Archives – March, 2010
One week from today I’ll be on a plane to Portland, Oregon for PLA2010! I’ve spent the last few days in a flurry of preparation: I’ve chosen my programs and sessions, I’ve made a list of what I need to pack, I’ve read the Walking Paper Guide to Portland, I’ve watched the Visiting Librarian’s Guide to Portland, and I’ve started to peruse the list of vendors.
I’m also very excited to announce that I’ll be guest blogging for the PLA Blog during the conference! I’ll be writing here, too, of course, but I’ll also post links here to what I write over there. About a month after the conference ends, I’ll mirror what I wrote for them here.
Finally, I’ll be tweeting throughout the conference; you can follow @librarified if you’re interested.
March 17, 2010
Goodreads has a list of books people have judged by their covers and I was kind of surprised to see how many of them are YA book covers. Does this just reflect the Goodreads userbase, or is it indicative of the ability of YA novels to draw people in with their covers?
I’ve been thinking recently about the way book covers change when the book comes out in paperback. Earlier this month The Compulsive Reader wrote a post about just that with a number of examples and offers her opinion on improvements or disappointments in the change, and Alea of Pop Culture Junkie has a number of posts that show the differences between cover versions.
Since librarians and hardcore fans are the primary consumers of hardcover novels, they’re the audience publishers consider when designing the cover the first time around. But since libraries mostly purchase hardcover books, the paperback covers are designed to appeal to book store browsers and changes often reflect that. This is my no means scientific, but it seems like a lot of the time when books written for girls have their covers redesigned for a paperback release, the cover features a shot of a real girl on the cover rather than an illustration or an inanimate object. This may be related to the hypothesis proposed by a friend in my earlier post touching on the depiction of larger female characters on book covers that publishers think women need to identify with the protagonist.
I think the most disappointing paperback covers I’ve seen so far are those for Shannon Hale’s PRINCESS ACADEMY and THE GOOSE GIRL:
PRINCESS ACADEMY in hardcover
PRINCESS ACADEMY in paperback
THE GOOSE GIRL in hardcover
THE GOOSE GIRL in paperback
I like the illustration style for the hardcover versions a lot, but beyond that they’re distinctive. The paperback versions just reminds me of every other medieval-style fantasy book I read growing up a decade or two ago, especially CATHERINE, CALLED BIRDY and THE MIDWIFE’S APPRENTICE. I suppose publishers know what they’re doing–their profits depend on it–but the paperback covers of YA novels, especially those aimed at girls, often disappoint me. I guess I’m not the target demographic!
March 16, 2010
I work part-time at a synagogue library in town and in the six and a half months I’ve been there, it’s been a really interesting experience. I’m not Jewish, so I’ve learned a lot about Judaism through my work and through long conversations with my boss, George, the education director. And since I’m the only person who works at the library, I’ve learned a lot about library work by doing everything: I select, catalog, and process all of the new books; I create book lists and book displays; I answer reference questions and help people find books; I do storytimes with the preschoolers; and I’ve been working on some other projects of my own, like cleaning up catalog records (there hasn’t been a lot of continuity in library work and not everyone who’s worked at the library has been a librarian so there are all sorts of discrepancies and irregularities in the catalog) and introducing a new shelf labeling system and doing a complete inventory (we still use a card system for checkout and there are no security measures, so books just walk away) and creating a library mission and a proto-collection development policy.
But the project that finally came to fruition today was my first fundraising program. Unlike in a public library, the programs that the synagogue library puts on often have a small admission fee to supplement the library budget. The library’s been nearly dormant for a while, so it’d been a while since we’d done any programming (fundraising or not). I came up with a list for George this winter of potential events we could do. He especially liked my suggestion of bringing Eileen Goltz, a professional chef and caterer and food writer (she does newspaper columns and wrote the excellent PERFECTLY PAREVE), to come do a cooking demonstration and talk about new ideas for Pesach/Passover, so I started planning that.
