This month we tip our gardening hats to the Green Bay Botanical Garden (GBBG)—yes, home of the Packers—as TinyCat’s Library of the Month. Linda Gustke, Director of Education & Guest Experience at GBBG, was kind enough to field my questions this month:

Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

Green Bay Botanical Garden’s mission statement is this: We connect people with plants by providing year-round educational and recreational experiences for everyone in an environment that engages, inspires and refreshes.

Tell us some interesting things about how your library supports the community.

We love to be a resource for our gardening community! Our library has a wide variety of gardening books, as well as some DVD’s, for adults—from starting a garden, to garden design, landscaping, native plants, vegetable gardens, grasses, plant lore, even backyard chickens! We also have a Children’s Library that brings nature to life through stories about all that happens in the Garden—plants, animals, lifecycles, plant stories and more. We host a story time each Tuesday morning with stories from the Children’s Library, and the library is especially utilized by families visiting the Garden during the summertime.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

In our adult section, I love the books by Amy Stewart: Wicked Bugs, Wicked Plants, The Drunken Botanist. In our kids section, it’s hard to pick a favorite, they’re all so great!

What’s a particular challenge your library experiences?

We continue to run out of space in our building for our staff, and that means the library gets relocated and underutilized. It has such great resources that we would love to make it more widely available, but it’s been difficult to devote the staff time to it to really make it more usable for the community.

Hopefully having an online catalog makes your library’s visibility just a little bit easier! Speaking of TinyCat, what’s your favorite thing about TinyCat, and what’s something you’d love to see implemented or developed?

We love that it has brought our collection online and it makes it easy for guests and members to check out books! I haven’t worked with it as closely yet (our staff member that got it up and running recently left) so I don’t have suggestions for things I’d like to see implemented or developed at this time.

Want to learn more about GBBG?

Visit their website at https://gbbg.org/, follow them on Facebook / Instagram / Twitter, and explore their full TinyCat collection here.

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To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Want to be considered for TinyCat’s Library of the Month? Send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

TinyCat’s Library of the Month is a rather timely one: Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin’s Community Library, the Maurice Ritz Resource Center. I interviewed the Center’s Resource and Training Specialist Anne Brosowsky-Roth who was kind enough to field my questions this month:

Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

The Maurice Ritz Resource Center is the Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin Community Library. It was founded in 1972 with seed money donated by a board member. It is Wisconsin’s only library dedicated to human sexuality and sex education. Housed in the Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin Milwaukee headquarters, it provides materials and resources for parents, educators, health care providers, social workers, case managers, youth workers, and others working to improve their capacity when addressing sexuality with their own children, students, patients, clients, and participants. 

The collection includes over 3,000 books, curricula, and audiovisuals. The resource center also houses a non-circulating research collection of historical materials relating to human sexuality dating from the 19th century onward.

Tell us some interesting things about how your library supports the community.

We are the only library in Wisconsin that specializes in human sexuality. We have a variety of unique holdings, including a section dedicated to sex education for people with disabilities. Our library offers resources and support for families who need to have conversations they might never have expected to need to have for their children with unique needs, like supporting kids with sensory differences coping with puberty, or people with cognitive disabilities navigating relationships.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

My personal favorite items are historical sex guides and manuals that live in our archival collection. They really open a window to the ways sex, sexuality, and gender have evolved in the United States over the last 100 years or so. One of my favorites was a book written for newlywed young husbands in the late 1800s, which includes “everything” he needs to know about marriage—except for intercourse. (Though it does contain “scientific” evidence about the importance of having separate beds lest couples become too overcome with passion.)

Another is a script for a radio program from the 1950s, which role-modeled ways parents could incorporate instruction about sex using everyday teachable moments. A mother tells her daughter about menstruation as they bake together. A father explains the facts of life when a neighbor’s dog has puppies. And there is this conversational lead in to a conversation about wet dreams…

FATHER: (THE CAREFUL LEAD-IN) You know, Bob, you’re getting to be a pretty big fellow! Yes sir – maybe this is a good idea. Chance for us to have a little talk.

BOB: Why sure, Dad. What’s cookin’?

FATHER: Mind if I smoke in your room?

BOB: (PLEASED AT BEING ASKED) Why, no, Dad. Go ahead!

