13 Siouxland Libraries, 500,000 Books, Bookmobile, E-Books and Dinosaurs

This is Forum. I'm John Michael's Public Affairs Radio Director since 1977. I'm going to be talking about the Sioux Land Libraries, 13 of them in Sioux Falls, with Alicia Dawes, supervising librarian, birth to five programming lead, and Lay Tanis, supervising librarian of kindergarten through fifth grade programming. A lot of people don't realize that education in the school system is from birth. And that's one thing that you can do quite a lot. When you say birth to five, let's start with that. What can people do there? You know, they're having babies, and they didn't know that that baby can get a library card, I guess. You can get a library card as early as you want. As a matter of fact, today, I think we gave a library card out to a one-week-old baby. So probably our youngest library card holder. currently is one week old. It's important to bring those babies in early. We like to say that kids should come into the library early and often to help build those. What do you have at the library for people that young? Yes, I'm glad you asked because we have a tummy time program currently at the library. It is for babies zero to nine months, babies who are not yet crawling or mobile. It's just a good time for families and caregivers to get together, to introduce those babies to books, to the environment, to how listening to the words, how the words work, and just meeting other parents as well. And that happens at currently four of our location. Now, is it the mom that brings the baby in or the dad or both of them? Both, anybody. We've had grandmas bring babies in. We've had moms and dads bring babies in. We've had, you know, the caretaker, you know. They're home with the aunt, you know, whoever wants to come and just learn some bonding and meet some other folks. Well, let's list the 13 main libraries. We can just kind of go down the list a little bit because some people don't know that it's probably just a few blocks away from. Yeah, so we have five city locations that are located in Sioux Falls, the downtown library, Cayley Branch, Ronning Branch, Oakview Branch. and Prairie West. Then we have the Brandon Community Library. Then we go into the rural communities that are located in Minnehaha County. So we have a library at In Baltic and Valley Springs, Crooks, Hartford, Colton, Humboldt, Gerritson. I think I've got them all, and then we also have the BookMobile, which is our library on wheels. Now, is that still that real big bus type thing? Yeah. There's a lot of books in there. I think Chat GPT told me you've got close to half a million books altogether. Chad GPT might be right. I don't have the book count, but it's more books than I can read, and I can read a lot of books. Well, a lot of people also don't know that how many books can you check out at one time? You can check out quite a few. Sure. If you have just the regular plain old library card, it's 50 materials at a time. 50, yes. That's a library in itself. That is a lot of books.

Alicia Dawes and Leightanis, how do you encourage people to not just play games but go in there and actually learn something that can be good for them? First of all, they may come to you for some advice. Yeah, the library is all about connecting people to information that they need. So whether they're coming in and wanting to get a job or we have young families wanting to connect their child to. resources to help them in their reading journey. We have staff that are trained to help all different kinds of people who walk in our doors and connect them to either answers that we can find within the library or answers that we direct them to different partners in the community. Well, first of all, you've got to tell the kids it's not like the TV show, the librarians. Not quite, no. But what's the qualifications to get a library card? So for our library system, all you have to do is be able to prove that you are a Sioux Falls or Minnehaha County resident. You would bring in your photo ID with you and a verification of your address. We could get you a card right on the spot. But if you're not a resident of our county or our city, we also have non-resident cards for folks who say live out of state or live in another city or county. And that's just $17 for three months and $63 for a year. Now, do you share with other libraries like colleges and network with other colleges or libraries around the area? nationally. Yeah, we just recently expanded our digital library services. So now we are a part of a consortium where we have access to more than just Siouxland ebooks and audiobooks. We were finding ebooks and audiobooks are really circulating a lot and it's in high demand. So now we have... access to the Black Hill State Consortium and then one other city, I believe. Yeah. So now we have really expanded the amount of ebooks and audiobooks that we have available to people in the community. But then we also have something called Interlibrary Loan. So if we don't carry a print book that somebody is looking for, we can request it through inner library loan and we reach out to libraries outside of Sioux Falls. Well, before all of the technology, you used to be that if you wanted a phone number or a question about something, you call the librarian. We still do that, though. Yeah, we get many calls throughout the day asking those reference questions, yeah. What kind of questions are you getting? It is a wide range. We get such fun questions. Sometimes we'll get the, what's the phone number? What's the address? But it's really fun to just talk to folks who call in and ask us about recipes or about. What are some other fun things we get questions about? Like books in a series or, you know, what's the next episode of this TV show? I mean. What's the trending headlines lately? Yeah. Yeah.