I have to admit I was nervous leading up to her visit. Since I only work there on Sunday mornings and on Thursdays, Eileen and I had been playing phone tag a lot and the idea for the event had evolved over time. We had to push the event back a week after booking her because of a conflict with other synagogue events. We didn’t have access to the kitchen since the synagogue’s had already been prepared for Passover and were going to have to make do with hot plates. We hadn’t had as many registrations by the end of last week as I’d been hoping to see and since Daylight Saving Time began today I was worried that everyone would show up an hour late. But Eileen was early and we had plenty of time to make handouts and get everything ready and catch up (I was friends in high school with one of her sons). And we had a great turnout!
Eileen speaks to the attendees
After I did a little library promotion and then sung a few of Eileen’s many praises, she started off by talking about how intensive cooking and cleaning for Passover can be (but don’t necessarily have to be!), and then gave a great history of the availability of kosher foods in the US. Before the 1960s or so, you had to go to specialty stores to get kosher food and there wasn’t a lot beyond matzah, gefilte fish, and kosher wine that wasn’t very good. But in the 1960s and 1970s, kosher food because more varied, more widely available, and more delicious and now there are all sorts of options. She also talked just a little bit about all of the different organizations that issue hechsherim, those symbols on food that tell you whether or not (and to what extent) it’s kosher (check out this illustrated list of hechsherim). Then she walked us through some recipes that she liked for Passover, suggesting substitutions on the fly for one woman whose child was allergic to dairy products. She showed us some of the dishes that she’d prepared beforehand and we all got tastes of the crustless quiche and the macaroon-and-almond pie crust–and oh man was it delicious.
Everyone at the event seemed to have a great time and they all were comfortable enough to ask questions along the way and Eileen did a great job of handling those questions and organizing the presentation in general. She was a very engaging speaker and she really knows her stuff. George and I both had a number of people come up to us afterward to say what a great time they’d had and how much they’d learned, and the executive director of the synagogue said she wanted to have Eileen back again. By the time we’d cleaned up and met back at the library, George was waiting with a request that Eileen come back for the High Holy Days (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which happen in the fall).
So despite some bumps along the way in planning, the program didn’t just go well, it went spectacularly. I was so proud of how well everything turned out and what a great time everyone had and how much fun Eileen had and how everyone wanted her to come back. And I learned so much from planning this whole thing myself about event planning in general and about working with other people in the same organization and the importance of good communication and all sorts of wonderful things that I’m sure will serve me well once I graduate. It was such a confidence builder to have it go so splendidly!
We made some money for the library, but more importantly we got the library back in people’s minds as a resource available to them and as a place that does cool things–I even had one man stop by that morning to say that he’d been a member of the congregation for years but had never stopped by the library and that now he wanted to check out a book he’d seen in the window display. I’m so proud of all the progress the library’s made in the last few months and I’m really excited to tackle my next project there.
March 14, 2010
In a delightful bit of crossover, Gwen over at Sociological Images rounds up a bunch of covers of books about larger girls, most of whom don’t look that big on the cover. There’s also been some discussion about how the women on these covers are mostly disembodied parts–common in advertising (see here, here, and here for examples)–but there’s also been counter-discussion positing that it’s because publishers think that women want to be able to identify with characters and that’s harder when you can see their face. I’m not sure I buy that; I’d like to see a study sampling books with covers depicting men and covers depicting women that determines if there is a gender difference in whether or not faces are shown. And what about YA book covers?
Susan Carpenter writes for the LA Times about the rising popularity of YA lit among adults. She addresses the increasing sales of youth lit in general (“Where adult hardcover sales were down 17.8% for the first half of 2009 versus the same period in 2008, children’s/young adult hardcovers were up 30.7%.”), acknowledges the rise in critical acclaim for youth lit, and points to the growing number of movies based off of books for teens and children (my husband and I are finally going to go see the Percy Jackson movie this weekend!). She also makes the great point that current YA writers grew up when YA books were finally starting to mature:
Many of today’s young adult authors were born and raised in the 1960s and 1970s, when YA began to move beyond the staid, emotionless tales of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys in favor of more adventurous work from Judy Blume, Madeleine L’Engle and Robert Cormier. Now, they’re turning out their own modern masterpieces.
