Leah’s CE Pick for the Week
Opening Up About a Quiet Practice: Self-Censorship in Collection Development, October 9, 1:00-2:15 pm.
Hey everyone, I got to see this webinar in a practice session earlier this week. Your colleagues from the IFLS area have thought long and hard about self-censorship and put together a webinar filled with background, context, suggestions, resources, examples, and empowering ideas based on their own experiences. Wowza! They are knocking it out of the park! (Recording will be professionally captioned and available by early next week if you can’t make it to the live session).
Intellectual Freedom Survey open until October 20
(from Christinna Swearingen, director, Rusk County Community Library) I’d love to invite you to complete the 2025 Intellectual Freedom Survey! The survey is a collaboration between the Wisconsin Library Association Intellectual Freedom Committee and the Wisconsin Educational Media & Technology Association Intellectual Freedom Group. The purpose of this anonymous data collection is to assess the state of intellectual freedom in Wisconsin as reported by all Wisconsin library professionals. The survey is an opportunity to share what support library staff members are looking for, while providing a platform for exchanging resources. The results of the survey will be analyzed and shared in a comprehensive report by the end of the year.
The survey is open from Monday, October 6 until midnight on Monday, October 20. The link is available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PMF3QDX. If you encounter any technical difficulties when completing the survey, please reach out to Nick Censoprano at [email protected].
My Life, My Story
Over the last 12 years, writers with the My Life, My Story project at the Department of Veterans Affairs have interviewed over 10,000 veterans and written short stories about their lives. Each story is reviewed and edited by the veteran, and with their approval, added to their VA medical record. Any VA provider who is caring for that vet can easily find their story and read, in their own words, what matters to them, who matters to them, and why.
1,000 Words: Stories from the VA’s My Life, My Story Project is a book which shares the stories and photographs of 15 of those veterans. The VA is offering the book free-of-charge to public libraries in Wisconsin (while supplies last). Please email [email protected] to request a copy.
Almost all of the veterans in the book are from Wisconsin, with a handful from Northern Illinois.