All sorts of fun stuff. People can look forward to a new book release, and how many copies of those books sometimes do you get? It's not just one. Yeah. We have a really talented team of selectors that are monitoring how many books we have in our system, and then also how many people are waiting for it. depending on how many people place a hold on a book, that kind of determines how many books we purchase. So we try to keep the holds ratio at four to one. So for every four people waiting, we want to have a copy of the book. So sometimes for these best sellers, we can have 30, 40, 50 copies of the same book because there's that much demand. So it really depends on what the demand is for books. hard, you know, to, I guess, you know, are we seeing the young kids being able to read like our grandparents did, you know, in the second, per second, third grade, are we seeing the kids able to read as much as we think they do? We're sure. Yeah. And that's something that's kind of being nationally talked about is third grade reading proficiency and just the national literacy crisis. And. At the library, we want to be a partner in that and partner with the school districts to support that, but also find ways to connect with parents to get their kit on the right track. So we have a lot of things at the library to support readers. We have dedicated reading kits that are... developed for either supporting readers or new and beginning readers. And each kit has a folder of parent tips on how to use the kit with a literacy game inside and then leveled readers too. So that's something that a parent doesn't need to be a trained educator. We can provide them a kit that has all of the resources they need and all of the guidance they need to support their young reader. And then we have so many different collections at the library that supports a reader no matter what journey they're in. So we start with baby board books. And that's just the introduction to reading and holding a book. And that gets their background knowledge and vocabulary built. But then we kind of level up throughout the library going to picture books with read aloud. And then we have easy readers, which have their own decodable series that, keep a child on track and support it in their reading journey. So, yeah, as a library, we're always looking for ways to support readers in becoming proficient by third grade because that third grade mark is really when a child stops learning how to read and transitions to reading to learn. They get hardwired. Yeah, yeah. And if you're not reading by third grade, there's so much data about just the prison rate. And it's the future job workforce as well. So we really want to catch kids early. And that's where we really empower birth to five resources as well is it really does start right away at birth because so much of brain development happens within that first five years. Yeah. So as birth to five, I feel obligated to say that.

At the library, we're focusing more on empowering parents and caregivers to be that child's first teacher. You don't need formal training. You don't need to know college level courses, really as long as you are speaking to your baby, talking to your baby, introducing them to words, then you're already... getting them ready, getting them prepared to be, it's hard to think about kindergarten when you have a little tiny baby, but you're getting them ready to do all those things. And at the library, we just really want to focus on providing parents with those resources and showing them I already have what is needed to help those babies. Well, I see it all the time that the minute the baby starts to cry a little bit, the... hand them their phone. No, yes. It's so easy to do, and it may be quiet right down, of course, extending into the iPads and that type of thing. You don't have to teach them out of type. I mean, they can, they're faster with their thumbs and I could ever be on a typewriter. So there's no typewriting classes anymore. I mean, they seem to know. I mean, they've already know. They just like they're born with it. Yeah, they catch on very quickly. Technology definitely has a place, and it's really important. Also, as the library that we're able to help folks kind of figure that out as well, because we know that technology is going to stick around. So how do we balance everything? And so we do our best to make sure we have... the best of the physical resources as well as the digital resources for folks. And you see so many young kids walking around and they've got headphones on. I mean, you're smiling, shaking your heads on. But a lot of them are listening to audio. And when you say e-books, it can add up to a lot of money on Amazon and in the library is there basically with the same thing for free. Yeah. I mean, it's really, it's not like there's a monthly subscription or annual dues or anything. Yeah, free with your library card. It's a library card. It's kind of like magic. I mean, you wave around, and you can have any e-book, basically, that young kids would want. Are there book clubs? Yes, so we do have book clubs. They are very popular. So most of our book clubs currently have waiting lists, but we would encourage anybody who wants to get on those to do that. But you don't have to be part of a library to set up a book club. So we can definitely help facilitate a space for you if you'd like. And we'd love to have more folks come in and do it. There's different ages. What kind of book clubs are you? Yeah, so primarily we have adult book clubs right now. We have a couple library staff who have been hosting a program called a book club mixer, and it's teaching and connecting community members with our book club to go bags and how they can start their own book club.

