The Heroic Adventure Kids Club (Or HAK Club, for short) is an RPG club of elementary and jr. high aged students that are sponsored by the local library. The H.A.K. Club began in January 2017, formed by 4 students from the Hagerstown Elementary School and a librarian at the Hagerstown Public Library acting as sponsor. The students wanted to learn to play role playing games and there was interest in using it as a play test idea for the community outreach coordinator of the school who was interested in the benefits of elementary students playing role playing games and how it might be used towards social skills & behavior improvement. The club has grown, expanded to two “level” age groups of participants. The group has been written about in newspapers and has been part of three summer reading programs and been featured on the list of “Great Things Happening in Indiana Libraries” by the Indiana Library Federation (ILF). We want to share the origin, the challenges that were faced and the secrets to our success as this group has continued for over three years. We’ll cover what has worked, what hasn’t worked, a few things libraries should always keep in mind & what the plans are for the future.
Date Recorded: 4/29/20
Format: Archived YouTube Video
Presenter: Jennifer Taylor / Hagerstown Public Library
As public libraries continue to strive towards deeper connections with their community, effective and mutually beneficial partnerships are essential. Unfortunately, all too often, instead of being “made in heaven,” many partnerships feel more like “shotgun marriages.” This session will examine the ingredients necessary for healthy, mutually beneficial, and sustainable library-community partnerships, and provide a number of suggestions as to where to start.
Every library collects statistics throughout the year, but are you doing more with them than just clicking submit on your annual report? In this webinar, we will discuss how to effectively present your annual statistics to your boards, Friends groups, patrons, and other key stakeholders. What should you put on an annual report? How should it look? What’s the best way to format your data? We’ll try to tackle it all!
Join Abby Johnson from the Floyd County Library to learn about how to do more with the Indiana Early Literacy Firefly Award. We will discuss why Firefly outreach is important, how to set up circulating book kits for daycares and preschools, incorporating the Firefly Award into existing outreach and lots more! This webinar was recorded on 2/11/2020.
How do you serve people in your community who are unable get in to your library? How do you find those people? What kind of programs or services could be offered to them? These questions plague libraries everywhere. Learn how we identified our target patron groups, partnered with community agencies to identify patrons, young and not so young, who would benefit from outreach programming, and how we used materials and staff on hand to add outreach to our service repertoire.
Teen patrons in every community live lives that are more and more hectic with little spare time and sometimes shrinking awareness of libraries and what they have to offer. It is sometimes the case that to engage them the best thing to do is to go where they are. In the community of Hagerstown, IN, a significant part of that has been accomplished by going into the high school and with the development of a program called the Quick Play Game Club. The program began over three years ago, originally as an International Gaming Day event that was highly successful, working in partnership with the school.
This presentation explores games developed by libraries to support information literacy and internal training. One benefit of creating games is being able to tailor experiences to the culture and needs of libraries and their communities. Some games covered in this session include the University of Tennessee Libraries’ interactive Breakout Game for first-year studies courses, Acquisitions Adventure (which is used for internal training of acquisitions staff), and the Pendergrass Clue board game (which supports one of our branch libraries). This session showcases games created by other libraries as well.
Dr. Curtis Rogers, Communications Director for the South Carolina State Library, will share his experience with SCSL’s podcast, 
Under the staircase, an old study room, an accessible storage closet … anywhere can become a mini makerspace! The North Riverside Public Library, a small library outside Chicago, was able to cobble together funding using our budget and grants to create mini makerspaces in small nooks around our library. We will talk about our process, research on materials and space design, and how we solicited valuable feedback from patrons. We’ll also discuss our failures and successes throughout the planning and implementation process, including budgetary constraints and unique workarounds that we discovered. This talk will be applicable to any small or rural library willing to get creative.
Seniors are highly motivated to learn to use devices, but have few opportunities to attend classes that address their needs to use. Most are unaware of how these devices can connect them to the free library services of Hoopla, Freegal, Libby (Overdrive) and their local online catalogs.