[Libs-Or] Letters to Libraries Online - September 2008

[April Baker]

Letter To Libraries Online
An Electronic Newsletter from the Oregon State Library.......Volume 18, Issue 9, September 2008
Library Board News

STATE LIBRARY BOARD WILL AWARD LSTA GRANTS IN OCTOBER
At their next meeting on October 17th in Salem, the State Library Board of Trustees will hear recommendations from the LSTA Advisory Council about awarding competitive LSTA grants for FFY 2009. The Board will be considering six applications for grant projects that are continuing and seven new grant projects. The total of all the projects being considered will be over $800,000. Among the projects that will be considered are new projects to test and implement an open source integrated library system in Eastern Oregon, and a project to begin to digitize all of Oregon's historic newspapers that are in the public domain. Also at the October meeting, the Board will hear recommendations from the Talking Book and Braille Services Advisory Council about how to proceed to expedite the transition from cassette talking books to digital talking books. The Board has already decided to use TBABS Endowment funds to purchase players, if the number of players that we expect receive from the Library of Congress is inadequate. However, recently an House appropriations subcommittee in the Congress voted to nearly triple the funding for the digital talking book program in FFY 2009, so the Board must now determine if it is wise to spend endowment funds on players and related equipment, or wait to see if the significant funding increase from the Congress will result in TBABS customers not having to wait months or years to trade in their cassette players. The meeting will take place at the State Library, beginning at 9:30 a.m. on October 17th.
State Library News

READING FOR HEALTHY FAMILIES BEGINS THIS FALL
The Oregon State Library and the Oregon Commission on Children and Families are excited to announce Reading for Healthy Families Oregon: Building Communities of Learning (RFHF), an early literacy and community engagement effort. 
Public library staff who work with children can apply to attend two separate two-day RFHF training sessions and receive training in the evidence-based Every Child Ready to Read @ your libraryR, outreach to high-risk families, and special topics such as working with English language learners, conducting early literacy story times, and working with people with special needs.
After the training, each participating children's library staff will have the knowledge, skills, and materials to provide early literacy education, support, and resources to at least 15 families over the course of a year. And, their library will be able to report this on their Public Library Statistics as "early literacy training", one of the three library youth services best practices identified by the Statewide Early Literacy Initiative. 
RFHF will foster partnerships between public libraries and Healthy Start programs in their counties that will help children's library staff develop or expand library outreach services to high-risk families in their communities.
To learn more about the many benefits RFHF can bring to Oregon Communities, go to the RFHF website: http://www.oregon.gov/OSL/LD/youthsvcs/rfhf.home.page.shtml
If you have any questions please contact: Joann Contini, RFHF Project Coordinator at 503-761-2506 or joanncontini at comcast.net. 



2009 LETTERS ABOUT LITERATURE CONTEST BEGINS
Letter About Literature is a national reading and writing promotion program for readers in grades 4 through 12, sponsored by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress in partnership with Target. To enter, readers write a personal letter to an author, explaining how his or her work changed their view of the world or themselves. Last year one of the six national Letters About Literature winners was from Oregon. The winner received a $500 Target GiftCard, and Target Stores made a $10,000 donation in the winner's name to the library at Cal Young Middle School in Eugene. To obtain the guidelines and required entry form download it from Letters About Literature. The deadline for entries is December 6, 2008. 

2008 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE OREGON INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM CLEARINGHOUSE COMING SOON
The 2008 Annual Report will be available soon on Oregon Intellectual Freedom Clearinghouse. The report is a compendium of 34 challenges to library material in three school libraries and seven public libraries between July 1, 2007 and June 30, 2008. More than twice as many challenges were reported this year than in 2007, and 13 more than in 2006. This increase may be due to joint efforts by OICF and the Intellectual Freedom Committees of the Oregon Library Association and Oregon Association of School Libraries to educate library staff about reporting challenges. 
The Oregon Intellectual Freedom Clearinghouse (OIFC) collects reports about formal, written challenges to library material from all types of Oregon libraries. The information is reported to OIFC by Oregon libraries on a voluntarily basis. OIFC compiles the reports from libraries into an annual report each year; all previous reports are now available online at Oregon Intellectual Freedom Clearinghouse.



UNABRIDGED RECIEVES DIGITAL PIONEER AWARD
Digipalooza '08, the library download service user conference, sponsored by OverDrive, was held in Cleveland Ohio in July. Honored at that event was the Unabridged downloadable audio book service provided by Talking Book and Braille Services, in cooperation with regional talking book libraries in several other states. Digital Pioneer Awards, or "Digies" were awarded to leading libraries demonstrating excellence in the expansion and promotion of their digital download websites. Unabridged was one of 13 honorees from hundreds of public libraries and consortia that offer OverDrive supplied download eBooks, audiobooks, music, and video. TBABS' patrons can sign up for Unabridged any time-all they need is a computer and high speed internet access. Call TBABS for details!



