The SurRural Librarian

Or so I’ve been told by my tiny collection manager (maybe you know her – curly hair, 4 feet tall, 7 years old). After four years of reading reviews & doing my best to stretch my budget, I am in the position of watching my hold queue grow to astronomical proportions for … gift books! This year, we’ve been very lucky in receiving many super book gifts from our families. And wouldn’t you know it, suddenly I’ve got hordes of girls lining up for Fairy Realm & Rainbow Fairy books. The arrival of these series coupled with the sudden explosion of reading in the early grades is creating a rave for fairy books.

And yes, I am a grownup. So take it from the tiny collection manager, you’d better stock these series if you know what’s good for ya.

free, as in kitten

I went live with my new library catalog last week. Thanks to the Green Mountain Library Consortium and Richard Pritsky at Carpenter-Carse I’m finally fulfilling my open-source dreams. I’ve been wanting to try Koha since I started at this tiny school, but I wasn’t up for running it myself. Thankfully, the Consortium came along to hold my hand. And now I can say without reservation, if you are considering going with Koha and you have a small library, do it. It’s a thing of beauty and very simple to use. I’m not going to link to my catalog here because there are too many things I want to work on before I’m ready to broadcast it to the world, but did want to share – I’m live!

If you’re lucky enough to have a book budget for next year, then your thoughts might soon be turning to Collection Development, or as it’s known in the real world – Shopping!

I love that spring cleaning time comes right before the start of the next fiscal year, because now I can take that stack of School Library Journals out to the hammock and start tearing out the pages. I do eventually use the computer for most of my collection development tasks, but I love good old print for the ease with which I can lay on my back & swing without having to squint to see my screen in the sun.

Of course, I have to do the usual statistic gathering – collection evaluation, finding out new units the teachers are doing next year, deciding which percentage I can spend on picture books, but for now – the field is wide open. And I just love browsing when I know I’ll have money to spend.

Here are some of my favorite (possibly non-traditional) ways to look for books to buy.

A trip to the Eric Carle Museum Library. If you are any where near Amherst, MA, I highly recommend traveling to the museum and spending some quality time with their picture book collection. You can peruse to your heart’s content and they have a magnificent collection of new & old picture books. Bring something to take copious notes with!

Your local independent book store. Again, spend hours browsing & reading and take notes. I always let the booksellers know who I am and what I’m up to, it’s a nice way to connect and I don’t want anyone to feel weirded out by the adult hanging out in the kid’s section all afternoon. Booksellers, like librarians, are an opinionated & quirky bunch, so you’re sure to find different books than you would on the shelves of box stores or the covers of publisher catalogs. And yes, I also lurk the stacks of my public libraries.

Blogs. This year make sure to check out Fuse 8’s Top 100 Picture Books Poll Results for any titles you might be missing from your collection. Elizabeth Bird has done a wonderful job of detailing each book in this top 100 list. She’s got links to super book talk resources like videos and gorgeous pictures from the books.  This list is compiled from her reader’s top 10 lists, and I find it an interesting slant on the usual.

Some of my favorite independent blogs for book reviews are:
planetesme.blogspot.com
hiplibrariansbookblog.blog-city.com
abbylibrarian.blogspot.com
6traits.wordpress.com
And check out the fabulous Vintage Kids Books My Kid Loves for other titles you might want to dig up used on Amazon. www.vintagechildrensbooksmykidloves.com

Let children mark up your catalogs. I let my 7 year old go crazy with a marker in my stack of journals, flyers & catalogs, just circling the books she thinks look interesting. Getting input from kids on the title & cover-appeal of books is a great help when you’re deciding which will fly off the shelves. I’m planning some class time where I give each student 10 stickers with their name on them and a stack of catalogs, and ask them to choose ten books they think I should buy. That would be a fun end of the year activity. We could work in some math too. Or you could just leave them out on the tables year-round.

Vermonters who use Titlewave will be glad to know that they have the DCF, Red Clover & GMBA lists built right in. Thanks Grace!

I had a great time speaking at the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award conference on Friday. Here’s my handout with links.

This year I focused more on the comics unit I did with my 5th & 6th grade students. It was a collaboration with our awesome art teacher, Lauren. Each student created a 3-5 page comic (using Comic Life) based on one of the DCF Books. The kids really got into these projects, and I learned a lot about working on longer projects with students. We also discussed the DCF Blog I moderated this year & the wiki I use with my students. I had a super audience, thanks everyone for coming!

The blog got 1,500 comments from Vermont students this year, wow. I was so impressed by some of the insightful & fun comments the kids made. There were plenty of “this book is awesome” type-posts, but many were more articulate and interesting. You can imagine, after 1,500 – I got pretty critical.* I’ll still be maintaining the blog for the committee next year, but Kate Davie from  Blue Mountain Union School will be moderating. Get your clicker finger ready Kate.

*In case you’re wondering, as the moderator I just weeded out posts for inappropriate language or spam, everything else was approved. But as a teacher, I insisted my own students express a “unique thought and opinion”. I also had them return to posts and read what other commenters had to say and “engage in respectful dialog”. For me, it was a great tool for teaching online behavior. My students knew I was the moderator, so a couple of times they asked me why kids in other schools were allowed to write shorter posts – how unfair!