mural, and funds to purchase more books, depending on need. Up to five runner-up libraries will each receive a selection of more than one hundred adult and children’s books from Scribner and other Simon & Schuster imprints.