But then we're also exploring how to create something similar for kids, whether it's Reading Buddies or the Oakview branch during the school year started a program called Reading Buddies where they just spent some time in a book and then did some sort of activity or sharing opportunity at the end of it. So we are looking to expand it to more ages as well. Well, you know, there's like Boys and Girls Clubs where they have mentors in that type of thing. Is that similar to what you're talking about? Yeah, I think right now at the library. Starting this fall, we're trying to recruit teens to join a teen advisory board. And I think that would be a fantastic opportunity to have high school mentors for young kids. And if the teen advisory board could help us facilitate maybe a partnership between teens and young kids and establish a reading buddy, that would be fantastic. So yeah, we're starting this teen advisory board this fall and information's on our website. And we would love any teen to. join that. Kind of a reading big brother, big sister. Yeah. There's an app for everything. I imagine there's an app for a other library. There absolutely is, yeah. So Sulein Libraries has its own app. You can go in, input your card information, and you're able to browse our catalog, put things on hold, check out what your account says. It's a great tool for folks. You can even do your inner library loans there. So if you can't find materials within Sulean libraries, we can then... grab them for you from other libraries in the nation that participate with the inner library loan system. Magazines are still there. very expensive nowadays. Even newspapers are expensive nowadays. And I used to go in just to read the comics in all the different city newspapers, you know. But how many different cities? I know you've got in Minneapolis, what Chicago, New York, Wall Street Journal, what kind of newspapers do you have? Yeah, so I think the most recent development we've had on the newspaper end is our Argus leader has moved digitally. So we have all of the Argus leaders archived since the beginning, I think, on our website. But then guests can also view a recent edition as well. But then...

As far as print newspaper goes, we have the Wall Street. I mean, each branch has different selections, and downtown probably has the most newspaper print selections. But then you spoke on magazines as well. And that's another thing that is kind of being transformed into digital. And our Libby app houses mini magazine subscriptions. So if they don't find it in print, it's often on Libby, and they can access that for free. Well, plus, you've got magazines back quite a few years. how far back do you keep you know like a model train or model airplane magazine something like that you know that i'm not entirely sure on i know that we weed them out um And I don't know the specific date, so I couldn't speak on that. Yeah, because you've been collecting them for a long time. There's got to be a warehouse someplace with a lot of hidden things. But with the artist being digital, you've got the search option, which you could go in there and put your dad's name in there and see what comes up through the whole entire aspect of over a century of the artist leader. Right. People use that quite, do you see a lot of people using that? It is fun to see what people come in. for and want to use the Argus Leader for. We recently had a research request that a staff member was working with and they were finding out more information about their club that they had started. And it turns out it was over 100 years old because they were dating back and finding articles from 100 years old. So it is interesting. The number of things that people will come in and... search our archives for. And we also have the Cayley Room, which has historical information in it as well that's used by the community, and that's at the downtown library. So yeah, we have a lot of hidden treasures at the library. Yeah, and to search us archives, you don't have to be in our building either. You can do that using the app that we talked about or on our website. Well, like I say, 13 libraries. If you were to say there's an economic impact on the city, that's quite a few employees. Yeah. Are you hiring? We are not currently hiring as far as I know. Yeah. The most up-to-date postings would be on the City of Sioux Falls website, and that's where you can find it. But, yeah, I'm not aware of any open postings currently. Well, if you were a corporation, your annual budget, your staff, your employees, the amount of money you put into the community would be quite an economic impact, I guess is what I'm saying. But getting back to, you know, some of the things that people can do at the library, do you still have records, LP records?

