An Exciting IMLS Partnership for WI Youth Librarians

In an exciting blog post from Tessa Michaelson Schmidt on the WI Libraries from Everyone blog, she announced: "Wisconsin will take part in a three-year project with the Bay Area Discovery Museum (BADM) to support early learning in public libraries for children ages 0-8 and their families."

This means that there will be training, opportunities to share and build on the Museum's initial work in CA with libraries to develop the brand new Reimaging School Readiness Toolkit (lwith additional info in this recent YSS blog article) and push it out nationally. In year one, 50 librarians from WI, AZ and KY (each of the new partner states) "will receive training on the existing Toolkit. A subset of these librarians, in addition to librarians who have been using the Toolkit in California, will participate in an evaluation to assess the Toolkit’s impact. These evaluations will also allow BADM staff to refine the Toolkit to ensure it is as effective as possible for as many librarians as possible across the country. In Year Two, 20 library staff from 10 states—all four of the Year One states and six new Year Two states—will be trained as trainers, who are then responsible for training additional library cohorts in their states. In Year Three, 16 library staff from eight new states will be trained as trainers, and will be responsible for training library cohorts in their states."

To read the full post, please click here. Congratulations to Tessa Michaelson Schmidt, who will lead the WI part of the project, and WI!