And finally, Lee Wind of I’m Here. I’m Queer. Now what the Hell do I read? has a post about reading with his daughter and what other dads need to know about reading with their own daughters. He paints a beautiful picture of a household full of readers and also touches on dialogic reading, which we’ve been talking about in my Youth Services class recently. I also love how he gets to the heart of why, beyond developmental and literacy-related reasons, reading with kids is so great: “Reading is the doorway to a Shared experience with your kid. Don’t just read it TO her. Experience it WITH her.”
March 11, 2010
Erin–whom you may know as the champion of metadata from her earlier blog post–has a new post over on her own blog about our trip to Eckhart Public Library if you’re interested in another perspective on the project.
She tackles in more detail than I did the difficulty of digitizing certain things and the way best practices can’t always be implemented within the context of real-world constraints.
How many of you have a digital camera? How many of you make sure your photos are TIFF files instead of JPG? TIFF is the current standand for archival quality photos. Which is great and fine and dandy if you’re scanning old documents into your computer, but a bit more problematic when you have digital camera pics that are already saved in jpg format.
Erin also touches on why this project is so cool. Not only are we getting a chance to advance a public library’s project, but we’re also finally getting to apply what we’ve learned in class in the real world and see why things work the way they do and how, as librarians, we can use the tools we’ve learned about to do cool things.
This project is great — not only is it fantastic experience, but its a lot of fun, and I feel like we’re contributing to a pretty cool project. After completing my digital libraries class last fall, I kind of hated metadata — its a lot like cataloging, with lots of rules and details and UGH. But the cool thing, that I’m realizing now, is that with metadata, the rules are always changing. So while it is a bit like cataloging, its much more fun, since we get to create the schema and the fields, and while there are standards to adhere to, the rules we get to make ourselves.
I must confess that I’m not as excited about metadata as Erin, so my current piece of the project, figuring out what metadata we need for items we’re expecting teens in particular to want to include, isn’t firing my jets quite as much as the project in general. But it does hint at the notion that teens understand digital content–and as a result the world–differently than people of other ages might, which I do find interesting.
So go read Erin’s post. She does a good job of discussing something I probably won’t talk about in much detail.
March 10, 2010
On Monday my Youth Services class took a field trip to Carmel Clay Public Library in Carmel, Indiana. We met with the Young Adult Services Department Manager, Hope Baugh, who–in addition to being a stellar librarian at CCPL–has been on the Alex Awards committee for the last three years. She told us about her department; did some storytelling (she told us a story about a man who marries a woman with a golden arm and the story of the little girl and the Gunniwolf and we were all utterly transfixed); gave us a tour of the library; and then answered our questions about her job, her library, and the profession.
CCPL’s YA department is–relative to other libraries I’ve gotten to know–huge. They have a full-time manager and a full-time librarian, both with their MLS degrees, and three part-time library assistants who don’t have MLS degrees. What a far cry from the “lone librarian” position in which most people working in YA find themselves! CCPL’s also noteworthy in that the reference desk handles all homework and research questions, leaving the YA desk to attend exclusively to teen patrons’ readers’ advisory needs. (The library also has an adult readers’ advisory desk that helps patrons with their recreational reading and even provides custom reading lists upon request.)
CCPL’s computing set-up is also unusual: they have computers scattered around the library, but their Internet access is restricted to the library catalog and the databases to which the library has access. It’s at the Tech Center that patrons can sign into a computer using their library card to get access to Microsoft Office and have unrestricted access to the Internet. CCPL has chosen to forego federal E-Rate funding to provide unfiltered Internet access to their patrons. I didn’t get this exactly right; please see Hope’s comment below for a correct (and detailed) description of their computer use policy and set-up. While there are more graduated levels of computer access than I described, the choice to have unfiltered computer access anywhere in the library still means CCPL has to give up federal E-Rate funding for their Internet and computer access.
