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Gay and Lesbian Pride Month
A June 1969 riot at the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan is often considered to be the beginning of the gay liberation movement in the United States. Launched in 2000, Gay and Lesbian Pride Month is held in June to commemorate this important event in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered history. “June is now the month of acceptance and the month to welcome diversity in communities regardless of sexual orientation. … This month is meant to recognize the impact Gay, Lesbian and Transgender individuals have had on the world.”
Also in June: Don’t forget Black Music Month, Flag Day, and Father’s Day.
From the Blog
Winning Ideas for Financial Programming
The FINRA Investor Education Foundation and ALA recently announced that grants had been awarded to sixteen libraries as part of the Smart investing@your library initiative. I thought you might be inspired by the partnerships and programming the winning libraries have created.
Partnering for the New Year
Here’s a great example of a long-running partnership between a public library and a university. Since 1993, the Monroe County (Ind.) Public Library has partnered with Indiana University’s Asian Culture Center to celebrate the Lunar New Year in Bloomington.
Feature
Meeting Needs and Making a Difference: Outcomes Based Planning and Evaluation
We’ve all been there. You plan a great program, and only a handful of people show up—or no one does. Maybe something that has always done well in the past mysteriously fails to draw an audience. Maybe you start something new specifically because someone asked for it—and still it doesn’t get off the ground. You’re doing everything you can think of and everything your schedule and your budget allow to promote your events to potential audiences. How can you draw people to your programs?
A lot of us—including me—tend to approach our programming a bit backward: we do programming we want to do, or that’s easy for us to do, or that worked in our last job, or that was already in place when we got there. While I was finishing my MLS at Indiana University and working as Curator of Education at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures on the Indiana University campus, I was lucky to get some training in Outcomes Based Planning and Evaluation (OBPE), which is more and more often required by granting agencies. OBPE turns the approach around, beginning instead with what needs or lacks are in the community for specific groups of people, and culminating in real outcomes in people’s lives. The process provides both quantitative and qualitative evidence (i.e., statistics and experiences) of the difference the library makes for its users, in ways that will make sense to the people who make decisions about your work. Read more | Meeting Needs and Making a Difference: Outcomes Based Planning and Evaluation
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Quote of the Week
I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.—Barbara Kingsolver