The SurRural Librarian

I’ve been at ALA Annual in Chicago since Wednesday, but connectivity has been spotty outside of the west building in the convention center (don’t get me started). Here’s my attempt to play catch up.

All-day Learning for Life training got me off to a decent start for my workshops in Vermont, though I’m a little afraid of all the work I have to do.

Saturday was the official start of the conference and I attended AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner in a Read/Write Web class room with Susannah Tamarkin. She’s got a very nice collection of materials at:
http://ithsnyclibrary.wikispaces.com and is a big proponent of wikis, Google Docs & Clipmarks – used together with kids. Nice presentation!

Next up was the ALA president’s program with Laurie Halse Anderson , Jacqueline Woodson , and Alan Lawrence Sitomer the authors showed big love to the school librarians, despite having to sit through endless announcements and even a treasurer’s report. LHA was seriously testifying to the crowd. We’ve got to step up during troubled times, the kids need us. Keep the libraries open & the stacks fresh, keep libraries open longer. Be generally awesome.

LHA and I take simultaneous photos.

I also slipped into Science Fiction and Fantasy: Uncovering the Modern World of Information, Society, and Technology through Metaphor and Imagination with science fiction and fantasy authors R. A. Salvatore, Ken Scholes, Margaret Weiss,  and Robert Charles Wilson for some interesting thoughts about speculative fiction. There were too many speakers in too short a time to get very deep, but it was provocative nonetheless.

The session “What Do I Watch, Listen to, Play, or Download Next: Readers Advisory Techniques for the Digital World” looked like they’d have a good collection of links to watch out for, but these are not yet posted.

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.

What a super idea! I carpool with three young readers and I’ve been trying to keep a stash of new library books in the car to keep them occupied & quiet. Here is a school bus driver taking this idea to the extreme.

This could be a great collaboration between driver & librarian. Why not check out a different selection every couple of weeks to your bus drivers? Give them a suitcase full. Out here in the country, our kids spend plenty of time captive on the bus, we should give them something fun to do to pass the time.

(I’ll admit I clicked on this article in my reader because I thought the headline read Wii School Bus Driver. I was pretty excited about the possibilities. )

WI School Bus Driver Launches Words on Wheels

Every reader his [or her] book & every book its reader.

These two laws of library science are constantly ringing through my head when I’m selecting books to purchase or weed. I have some readers at school who absorbed just about anything I give them with glee. I’ve got more who are always happy with the same genre and rarely deviate, and a few who are extremely difficult to please. It’s this last group that I spend most of my time thinking about.  Librarians are always on the search for that one book that will hook the potential readers.

Now and then I read a book that strikes me as just the thing to enchant a certain reader. Peter Gould’s Write Naked is one of those possible favorite novels. Peter writes with and about passion in a way rare in YA books. Romantic passion, but also passion for art, for community, for understanding. Knowing Peter & his passion for teaching & drama, this doesn’t surprise me a bit. This is a book I wish every high school would have on its shelves, sitting there waiting for the right reader. And not because I wish Peter well with his novel (which, of course, I do!) but because I’m sure it’s the potential love of some quietly passionate 10th grader out there, who’s just waiting for this book to come into his life.

Vermont kids will be especially drawn to this book. It’s got great local flavor (it’s set just down the road from my house!) and describes our rural life style romantically but truthfully. The characters are unique, unconventional and pretty darn lovable. The title is a little racy but the content is certainly appropriate for high schools. Having heard Peter read a segment at the VSLA conference last fall, I highly recommend him as a school visit. His infectious enthusiasm is just perfect for students. Great job Peter!

Reviews & other info here: http://us.macmillan.com/writenaked

Judging by recent letters in SLJ (scroll down to “pathetic”) librarians – like the rest of the population – really freak out when people charge kids books with promoting racist stereotypes. There’s a little hubub over Skippyjon Jones over there. Is this a surprise? if you write a book where a character adds “o” to the end of words he says “with his best Spanish accent”, you’re going to annoy people.

I think that because we read these books to our children, we feel especially protective of them. Or if we loved the books as kids, it can be especially hard to hear they’re full of bigotry. Has anyone read Narnia lately? Peter Pan? Little House?

When a person tells you that you’ve offended them, try this. Listen. We are living in a time of amazing changes, and a time of the same old prejudices. When buying books for our kids to read, librarians seem to spend an awful lot of time worrying about “appropriate language”. I’d really love to see more messages on our listservs about super books with positive female & minority characters. I’ve got limited funds, just like you. Help me find the best & the most progressive books for my school. Not just avoid the ones with “f bombs”.

So here’s my little collection development tip. Seek out the voices of people unlike yourself and hear what they have to say.