We go to take a peek at some of the staff work areas and storage areas in the Youth Services department. Every staff member, even part-time library assistants, have their own workstations and work areas. And oh man, the materials they have for programs and storytimes! The back storage areas were full of plastic containers marked “FROGS” or “FEELINGS” or with different books, and inside were finger puppets and toys and craft ideas related to those themes and those books. And the room they use for storytime has wooden doors with little preschool people-sized doors in them for late arrivals!
Since our trip to Greenwood focused mostly on services for younger children, this visit focused on young adult services. Hope told us about her Teen Library Council, which was originally limited to 25 teens but has, under her guidance, expanded to 50 teens divided into two groups who meet separately on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. The two different groups mostly work on their own projects, but they do a lock-in once a year as one big group and plan a big program for school-age children together once a year.
One of the other neat things that the TLC does is designate Choice Picks. At each TLC meeting, a notebook is passed around and teens write down a book they’ve read recently that they enjoyed and would recommend to other teens; once a book gets three votes, it’s designated a TLC Choice Pick, gets a special spine label, and is moved to a special shelving area.
Teens also have the chance to get involved with the library by leading a How-To Wednesday. Once a month, a teen volunteers to design a demonstration of a particular skill or craft (like origami, magic tricks, or juggling) and teach other teens to do it. They receive three hours of volunteer credit and get experience with planning an event. CCPL also has a recurring DIY Monday’ and Book Discussion Thursday in the teen lounge (a corner of the YA department with comfortable seating, tables, board games, magnetic poetry, and plenty of electrical outlets for laptops) that are fairly casual programming; the book discussions in particular require no reading ahead of time but provide teens with an opportunity to talk about books they’ve read and enjoyed recently or about certain topics like books that should be made into movies. Of course, food is always provided at these programs!
After our tour, Hope talked to us about some more “behind the scenes” sort of things. She went over the library’s book challenge process and talked about encounters she’s had with patrons who have been unhappy with a book in the library. She also told us about this great in-house database the YA department has been building over time with book summaries and “flags” that denote sexual activity, bad language, death, and other sensitive topics. I think that as librarians we’re always reading with an eye for that kind of thing (and for more general characteristics like appeal or certain kinds of characters or settings), and the database allows CCPL’s YA staff to easily know the content of books beyond what they’ve read.
I was impressed with the work that’s gone into CCPL’s YA department from having a surprisingly large staff that really enjoy working with teens to giving teens opportunities to shape the library for themselves and their peers. And I’m not sure it’s come out in this post, but I was also really impressed with the wisdom and professionalism that Hope has cultured over her years as a YA librarian. In her local work and her work with ALA and YALSA, she’s absolutely an asset to our profession.
March 10, 2010
I’ve written before about my love for Mo Willems and I finally got to the top of the holds list at my local public library for the latest in his Elephant and Piggie series, I AM GOING!. It’s currently #8 on the New York Times Children’s Book Bestsellers List; Willems also holds spots #5 and #7 for CAT THE CAT, WHO IS THAT? and LET’S SAY HI TO FRIENDS WHO FLY!, respectively.
Willems’s sense of body language and facial expressions are once again spot-on: with a restricted vocabulary, so much is conveyed through an arched eyebrow or a tilted ear, and there’s a lot of humor Piggie being flipped upside-down by Gerald’s outbursts. And I love the humor in the details with Piggie’s watch existing only when she needs to check the time and the Pigeon’s cameo on Gerald’s silly hat and the Piggie-themed calendar (I’d buy that!).
The book also touches on a lot of developmentally appropriate ideas and literacy concepts. When Gerald is trying to persuade Piggie to leave later, he asks in specific increments of time of increasing size (tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year). Readers learn that tiny text in a big bubble means whispering or whimpering, and are exposed to italicized words along with their non-emphasized counterparts (“Why? Why? Why? Why?“). Adding “Who will I skip with?”, “Who will I play Ping-Pong with?” and “Who will I wear a silly hat with?” becomes “WHO WILL I SKIP AND PLAY PING-PONG IN A SILLY HAT WITH?!?!”