No, currently we don't. Because they're coming back. Vinyl's coming back. Yeah. But I don't suppose you have any VHS tapes anymore. We do not. We do not. No. Everything going digital. Yeah. But you got the digital version of all of those. Yes, we have digital versions of a lot of things. Another thing while you're talking about VHS, though, is the library recently added Canopy to one of our digital offerings. And Canopy has movies and some sort and some documentaries, TV shows on it. Even though we're not able to offer those VHS tapes or some of those things, like Canopy is a good place to go to look for that. Now, you've got printing. You can print something you can put it on a printer and print it or copy it or make copies of. But can you download in the library to your iPad or iPhone and whichever too? How does that work as far as downloads? I don't know copyright or whichever, you know, that type of thing. But can you download the digital version of a book or whichever? Yeah, so with Libby, you check it out similar to what you would do for a paper book. And it's for a certain time frame, three weeks, and then it goes back to the library. So those you don't necessarily download, you can push them to your Kindle to read. But then your... use of them does expire. Well, I used to go down to the library after school to do my homework. Do kids still do that? Their parents can pick them up later. You know, after school, they go to the library and they can get their homework done without all the distractions of their Xbox, I guess. But turning the Xbox, do you have games? You can... peek out from the library. Yeah, we have board games that are available for checkout. We don't currently have video games, but we do have board games, and we have adult and children's games. Yeah, and we also have, again, going back to the app and the website, we have digital access to games as well. If you click into that website, we'll have games listed for specifically K to 5 students and some birth to 5. educational games and those sorts of things. They can play those in and outside of the library. So you're connected to other services like you mentioned Libby. What is Libby? Libby is the app that houses all of the e-books and audiobooks and then e-magisines as well. And I imagine there's quite a lot of e-books and it's, what are seniors looking for? What kind of aspect do you have for seniors? Yeah, so we have a dedicated large print collection. So often we get the older senior citizens looking for that. We do have a dedicated team of staff who provide outreach to those who are homebound or they deliver to area residents or community living center.

If they are unable to make it to the library, we do provide the service of bringing access to our materials to them. Oh, you connected to the blind? It was going to say the State Library has that as well, and that those folks who are signed up with that service would be able to get a, it's like a player. And then there's. It's kind of like a cassette mailed out to them each month with some books on it. It's free. The players free. The cassettes are free. Something you can play in your home. And it will read those books to you, much like an audiobook. What about Braille? We could probably find it. I don't know that we have anything currently. But you probably got books on how to read there. We do have books on. We could find that for sure. Well, the Sioux Falls Library, what are some of the programs, your summer program, reading program is kind of ending? School is starting real soon, and what are some of the programs coming up that people might want to book into? Yeah, so our summer reading program officially ends on August 14th. So there's still time to sign up and even finish the program. We have some very avid readers that get done within a week or two of the program beginning. So there's still certainly time to sign up and complete that. And then to end summer reading, all age groups, well, I guess teen, K to 5 and birth to 5 are having some sort of end of summer celebration to celebrate a summer of reading. Speaking on the K5, or kindergarten to fifth grade, and ours is on Friday, August 14th, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Oak View branch. And we're going to have inflatables, the 605 Magic Art Bus. We're having balloons there. And Sylvan Learning was also a generous sponsor of our summer reading program. So they're going to attend and give away snacks. And then you can speak on the birth to five one. Yeah. So birth to five is having a end of summer party as well this year. It's at Oakview Library. It's August 10th at 10 a.m. We'll be having a local musician Phil Baker come. This year's summer reading program is themed unearthed story. So a lot of our programming is dinosaur-related, paleontology, archaeology, geology, geology. So this one, we are encouraging attendees to come dressed as their favorite dinosaur, come dressed as a paleontologist or archaeologist. And then... As Phil Baker is playing his concert, we're also going to have a dinosaur parade. So it's going to be so great to see kids stomping around and be in their favorite dinosaurs. So feel free to come join us again, August 10th at 10 a.m. at the Oakview Branch. Yeah, Bill Baker, he's Apple Pie and been doing kids things for... He's been doing it, and he does so well, and we're excited to have him this year. And then speaking as school begins, the downtown library is hosting a school registration