Other Library News

OREGON HERITAGE COMMISSION VOTES TO SUPPORT THE OREGON DIGITAL NEWSPAPER PROJECT
At their meeting on August 4th, the Oregon Heritage Commission, a division of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, voted to provide $145,000 of Oregon Cultural Trust funds to help with start-up costs for the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project at the University of Oregon Libraries. The funds would match nearly $80,000 that is being requested in an LSTA grant application to the State Library. It is hoped that both funding partners would be able to provide two years of funding to get the project off the ground. The project was the result of an Oregon Newspaper Digitization Summit meeting that the State Librarian hosted in December, 2007. The meeting brought together librarians from research libraries around the state, representatives of heritage organizations, and the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association. UO Libraries is leading the project because of their longstanding leadership in microfilming and archiving Oregon's historic newspapers. The project plan envisions that at the end of the two-year start-up phase, a representative sample of historic Oregon newspapers will be available for viewing on the web, and that this will lead to more Oregon communities raising the funds to have their historic newspapers digitized. This is the funding model that has led to the creation of comprehensive historic newspaper digitization projects in both Colorado and Utah.


LANE LIBRARY DISTRICT SPONSORS FARMERS MARKET
On June 24th the Lane Library District in Creswell sponsored a farmer's market in a area behind the library. According to an article in the Creswell Chronicle, the farmer's market had 12 vendors and drew about 200 people from the community on opening day. The Library set a single day attendance record with 419 people visiting the Library. The Chronicle reported that five more vendors have signed up for the market. It will be open every Tuesday from 4-7 p.m. throughout the summer.
P.S. (From the State Librarian)

Is it possible that some "Oregon Moms" could achieve the same results for our school libraries that the three "Washington Moms" achieved in Washington earlier this year? You might have read about the three moms from Spokane who took on the Washington legislature to get funding for a teacher-librarian and an adequate library materials budget in every school. They succeeded in getting an appropriation of $4 million - about a third of what they asked for, but a start. They plan to be back when the new legislature convenes next year.
Nancy Sullivan, a high school librarian in the Portland Public Schools and an Oregon Association of School Libraries Board member, has taken it upon herself to try to replicate the Washington Moms success in Oregon. She has already found a couple of Oregon moms and has created an organization and a website modeled on Washington's. She's getting advice from the Washington Moms and recently presented her plans to a joint meeting of the Boards of OASL and OLA. Both organizations seem interested in helping, if Nancy and her moms can manage to get a bill introduced in the Oregon legislature next year. Nancy reported that several legislators have shown interest, but that she has yet to locate a legislator to be a champion and to sponsor a bill.
Getting the Oregon legislature to appropriate funds specifically for school libraries will be a harder task here than in Washington. For a long time the Oregon legislature has avoided funding specific activities or programs in Oregon's K-12 schools, adhering to a firm policy of "local control." They have gone along with the strong pressure they typically get from the school boards and school administrators to appropriate as much money as possible to fund the formula allocations to Oregon's school districts, but to refrain from directing them how to spend it. It took two legislative sessions and very strong support from the President of the Oregon Senate to appropriate a modest amount of money for grants to hire more PE specialists (seen as a response to the childhood obesity problem) in the 2007 session.
There is nothing to lose by attempting a Washington Moms strategy in Oregon. I have urged the OASL to help Nancy by developing a succinct case statement that presents the research showing how school libraries can really make a difference in reading achievement, and that also describes the dismal state of Oregon's school libraries. 
The State Board of Education recently voted to require that Oregon students be able to demonstrate reading proficiency in order to graduate from high school, beginning in 2012. One of the best ways to enable all our students to meet this new requirement would be to invest in our school libraries, particularly at the elementary level, where our school libraries have taken the hardest hit. Beginning to educate our legislators about this would be worth the effort, even if funding is impossible to achieve in 2009. - Jim Scheppke

Contacts at the Oregon State Library

Technical Assistance: 503-932-1004.

Library Development: 503-378-2525, MaryKay Dahlgreen, Mary Mayberry, Darci Hanning, Ann Reed, Patty Sorensen, Katie Anderson.

Talking Book and Braille Services: 503-378-5389, Susan Westin.

Government Research and Electronic Services: 503-378-5030, Robert Hulshof-Schmidt.

State Librarian: 503-378-4367, Jim Scheppke.

LTLO Editor: 503-378-2464, April Baker.
Letter to Libraries Online is published monthly by the Oregon State Library. Editorial office: LTLO, Oregon State Library, 250 Winter St. NE, Salem, Oregon 97301-3950, 503-378-2464, editor: April Baker.
Letter to Libraries Online is available free of charge and is available only in electronic form on the publications page at the Oregon State Library's homepage: http://www.oregon.gov/OSL. Opinions expressed in the articles are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Oregon State Library. News items or articles should be sent to April Baker, or mailed to LTLO, Oregon State Library, 250 Winter St. NE, Salem, Oregon 97301-3950.
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