Debbie Reese has an article in this month’s SLJ Native Voices and her blog is a great resource for a little mind-opening. See this post and note the links to her writings about Thanksgiving.

Browse through Everyone’s Kids Books and see if there are some titles you want to check out.

And if some parent mentions to you they found a library book offensive, don’t hand them your selection policy and walk away. Listen to what they have to say. It might be the start of a great conversation.

Now I’m hoping someone else has some good suggestions.

Here’s another short list of links for the crafty among you…

These handmade fabric bookmarks and these made from chopstick wrappers would be great for keeping third-grade hands busy during longer read-alouds.

These very cute bookplates would be a nice giveaway.

Decorate your library walls with a cool inexpensive vinal wall decals (buy one of their designs or customize your own) or go low-rent and maybe just a little bit edgy with the Rasterbater which is not nearly as bad as it sounds. “The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. Upload an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble the pages into extremely cool looking poster up to 20 meters in size”

And if your handwriting is as bad as mine, Wordle can help jazz up your displays. Here’s a title cloud I made for my DCF display:

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.

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!

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?!

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)

One of my first graders was over for my daughter’s birthday this weekend. She left this message for me on my fridge.

I had a lovely walk Sunday with the dogs and this week’s On The Media podcast. The entire show is about books. There is a fun segment on the new Espresso Book Machine, which prints and binds a paperbacks as you wait. Coolest part? There are only six in the world and one will be living at Vermont’s own Northshire Bookstore in Manchester.

The NYPL had one for a while. Here’s an article from SLJ. With beasts like this on the premises, libraries could get immediate access to books for loan. Could it finally (finally!) finish off interlibrary borrowing? I’ve got my fingers crossed.

So far, it sounds like the majority of works they offer are in the public domain. I hope more publishers see the potential soon, I want to order up a Double Grande Trollope. Oh wait – is that – hey! cool, I’ll see you in Manchester.

I was just setting up a new blog over at Edublogs for a teacher friend of mine. Edublog is a free (with optional upgrade) blog hosting site targeted specifically at educators. It runs Wordpress blogs and they offer a nice array of pre-loaded themes, plugins and widgets, I was pretty impressed.

Since I host my own blogs, I’m used to complete control over how things looks (I find the inability to edit themes on Edublogs particularly nettlesome) but for someone without the ability, time or interest to host their own, this is a nice alternative. And it is a joy to let someone else worry about upgrades and administration for once.

I checked into it because a colleague has a school-related blog on Blogger and was wondering about the ease of students to stumble upon less savory blogs there. That’s a great reason to use education sites, that whole “go to next blog” thing. Some folks are more nervous about 2.0 applications in the classroom than others, and I think it’s a good idea to do what we can to put them at ease.

Checking out the widgets I saw they had one for Picasa, so I thought I’d try that out too. It’s yet another very nice service from Google. They have a simple uploading utility, you can just drag in pictures (even from iPhoto – which I find doesn’t work well with all applications) and click upload. Using the widget, they appear on the blog immediately, which should work nicely for my friend while she’s traveling.

I did have a bit of a fight with the Google Maps plugin, and decided that just linking from a static picture of my map to the one I saved on Google was a more elegant way to go.

And considering that the spam filter on this blog has caught over 23,000 spams (!) I’m glad Edublog is offering that plugin as well.

I love Wordpress, and I find the themes so much prettier than Blogger. I definitely recommend checking out Edublogs if you’re thinking about starting your first blog.

Flotsam, by David Wiesner, Red Clover book and recent winner of the Quill award was a real fun read with the primary grades. First, we went through the book together (Wordless books are a challenge for read aloud. What works for me is letting each student narrate one page as I project it. Elmos are fabulous for this. )

Then, inspired by the wonderful illustrations and the fun ideas in the book, we made some great art.

We made our own versions of under-the-sea fantasy worlds and took photos within photos over time, like those in the book. It was really fun helping the kids figure out where they would be in the finished product. The last kids often said – aw, we’ll be so tiny! Then, after some thought they’d realize it went backward, and the most recent photo was the largest.

Oh, and there’s a beautiful book trailer at this site that might come in handy for anyone booktalking Flotsam.

I’m usually not one to get all mushy and anthropomorphize animals. But since Owen & Mzee is on the DCF list this year, and since I’m doing non-fiction informational texts & animal research with my 3/4 grade right now, I thought it would be a good read-aloud. It was.

Plus, there’s a nice video on the book’s website. I showed a segment in class and the kids enjoyed seeing the animals. They also have some fun animated shorts.

And then wouldn’t you know it? This little gem was sent to me today.

It’s part of a talk on animals at play by Stuart Brown. A great story about a polar bear playing with a husky, with amazing photos. Wow, wow!

I can’t wait to show them tomorrow.