The SurRural Librarian

OOh, pretty. Françoise Mouly (New Yorker art editor) and Art Spiegelman (her husband, acclaimed cartoonist) came out this spring with TOON Books,  comics for early readers! I have a feeling these are going to be a big hit at my school. The covers on these babies are beautiful and judging by the sample pages on their (great looking) website, the insides are mighty fine too.

Considering every comic/graphic novel I have for the under-10 set is falling apart, I’d better lay some of these in for fall.

You’ve got to drop everything right now and watch this video. I simply cannot believe this is for real, it’s got to be some kind of new, viral campaign for Google.

“Put it on microfilme & file it, Dundee!”

What did they do to that puppy? My kids would cry.

from BoingBoing:

Matt sez, “When I was in fifth grade, Mississippi Public Broadcasting decided to introduce a series of short films to educate children on how to use the library. For some godforsaken reason, the people at MPB decided that the best way to do this would be through a post-apocalyptic science fiction serial with children roaming the blasted earth in a… bookmobile…

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/24/postapocalyptic-book.html

Just in case I’m not the most ill-informed librarian on the planet, I thought I’d post a link to this series for anyone who hasn’t seen them yet. Harper Collins Let’s-Read-And-Find-Out Science.

These are just the early readers I’ve been looking for (of course they’ve been around for years, who knew and didn’t tell me?)  Factual, nice-looking and satisfying. Reading a well written non-fiction book can really give an early reader a sense of accomplishment. The kids know when they are being talked down to, these books don’t do that. They’ve got great facts, longish sentences and multiple sentences per page. I particularly like this whale title, it was the perfect post-whale watch family read.

Just back from swimming lessons where I sat by the side of the pool and thoroughly enjoyed an article by Jill Lapore in the July 21st New Yorker on Stuart Little, the history of children’s libraries & children’s literary criticism.

To top it off, there’s a podcast about the piece with Jill Lepore & Roger Angell - whose mom Katharine White had a big role in the story. Seems as though getting yourself into a twist over kids books has been a hobby of librarians throughout the ages.

Listen to the podcast here, read the article here, and learn what made Tonstant Weader fwow up.

As previously mentioned, my old hard drive has met its maker, so I am currently trying to recreate my life with a new slate. All was going well until I had to install the Flash player. (Have you tried to do anything without Flash these days? It’s impossible. The world has gone Flash crazy.) For some reason, Flash has some permissions issues on Macs.

By what I see on lm-net, many of us don’t realize one of the easiest & quickest ways to get an answer to a computer problem is simply to Google it. Don’t spam a list, for heavens sake. Google the exact error message - you’ll turn up the answer in a split second. In case you happen upon this same Flash issue, here’s a step by step solution:
http://www.table38.com/blog.php

The bad news is you have to use the command line. Many of us shut down completely at the thought. I was working at a time when I had to use heinous Unix commands to simply check my email, but I still shiver at the thought of opening up a terminal session. I embraced point & click like no one’s business and I still need to call my personal tech support (thanks M@) whenever I need to speak Unix. That said, it does come up and (same goes for HTML) we’d all be better librarians if we were just a little bit more comfortable with this kind of thing. A little code won’t kill you, it will help you understand a little more about your computer and hopefully empower you to tackle the bigger issues.

Just in time, Jessamyn linked to this helpful, and very chipper, tutorial Life on the Command Line

sudo go learn something

Last year’s  I Remembered My Library Books stickers were a huge hit with the kids. So much so that I decided to get a little crazier with them and make new subject spine labels. I’ve never been a big fan of those labels. The types available from the vendors are boring, cheesy and take up too much space on the spine. But three years of frantically searching for dragon books in the fiction section for apoplectic third graders has pushed me to new limits.

The array of Creative Commons licensed material on flickr is vast and what better way to spend a humid day on the porch than searching for fun pictures? And it gives me another excuse to play with Comic Life fonts. Using the fabulous flickr search engine Compfight gives you 250 thumbnails per page - which are a great size to judge whether a photo will work as a tiny spine sticker.

I also put into practice a little (Mac) tip I saw blogged last year. To keep track of ownership & permissions for these images, I’m pasting the profile url into the Spotlight Comments for each file (apple - i). Then I can email the owners of the images I use to let them know the joy they’ve brought to our little library shelves.

Brief note - it’s been a while since I last posted, what with end of the year madness & lovely vacation travel. Tragically, while away, my hard drive died - passive aggressive behavior for not bringing it to the beach, no doubt. It was a great wake-up call when I realized how impossibly dependent I was on all my little apps, bookmarklets and spreadsheets.

A word to the wise…get yourself a fancy external drive and backup your entire machine. Like - now!