But I have to admit that this isn’t my favorite of the Elephant and Piggie books. (That would probably be THERE IS A BIRD ON YOUR HEAD! or ARE YOU READY TO PLAY OUTSIDE? or maybe even I WILL SURPRISE MY FRIEND!) It seems like the book focuses too much on the build-up to the twist, and the dialog is fairly one-sided (which was especially evident when Brittany and I read the book aloud to Erin during lunch).
Don’t get me wrong, though. Mo Willems’s books, even the ones that aren’t his best, are still at the top of the heap when it comes to children’s books. This entire series is a must-have for any library with beginning readers for their story and humor, which appeal to children and grown-ups alike.
(Have I mentioned how totally hilarious I find it that @The_Pigeon follows both @ChicagoHotDog and @GreyhoundBus?)
March 9, 2010
On Sunday Neil Gaiman tweeted about the Chinese cover of THE GRAVEYARD BOOK.
The Chinese cover of Neil Gaiman's THE GRAVEYARD BOOK
I love the selective use of color and the texture. It’s interesting to see what got carried over from the American cover, most notably the silhouette of Bod (confession: it took me ages to see that in the headstone). Actually, check out all of the different covers at Gaiman’s official site. Some are more graveyardy, some are more Victorian, some are more fairy tale, some are more spooky. What a great variation. I especially like the Italian cover. Although the one from Poland is pretty great, too. Honestly, I think the American cover is sort of boring in comparison!
Anyway, back to China. In the summer of 2007, the Chinese government banned the depiction of skeletons in the MMORPG World of Warcraft. The Chinese company licensed to operate WoW in China complied, adding flesh to the undead characters and replacing the bodies of players with graves. Given this, I think the Chinese cover of THE GRAVEYARD BOOK is even more interesting. The ghosts shown are cartoonish, very different from the spooky figures on the Polish cover, and there is no knife like the one in this sketch Dave McKean did for the original cover selection process or even the Italian cover.
But what is curiously present is a cross on the grave marker in the lower left corner. While restrictions on religion have loosened since the 1980s and Christianity may be on the rise in China, religion in general is required to operate within strict boundaries. Both the Catholic church and the Protestant church in China are run by government-approved organizations and worship or Bible study outside of those approved churches is illegal. One of the girls from my residence hall in college spent a summer evangelizing in China and had to be very careful about what she included in her emails home. (Please note I am not supporting illegal proselytizing in China, just mentioning it as something that happens.)
While THE GRAVEYARD BOOK takes place in England, and in a Christian cemetery specifically, I was still surprised by the presence of a cross on the cover. Are you?
March 4, 2010
I’ve written a little bit about my directed readings course this semester that I’m doing with Andrea Japzon and four other students in the program. On Saturday we took a trip up to the Eckhart Public Library in Auburn, Indiana to see their collections, work out some details of the project, and share our best practices research.
The William H. Willennar Genealogy Center
We started at the William H. Willennar Genealogy Center where we met Gregg Williamson, the Manager of Genealogical Services (and a SLIS-Indy grad!), who gave us a tour of their building. We started off with the print collection, which has the largest collection of genealogy materials dealing with DeKalb County, and includes yearbooks for local schools dating back to 1905, family histories for local families, phone books, and individual files of research people have done on their own families. They also have a large microfilm collection of local newspapers, microfilm readers and scanners, and computer stations where patrons can use online resources to do genealogy research.
The seating space in the main room of the Genealogy Center. Photo by Erin Milanese.
Part of the print collection. Photo by Erin Milanese.
Gregg then took us through the staff workspace and talked about the people who work at the Genealogy Center (they’re mostly part-time employees and volunteers) and showed us the basement archive and the permanent archive upstairs. The basement archive is mostly local newspapers; some date back to the 1800s, but the collection also includes recent issues as well. As Gregg explained it, we’re very fortunate to have those two hundred-year-old papers, and people two hundred years from now are only going to have resources like that if we save current newspapers now.
