The SurRural Librarian

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!

Librarians Escape Being Turned into Teachers in FL District

That’s the headline I just received in my inbox via the SLJ Extra Helping.

What?!

Man, I work my tail off so everyone in my building thinks of me as a teacher. What are they thinking with a headline like this? I’m sure my classroom teachers would just love it.

Here’s what they’re really talking about if you’re curious. Librarians being moved to classroom teaching positions, and school libraries loosing their librarians.  Why they couldn’t have written a better headline is beyond me.

It’s the time of year when I start getting very excited about next year’s book budget. I try to get the bulk of my collection development done before September, because I simply get too busy after that. Now I’m diving into my stacks of torn & annotated SLJs, notes from the suggestion box and archived emails form various journals & listservs. But my favorite book buying pastime of all is searching through the archives of my favorite book review bloggers.

If I had the stamina and discipline, I’d be blogging every good book I read this year. Alas, it doesn’t see to be happening. How do they manage it?

Here are my favorites, I’d love to hear if you have other recomendations.

Everyone should read the truly wonderful Planet Esme: planetesme.blogspot.com

The Hip Librarians Book Blog: hiplibrariansbookblog.blog-city.com

Abby the Librarian: abbylibrarian.blogspot.com

Picture book of the Day: http://6traits.wordpress.com

Browsing through their fun & informative reviews makes me realize just how super duper my job is. Looking for great kids books to buy - how much fun IS this?!

Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing) has a brand-spanking-new YA Sci Fi novel out called Little Brother.

Cool guy that he is, he’s posted electronic copies of the book online for free. Instead of accepting offers of donations from grateful readers, he’s set up a site where potential donors can send a hard copy of the book to a school or library that requests it.

How does it work, you ask? Welllll, our budget spent for the year, I thought I’d see. On Wednesday I asked to be added to the list of libraries and our name & address were posted on their site. Today (Friday) I received a copy in the mail from an anonymous donor! How coool is that?

See his site for more details.

And Thank You Anonymous!! I’ll be spending my Mother’s Day in the hammock with our new copy of Little Brother (librarian’s privilege). By Monday - it’ll be in the hands of a student.

Pre-readers review: great title, super cover and jacket blurbs from Scott Westerfeld & Neil Gaiman. Ooooh!

I’ve made a new page (see above) with links to materials from some of the presentations I’ve given recently. The latest is the DCF Conference session I did yesterday in Stowe.

“Using Fun Technology to Promote Student Engagement”

As usual I talked far too much and for too long, but the audience was great and had excellent input & questions. We have so much fun at school with these DCF projects, I was so jazzed to share it all. Thanks to Grace Greene for inviting me to speak!

Last week I went to a talk in Second Life by Doug Johnson on copyright (you all should have been there, great talk.) I’ve been playing around with 2nd Life just a bit - in fact, I even held a class in there for my graduate students one night. I am not a gamer (Well - there was one weekend in the 1989 with the Mario Bros. But just one, I swear!). I think Second Life is pretty silly. But - I’ve got to tell you - I really like this idea of having conferences & talks in there and I would love to encourage more people to check it out.

Here’s why. Here’s a short list of conferences for Vermont school librarians:

Vermont Library Conference
VSLA Fall Conference
Red Clover Conference
DCF Conference
VITA - Learn
Dynamic Landscapes
Vermont Open Source and Education Conference
Windham County Reads Annual Breakfast
Materials Review sessions

And that’s just the local organizations!
Then I’ve got
NEEMA
AASL
ALA
& other cool places I’ll just never get to - that national conference for IT in schools, Computers in Libraries, the conference for picture book artists, children’s book authors, author talks at book stores, local chapter meetings of various organizations, etc.

Even at MIT I couldn’t take this much time off. Missing classes more than once or twice a year just does not seem OK to me, especially when I truly can not make the argument that it’s integral to my professional development. As much as I enjoy talking with other school librarians, the benefit I’ve gotten from the presentations has been variable.

And then there’s the expense to myself & the earth in terms of travel. Most Vermont happenings are over two hours away from me. Here in Green Liberal Vermont, it’s frustrating that so many groups are encouraging so much travel. District-wide professional development is a 45 min drive, with no fuel reimbursement.

So - I ask you. Can we just think about this 2nd Life thing a bit? I know it’s a little odd. The avatars are usually pretty racy. Figuring out how to move around and not accidentally take off your garments can be tricky. But there are plenty of (professionally legitimate!) ways to safely try it on…

www.iste.org/secondlife

And check out the links here at the Blue Skunk Blog

Extra cred if you can find my avatar in that screen shot on Blue Skunk. Hint: I’m the freaky one.

(cc. image by Roberto Rizzato)

I’ve got a few crafty blogs in my feeds these days, and occasionally I run across a perfect project for the library. Here’s a place where you can buy temporary tattoo inkjet paper, so you can make your own tattoos. Why not make some for the kids with your library logo? Or a “I remembered to return my library books today” tattoo?

Here’s a cute DIY ribbon dispenser, which would work great for organizing rolls of labels.

I am always finding inspiration for fun bookshelf ideas. Here’s a nice one made from an old ladder. Furniture with bookcases built in are everywhere - here’s a chair and here’s a bench with built-in bookcases. Or how about this Cave bookcase, the kids would go nuts!

This one has got to be my favorite. This fellow built a bookcase around his bed, but I could just imagine this surrounding a cozy reading spot for picture books.

After a short discussion on lm-net & further discussions at Blue Skunk on hyper-compliance with copyright, I thought I should mention a couple of handy applications for teachers needing to download video for use in class. We hear so often from teachers who can’t access online videos at school due to strict filtering. It’s ridiculous to cut off this wealth of free, useful material for instruction and I do hope some are successful in convincing their schools to re-think their policies. (Chant with me now…fair use, fair use, fair use)

In the meantime,

Download Helper is a very easy to use Firefox extension that will quickly grab any material you need from a website, and Miro is my favorite application for viewing media files of many types. Easy peasy.

The Boston Public Library has been rapidly adding photos from their archives to their Flickr pages, including sets of great oldey-timey New England postcards.

They wrote to Jessamyn that they’re hoping to use the “No known copyright restrictions” license the Library of Congress uses.

How cool is that?!

I’m aware that this sounds needlessly geeky. However, if you’ve got a school full of Intel-based Macs and are in the business of finding fun literacy games, you know how many are in the (up to now) inaccessible Shockwave format.

Well, weep no more young gamers.

Adobe has finally release a version that runs natively on Intels. Hurrah!

(tip: get the full installer.)

has entire picture books online! I’ve bought many picture books (based on reviews) that have turned out to be dogs. I always check Amazon to see if they have a “Search Inside” version - but often they don’t. This is even better - you can check out the entire book. The selection is pretty small now, but I hope they keep it up. A handy collection development tool, and it’s fun watching the pages turn.