Newsletters
Hear ye, hear ye! I have happily felt like the town crier, imparting news to my fellow employees and my employer’s audience when I have created newsletters. People are glad to receive these publications, and I have had the privilege of spreading the word.
June and July are always exciting with our summer reading program, and this summer (2024) has been no exception. I followed with a camera to capture what I could of it, and balanced the monthly missive with some adult programs as well. We provided good times with history, nature, culture ... you name it and we delivered!
In March this year (2024), we added an exciting offering that extended a service to the underserved -- a story time designed for children with special sensory needs and their caregivers. I let Emerson Taylor run with the description since this former special education teacher has the appropriate expertise. It was otherwise a slow month (besides upcoming programming), so it was a good time to remind patrons of ways to pick up materials without ever having to leave home.
June of 2023 marked MPL's fifth anniversary in its current location, I pointed out to our director in February. We started with a simple plan to plant a burr oak in the yard for the paper/wood anniversary, but it turned into a big community celebration. So the June 2023 newsletter invited people to the celebration and also invited kids, teens and adults to sign up for "Find Your Voice," the summer reading program, which is always a big deal at MPL.
The July (2023) newsletter catches the library at the height of its programming season. It’s a time when a look back combined with a look forward is craved by the public but hard to keep succinct! So I talked to the children’s programming coordinators to look back at June’s programming and to give readers a preview of what was coming up in July. It was important to acknowledge our 5-year anniversary in our current building - a gift from HNI Corporation - so that was our lead. In addition to the anniversary event and kids’ programming, we had teen/adult programming to announce and a new app for our onsite TV station!
May 2023 had us reflecting upon National Libraries Week, during which we had "Wonderful Week," based on "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll. It was visually spectacular with events for all ages, and I made arrangements for Library Assistant Katie Roquet to go on a regional TV show to promote her creation. At the same time we were also looking forward to the first Local Authors Celebration in many years, and June will bring our much-beloved summer reading program and a big party to celebrate five years in our current location. That anniversary may have gone unnoticed, but I suggested we commemorate it!
December is a slow month for the library, but the children's librarians still do story times at the schools. I used a video I had taken of Mr. Taylor singing an original song on social media, and for the newsletter, was handed this eye-catching photo of Mr. and Mrs. Taylor acting out "The Gruffalo" - she signs in ASL and he provides music at the Muscatine Early Learning Center. Other fun stories for this issue alerted people to the library's participation in the Jingle and Mingle and the Friends of MPL awareness raiser - where we signed up 37 new members - way up from seven!
September 2022 MPL newsletter: During Genealogy Month, our Library Assistant Carrie Olson blogged about her journey learning her family history, and we promoted a genealogy class taught for six Saturdays. My friend Mike Wedell and his cohort, Ann Simpson, were a great interview. When they told me their research had revealed that they are third cousins, I couldn't resist creating the above art.
April 2022 MPL newsletter contained the best of our user-generated content. Responding to my callout, "Tell us your library story," Esperance Ciss shared the world that Musser Public Library opened up for her and for her two children, Pearly and Kevin. I liked that another respondent shared some Greek writing with us, too. I was also relieved that Library Assistant Chris Cook did not disappoint on the blog. I had introduced this feature the month before. He took it to the next level.
March 2023 MPL newsletter - I had the lower half of this newsletter done first, then thought: What are the library's bigger stories right now? There were two. A simple look at our online calendar revealed new adult classes that we needed to promote, and after I did social media posts on the Mother-Daughter Book Club reading about homelessness and creating tie blankets to donate to the local homeless shelter, I thought that story needed to be reimagined for the newsletter.
January 2023 MPL newsletter: I worked with our director to explain why there will be no more library fines. To show the fun of the upcoming "Sparkplugs" program, we used photos from a prior program like it - with a board member scolding a doll in imitation of an antique photo. Our blogger did not want her photo to accompany the blog (about libraries as havens of comfort), but a patron allowed us to share the library-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow photo she had taken. It was perfect.
July 2022 MPL newsletter was almost exclusively about the Children's Summer Reading Program: numbers up to that point, a photo gallery, a blog by our historian/librarian Jenny Howell on her childhood memories of the program. Here, a child tentatively pets an opossum held by a volunteer with Incredible Bats during a Summer Reading Program event.
John Deere Parts Distribution "Particles" newsletter Oct. 22, 2001. This is a publication I edited for five years. This issue covered a reorganization that concerned employees, and we had to get in front of the rumor mill, alerting them it would not mean job losses. I introduced the new director of Parts Services including his ideas for the future and his past with the company. The XATA story informed employees about the workings of then-new technology that OTR drivers were using - an interest because these drivers delivered the parts our employees coded, picked or packed.
EXTRA John Deere Parts Distribution Particles, 10 June 1998 - In my five years creating the Parts Distribution newsletter, this was the only EXTRA I ever created, at our director's request. As you can see, the bar charts were not beautiful at the time and with the tools I had (Pagemaker, anyone?), but they at least gave employees a visual representation of favorable, neutral and unfavorable responses to the questions.