Waiting

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Here's this week's flawed, weird, but heartfelt video offering to my friends.

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Finding Stories to Tell

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For the tenth year, nearly rounding out a decade, I am preparing to teach a graduate seminar in Storytelling. This course requires many kinds of skills, from public speaking to understanding audiences and much more, but the first skill that every student must acquire is the ability to find stories to tell. Specifically, for their first stories, each student must acquire the ability to find folktales. You could head to the local public library and browse the 398.2 section, or you could start online With the task of finding folktales at hand, my students find that there are fewer excellent online resources for finding folktales than you might think. Those linked here offer good starting points because they have reasonable information documenting origins either as source notes or as annotations or because they situate tales in relation to each other. Aaron Shepherd's Folktales  http://www.aaronshep.com/stories/folk.html D. L. Ashliman's Online Folktale Finder  http://www.pi
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Data Storytelling for Librarians and the Data Storytelling Toolkit

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 This fall, with Dr. Matt Turk and RA Xinhui Hu, we launched the Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians project ( https://imls.gov/grants/awarded/re-250094-ols-21 ) with a free webinar on 9/30 (recording publicly available at  https://mediaspace.illinois.edu/media/t/1_69ag1gj0 ) and 675 registrants!  The Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians (DSTL project website:  https://uiucdstl.wixsite.com/uiucdstl ) will connect real-world examples of data use with data stories (including narrative strategies and data visualizations) as adaptable templates for communicating and related online free resources for data exploration and visualization. The long-term vision is to cultivating data storytelling expertise as a signature expertise of our field, so that when communities have data storytelling needs, they are met at libraries and by librarians. As of 11/15/22, we have collected 11 data use scenarios, which we're now calling "common storytelling needs." The goal is to develop
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ALA and the Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians

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So ALA sent out their email to invite members to come to ALA Annual in Chicago this year, and they selected five sessions to highlight. Ours is one of them!   As the US struggles with an onslaught of book banning like we have not seen in my lifetime, our project, the Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians , aims to get ahead of what we expect to come next: local battles over the existence of public and community college libraries. In fact, this battle has already begun, with some community college libraries in my state losing up to 2/3rds of their former staffing levels since the Covid-19 pandemic. We are right on time. This concern about defending libraries launched my research on understanding data storytelling in librarianship, with a pilot project in 2019 funded by the Center for Social & Behavioral Science at the University of Illinois--an article on obstacles to library data storytelling is in press with Public Library Quarterly, likely to be published in summer 2023. With
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