My first foray into audiobooks was on a road trip with a friend, when we popped a CD into the car’s player only to be bombarded with jarring music that
Sandi Ryan, 69, is a lifelong reader. She reads mysteries, non-fiction biographies, political histories and, on the days she volunteers to proofread Braille translations at the Iowa Library for the Blind and Print Disabled, she reads a bit of everything.
Ryan, whose eyes were removed to treat a rare early childhood cancer called retinoblastoma, has been a patron of the library for nearly 60 years. When she was 10, her mom discovered the library’s services and they regularly ordered audiobooks, or talking books, which came on vinyl records they played in their Nevada, Iowa, home every weekend.
Ryan, who now lives in Ames, sometimes wishes she was 10 again because the library’s youth services have expanded so far beyond what she had access to as a kid. Today, its instructional materials center helps more than 100 Iowa students who are blind, have low-vision or a reading disability to access their schoolwork. It s also in the process of building a new area for children and you
St. Johnsbury Athenaeum distribution site for sanitizer, Census, and other materials.
Michele: What approach have you taken with the CARES Act stimulus funds, including mechanisms you have used to distribute them?
Jason: To find out what libraries were experiencing, we released a survey asking about their needs. We took a portion of the funds and purchased shield guards based on feedback from the survey. Vermont’s prison industry made them for us, which cost us less and allowed us to purchase additional items. We gave some funds to our historical society that oversees the State Museum of Vermont to do some virtual programming. We also provided a grant to our Green Mountain Library Consortium to make more eBooks accessible to a wider audience. Then we reserved some of the money in case the virus had a resurgence. We also planned on a second round of grants for Wi-Fi extenders to help around 50 libraries. The last round of funds was slated for disinfectant and cleaning wipes. We ar
Jack Miller dusts shelves at the main location of Gail Borden Public Library District in Elgin, Illinois, pre-pandemic. Photo: Gail Borden Public Library District in Elgin, Illinois
Before COVID-19 came along, 18-year-old Jack Miller, who has autism, visited the main location of Gail Borden Public Library District (GBPLD) in Elgin, Illinois, three times a week. On two of those visits, he dusted books, alphabetized DVDs, and performed other tasks as part of his school’s special-education vocational studies program; on the third, he came with his family to check out his favorite Impressionist art books and play games in the library’s computer lab even though he has access to the same games at home.