Archival boxes in the basement archive. Photo by Erin Milanese.
The Genealogy Center has a lot of really cool technology and tools; one of the ones I found the most interesting was the microfilm camera. EPL still sends some of its things out to be microfilmed since it’s such a labor-intensive process and they do depend so heavily on volunteer work, but there are some items that they scan themselves. I can’t remember what the exact claim to fame was, but this may be one of the only microfilm scanners in a public library in Indiana. It was something really impressive like that.
EPL's microfilm camera. Photo by Erin Milanese.
The upstairs archive is the permanent archive and contains records that are available upon request but aren’t immediately available to the public (e.g., old gradebooks from local schools). We had a short but interesting conversation about balancing privacy and access; Gregg said that rather than siding with archivists who’d be more interested in privacy and protection of the physical materials, he tends to err on the side of making things open to people, reasoning that it’s a public library, so their holdings should be open to the public. He did say that there are some things that aren’t available to the public at all because of privacy concerns, like old library card registrations from earlier decades that include people’s names and addresses.
We also got to check out the digitization lab. Alaina Ring is in charge of the metadata for the library’s photo archive and database and she walked us through the creation of a database record. The digitalization lab has some neat technology, too, including a 35mm slide scanner, and what’s really cool about it is that it’s open to the public. They’ve done a lot of grant writing to build their collection and the tools they have available to them. It’s really impressive.
Two of the computer workstations (and the slide scanner) in the digitization lab. Photo by Erin Milanese.
This trip also gave us all a chance to better understand the specifics of and our own roles in this project. The Genealogy Center already has an extensive collection of photographs and documents, but most of it is of historical materials–which makes sense, since the people who use the Genealogy Center are doing research into their family’s history or into local history in general. But in the same way that Gregg is saving local newspapers now for the researchers of the future, Andrea wants to start saving the digital content of today for the researchers of tomorrow.
What we’re hoping to do with this project is to target some people whose stories reflect what’s going on in the community now: the woman who owns a local cafe, a teenager growing up in Auburn, a prominent politician, the factory worker who recently got laid off because of the economic downturn. We’ll solicit from them real and digital objects that represent their lives in the community and then figure out how to ingest that content into the library’s digital collection (or find a home for it at the DeKalb History Center or return it to its owner after scanning or photographing it). We’d also like to collect oral histories (maybe even on video) and find a way to include those in the library’s database. After an initial pilot program this year, we’re hoping to expand the project to include more community members in future years, and to promote the collection during Auburn Pride Week.
Andrea’s big on co-created community resources and on knowledge exchanges, so since we (both we students and the public library) are learning from community members with this project, we’ll also be doing workshops this summer to give some knowledge back to the community. The library’s done programs before on creating scrapbooks and preserving photographs and they’ve brought in outside speakers to talk about preserving digital information, but we’re hoping to build on what they’ve done before to help teach people about collecting, organizing, and preserving their digital content. We’ll also do workshops on privacy and copyright issues when dealing with digital content.
During our discussions, I was thinking about the different people we’re going to recruit for the pilot program and it really struck me how people of different ages understand digital content in completely different ways. Most teenagers are very at home in a digital world and are very nearly swimming in digital content. But maybe there’s also an older person in the community who doesn’t have his own computer and comes to the library to check his email where his granddaughter has sent photos from her latest birthday party. He understands those digital photographs that just live in his inbox in a totally different way than the teen understands the photos he texts to his friends. I think I’d like to learn more about that.
Now that I’ve got a more detailed idea of how the People of Auburn project is going to go and I’ve actually seen the physical facilities and gotten to know the library a little bit, I’m even more excited about this project. I have to admit that normally I find genealogy and archives only mildly interesting, but the more Gregg showed us on Saturday, the more interested I got. They’ve got so many unusual and unique resources and technology. I’m also very excited about the team we have assembled for this project!