FATHER: Thanks. Your mother will probably have a fit. She just had the curtains washed. (PUFFS AS HE LIGHTS PIPE…BOB CHUCKLES THROUGH PUFFS) Remember the last time we talked about this old body of ours, Bob?…

Sex, stereotypes, and smoking, all in one tiny piece of dialogue. It doesn’t get much better than that.

What’s a particular challenge your library experiences?

As a library within a larger organization, we have bounced around through different departments over the years. When we began, we were housed within community education, as we supported our staff educators who would provide programming to the public. When our organization experienced budget cuts that eliminated educational programming, we were moved into patient services, to support a program that supported nurse practitioners (NPs) working on their certification. When our state required NPs to get a degree through an accredited university, we were moved into development. It’s been a constant struggle to explain the reasons for continuing to support and value the maintenance of a library.

That seems to be a constant struggle for too many small libraries! 

Switching gears a bit: as a supporter of small libraries, ourselves, can you tell us your favorite thing about TinyCat, and also something you’d love to see implemented/developed?

TinyCat was revolutionary for us. We are very small, in terms of the size of our collection and our budget. One staff person oversees the library, and that is not their primary role. Until a few years ago, everything was done on paper—acquisitions records, materials processing, I even hand-typed cards and book labels. This made access difficult for all but a few dedicated users. Since the library serves staff at 23 different sites, and most of the public that uses our library doesn’t live in our region, there was no way for them to browse or access the collection. 

While we knew an OPAC was always the gold standard, there was no way we could afford access with our tiny budget. TinyCat was a game changer. The low cost combined with an easy-to-use interface for the first time meant that people could access our materials in the same way they might look things up at their local library. Even for people unfamiliar with doing searches, I can just send them a link to search results. It has made acquisitions easier as well. We have a very niche collection—it’s easy to see what other similar collections contain and add that might be of interest to our users.

I would love to see a robust circulation option built in—that could be used to solicit and track patrons.

Great suggestion. While we don’t (yet) have a way for you to message patrons within TinyCat en masse, you can add/import/track your patrons and their circulation data, and we will continue to make improvements to the system as we grow. Thanks for your feedback!

Want to learn more about the Maurice Ritz Resource Center? Explore their full TinyCat collection here.

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To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Want to be considered for TinyCat’s Library of the Month? Send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

It’s Pride Month, which means we’re super proud to feature an independent LGBT2QIA+ library that’s been supporting their Vancouver community since the 1980s! It was my pleasure to interview Out On The Shelves (OOTS) Library Co-Coordinator Rio Picollo, MLIS (they/them) this month:

Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

Out On The Shelves Library (OOTS) is an independent community library serving the

LGBT2QIA+ community of Vancouver, British Columbia since the early 1980s. We foster a free, accessible, and safe space for LGBT2QIA+ people to discover and share stories and resources centering on LGBT2QIA+ experiences.

Tell us some interesting things about how your library supports the community.

We’re in the midst of a project in collaboration with the University of British Columbia School of Information to improve our subject tags to help patrons discover works featuring identities that aren’t well represented in mainstream library cataloguing. We routinely get requests for things like books by trans women of colour or YA fiction with non-binary characters, and until now we’ve relied heavily on word-of-mouth recommendations between library volunteers or searching through curated book lists for that information. We’re excited to create a more organized, accessible way for our patrons to find the types of materials they’re looking for from within our catalogue.

What a wonderful way to increase visibility for underrepresented identities. Speaking of your collections, what are some of your favorite items?

Our new seed library, Out in the Dirt, which offers free seeds and starters, as well as programming on sustainable urban farming and food sharing within the Vancouver queer community.

What’s a particular challenge your library experiences?

Being located on the far west side of Vancouver, it can be difficult for folks from elsewhere across the Lower Mainland to make the trip to our location. We have plans in the works for a sort of interlibrary loan system partnered with the newly developed Vancouver Black Library located in Chinatown to help increase the reach of both our organizations.

What is your favorite thing about TinyCat, and what’s something you’d love to see implemented/developed?

We love how quick and easy it is to catalogue materials with LibraryThing. It offers such a low barrier to entry for folks new to library cataloguing. In the future, we’d love to be able to store info for duplicate copies under the same bib record.

We hope to add copy management in the future as well! We’ll be sure to announce any changes on that front. Thanks for your feedback.

Want to learn more about OOTS? Visit their website at https://outontheshelveslibrary.com/, follow them on Twitter and Instagram, and explore their full TinyCat collection here.

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To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Want to be considered for TinyCat’s Library of the Month? Send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.