PLA/ALA Public Policy and Advocacy Deputy Director Larra Clark and Emily Wagner, Public Policy and Advocacy Deputy Director discuss the publisher changes to library ebooks and the publisher embargo which led to ALA’s “eBooks for All Campaign.” Clark and Wagner further discuss how public libraries are taking action, the online petition, and detail how you […]
We talk library marketing and PR with Cordelia Anderson, a marketing and communications consultant who works primarily with libraries and nonprofits. She is also the former director of marketing and communications at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Library in North Carolina. Anderson shares her concept of the library marketing funnel, understanding the library user’s wants and needs, the importance of the overall customer experience, and finding where library users are dropping off at your library.
We talk with Kate Coleman, Outreach Coordinator at the Hennepin County (MN) Library about the library’s social services offerings, outreach, and more. Resources for this Podcast: Hennepin County (MN) Library Finding Solutions to Homelessness at Hennepin County Library Peer Navigators Demystify Social Service System
We talk with Oralia Garza de Cortés, Coordinator for REFORMA’s Children in Crisis and Patrick Sullivan, Emeritus Librarian at San Diego State University, about the organization’s efforts to provide books and storytime materials to children detained at the southern border. Resources for this Podcast: REFORMA’s Children In Crisis Project Website Librarians Respond to Humanitarian Crisis […]
We talk with Rachelle Brandel, Adult Services Librarian at the Ferguson (MO) Public Library about PLA’s ‘Libraries Connecting You to Coverage’ initiative and the Ferguson Library’s efforts to help their community members enroll in health insurance during the Affordable Care Act’s open enrollment period.
We talk with Sarah Garbis, Service Manager, Community Embedded Library Service (CELS) at Hennepin County Library. This program pairs librarians with Community Liaisons to shape library practices and extend programs and services for communities that experience the greatest barriers to library access.
Our guest for this episode is Sara Zettervall. Sara is the founding consultant and trainer for Whole Person Librarianship, which applies social work concepts to library practice. She also works at Hennepin County Library as the community engagement librarian for East African refugees in Minneapolis.
PLA’s Brendan Dowling hosts a conversation with Lainey Mays and Christopher Connolly of the HarperCollins Library LoveFest team, and an interview with Juliet Grames, whose first novel, “The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna,” will be released in the Spring.
The United States has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the western industrialized world and studies show that children of teen parents are less prepared for school, perform less well, and have a higher dropout rate than other children. As many librarians know, it is challenging enough to get teens into the library […]
Our guest is social worker Jean Badalamenti, the Health and Human Services Assistant Manager at the Washington, D.C. Public Library. In her role with the library, she leads system-wide initiatives in a variety of areas. Since 2014, she has been developing programs, creating partnerships, and training DCPL staff to support customers experiencing homelessness. She also […]
Our guest is Elizabeth Fitzgerald, director of the Culinary Literacy Center at the Free Library of Philadelphia. The Culinary Literacy Center is the first kitchen classroom in a public library in the United States. Here we discuss the Culinary Literacy Center, why culinary literacy is important, how libraries can offer this type of programming, and more.
We talk with Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Community Resource Manager at the Denver Public Library, Elissa Hardy about the emerging trend of employing social workers in public libraries, serving persons experiencing homelessness at the library, making the library an inclusive space, training library staff, and related issues.
This episode focuses on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, EDI for short and features three guest who’ve been working tirelessly in this arena. Amita Lonial leads our conversation. Amita, (she/her/hers) is currently the Principal Librarian for Learning, Marketing, and Engagement at San Diego County Library. She also currently serves as the co-chair for the PLA Equity, […]
We talk with John Spears, Director of the Pikes Peak (Colorado) Public Library about challenges and opportunities in serving homeless patrons at the public library, educating the public, tensions in the community, efforts to expand initiatives, and more.
In this podcast, we discuss Graphic Medicine, which can be defined as the use of comics (graphic narratives) in health sciences education and patient care. Our guests are Susan Squier and Ellen Forney. Susan Squier is Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State University, where she taught graphic narratives (comics!) to graduate students. She is now Visiting Fellow at the Freie Universität, Berlin (the Free University, that is) where she is part of a collaboration called the PathoGraphics project, a study of the relations between illness narratives (also called pathographies) and comics about medicine, illness, disability and caregiving. She is a co-editor of the Graphic Medicine book series at Penn State Press, which publishes long form graphic narratives, graphic narratives for classroom use, and scholarly studies of works of graphic medicine. Ellen Forney is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me,” a graphic memoir about her bipolar disorder. Her new book, the follow-up to Marbles, is a self-help guide to maintaining stability with a mood disorder. It’s called “Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice from My Bipolar Life,” and will be out this May. She teaches comics at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.
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