and Resource Fair on Wednesday, August 19th from 4 to 6. And we felt a need to support the school district on getting all of those required forms submitted before their child starts school. The school district often will host specific dates where they assist families in filling out the online school registration forms, free and reduced lunch applications, but they often don't. get to help everyone. So we're kind of providing that third space or that third opportunity to support the district in that. And then along with helping them complete forms, we're also inviting a lot of different community partners to attend. So we have the Toy Lending Library coming. Yep, yep. The Sioux Falls Hope Coalition, Reach Literacy is attending, Lions Club, Delta Dental, Sanford Health, Avera Health. So it will be a very valuable time to connect families to resources that are in our community. What's the date and where again? Yeah, so it's August 19th from 4 to 6 p.m. at the downtown library. Conference rooms. Yes. I've seen it for announcing for political office in the conference. Do you have birthdays? We don't have birthdays, no. But our conference rooms are available for anybody in our system who meets the criteria for the conference room meeting, conference rooms and, sorry, meeting rooms. And we just ask that it be a, you're not charged to use the room. and that it be an event that we would generally like an event that anybody could attend. What about other languages? Yeah, we have a dedicated language collections, and that ranges from birth to five all the way up to adults, and we have that in print, but then we also have a fantastic app called Mango Languages, and that's free with your library card. And if you are learning any language... Even pirate is on there. So that is a free app that you can learn a new language. Or on the flip side, if you are new to the country and trying to learn English, that's an app that you can use. And then we have print collection as well. Yeah, we had the Sue Paul's school superintendent on a couple weeks ago, and I think there's over 100 different dialects. in the city of Sioux Falls. If somebody has something that they think the library would be interested in that they would want to donate to the library, maybe it's a certain amount of certain books, very books of whichever, how can they do that? Yeah, so we accept limited donations. We accept anything that was newly published within the last year and is in almost brand new condition. If it's not and it's something that's older, we would recommend donating to a local use store or reach literacy is a fantastic place to donate those items.

If you have something that you're not looking to donate, but you would love the library to get, we do have a purchase suggestion form on our website as well. Do you have a rare books section? We do have a, it's called the Cayley Room. It's at the Downtown Library. And that room is essentially don't. What's the word I'm looking for? Dedicated to local literature, local books, things that are older. We have lots of information about old county records. We have lots of local authors in there. Anybody can come and check out those books or not check them out. Look at them in the library. We ask if they not leave the building. But it's a great resource and lots of cool stuff there. Well, interesting. I think you still have old phone books of the state of Sioux Falls. We do, yes. And yearbooks and all sorts of good stuff, yeah. Well, the Sioux Falls Library, like Sioux Land Libraries, is something that, for those that just maybe moved to town or maybe you're just been too busy, what are your hours mainly? Sure. So it kind of varies depending on which library branch you're looking at. I would say generally in Sioux Falls, most branches are going to be open from 9 a.m. until about 8 p.m. There's always a branch open that time, but some of them close earlier, just depending on check the website for details. Our rural... locations have differing hours. And I would probably say it's best to look at the website before you go. But one of the advantages of those rural branches is that we have what we call expanded access. So folks who live in those communities are able to get a library card and get an expanded access card, which allows them to go into the building, even if the library branch isn't open. So if that's something you're interested, then you just contact your local. I can imagine a young kid, you know, they get their library card, and it gives them kind of, hey, I'm somebody. I've got a library card, and I can do all these things with this card. Your website? Check out our website. And if you want to get a library card, come on in. Under 18, bring your parent to legal guardian, and we can get you set up. So much more we could talk about Nalisha Dawes, supervising librarian, birth to five programming, and Lee Tannis, supervising librarian, kindergarten, fifth grade programming. I want to thank you for being with us on Forum. Thank you for having us.