Back row: Andrea Japzon, Erin Miller Milanese, Gretchen Kolderup, Alaina Ring, Gregg Williamson. Front row: Katie Nakanishi, Eve Grant. Not pictured: Angela Slocum. Photo by EPL's Gretel.
Eckhart Public Library is unusual in that it actually comprises three separate buildings all on the same street. We conducted most of our business on Saturday at the Genealogy Center, but we also visited the main library building and the teen library. Oh yes, EPL has a completely separate building for its teens–and it’s totally awesome. It’s open after school and on the weekends and it’s got comfortable furnishings, really striking light fixtures, computers, and a space for programming and games. Adults are only allowed in for fifteen minutes at a time if they’re not accompanied by a teen. When we walked into the building, the teens sitting at the computers turned around to stare at us; Darcy, the librarian I talked to, said that’s one of the things the teens like best about having their own space, feeling like they belonged and anyone else was an outsider. She did acknowledge that sometimes the people in adult services were too quick to send teens away from the main library building but said that overall, having their own space was great. I was impressed with how current their fiction collection was and how large their non-fiction collection (homework resources and teen-interest stuff like gaming guides and yoga books and things like that) was. I think it’s really important for teens to have their own space in the library–and it’s even better when they can have a space where they aren’t constantly being told to keep their voices down.
The outside of the Third Place, EPL's teen library. Photo by Erin Milanese.
We also visited the main library building, which was built in 1911 and is on the National Register of Historic Places and has a lot of interesting touches. It was originally going to be a Carnegie building, but Charles Eckhart, a local businessman, said he’d build the library on the condition that the contract with Carnegie be severed. The library has a fountain in the yard outside, stained glass windows, and a fireplace. It’s very comfortable and it really feels like a homey place the community can gather.
The fountain outside the main library. Photo by Erin Milanese.
Stained glass and bookshelves in the main library building. Photo by Erin Milanese.
I also took a trip downstairs to check out the children’s area. They have puppets and toys available for checkout and their storytime room is decorated with a Secret Garden theme and has an adjacent room with kid-sized tables for craft time. I was so impressed with the creative touches throughout the whole library. It seems like a really fun place to be able to go!
A tree in the storytime room in the children's department. Photo by Erin Milanese.
EPL has internship opportunities available for SLIS-Indy students. If you’re interested in working in the Genealogy Center processing materials for the digital collection, in the teen library, for information services, or in technical services, email Gregg Williamson. Don’t forget that internship applications are due to Marilyn Irwin in the SLIS office by 15 March for the summer semester and 15 July for the fall semester.
March 2, 2010
Our trip to Auburn went really well on Saturday! I’ll be writing a post about it tomorrow. For now, just a few news items from the library blogosphere.
Reading Rants, written by Jennifer Hubert and designed by Andrew Mutch, is a collection of booklists and book reviews that’s been around since 1998 (first as a website and then in 2007 as a blog. They also published a book). Jennifer posted to YALSA-bk yesterday announcing that with the help of her 7th graders and Andrew, Reading Rants had gotten a template redesign.
There’s been some controversy in central Indiana recently: the Monroe County Community Schools Corporation announced budget cuts earlier this month that would eliminate school librarian positions districtwide. There’s been a trend recently toward having one licensed librarian provide library service to multiple schools in a district with assistants overseeing the individual libraries on the librarian’s days elsewhere, but these budget cuts would eliminate all librarian positions within the district. Mary D’Eliso–IU-Bloomington SLIS grad, former assistant manager of children’s services at Monroe County Public Library, current library media specialist at University Elementary School, and (former?) instructor of Children’s Literature at IU-Bloomington SLIS–started Let Me Think: Adventures in a School Library at the end of January and wrote in an email, “I was thinking that the main crux of our elimination was that people have no idea what actually happens in the modern school library, particularly in areas of teaching and curriculum.” She’s intending for Let Me Think to include lessons, displays, and events.
I mostly think of blogs as tools for aspiring and practicing librarians to find book reviews and get new programming ideas and as an online community for people in the profession, but they can also be public relations tools, showing non-librarians what we’re all about.
March 1, 2010
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