After months of living like animals with our books just thrown on the shelves however they came out of boxes when we moved in, my husband and I have finally organized our personal library. When I announced this project, a number my non-library-affiliated family and friends made jokes about the Dewey Decimal system, but it also prompted people to describe to me how they organize their own book collections.
One friend doesn’t organize his library because he values serendipity above all else. Another interfiles fiction and non-fiction and just alphabetizes by author; this makes finding what you want very simple because there’s exactly one place that book can be. A third friend organized her books by height because she doesn’t have a lot of books and doesn’t have a lot of space to store them. Another friend called me when I started library school to ask if she should use Dewey or Library of Congress to organize her library and even made up spine labels because she loves to organize but also loves to share. Others had more complicated systems and honestly, as long as you’re not sorting by color, I’m not going to pick a fight with you. (I know that there are people for whom color is an essential part of experiencing a book or the part they remember best, but most of the time I think sorting by color is done by people who own books purely for decoration.)
Organizing our library also sparked some discussions about the principles of arranging books. While I guess the expectation is that librarians love DDC so much that we bring it home with us, a real library science enthusiast knows that the purpose of classification and arranging is to make materials accessible to people. In libraries used by lots of people, we use standard classification systems like Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal Classification because they’ve been developed to work for lots of different kinds of people approaching books in lots of different kinds of ways and because they’re widely used, so frequent users (or those who’ve had some bibliographic instruction) know how to find things on their own.
But even libraries don’t always cling to the letter of the law: rather than keeping biographies in the 920s in between geography and history or interfiling them by the area in which the subject worked (the Cataloging in Publication data for my husband’s biography of Frank Zappa assigns it a call number in the 782s, which are books on vocal music), many public libraries have a separate biography section. Even fiction can be classified with DDC, winding up in the 800s with books about literature–but usually libraries separate out fiction, maybe even break it into genres, and then organize by author’s last name rather than the author’s country of origin or the language in which he or she writes like DDC dictates.
And while most of the time libraries have a system in place that’s intended to make things as accessible as possible to the most number of people and stick to that system, there are occasional debates about where things should live in the library. Every few months, someone on the YA listservs will ask what others do with non-fiction in their libraries: is all non-fiction in the adult section or is there a YA non-fiction section? What does it contain? Just homework and test-prep books or also recreational non-fiction reading like instructional books, inspirational biographies, and video game guides? (In general it sounds like most libraries have a small collection of high-interest non-fiction for their teens, but most research-oriented non-fiction goes in the adult section.)
But that’s what public and research libraries do, and they lots of people looking for lots of things. Your own personal library is used by far fewer people and the people who use that library probably don’t come to your books with the expectation that they’ll be arranged by Dewey or by LoC. You’re free to arrange books in a way that works best for you. Do you want to just sort all of your books by author because that’s the easiest way for you to find things? Do you want to keep every book an author’s written together regardless of genre or content? Do you have a huge collection of romance novels that you want sorted by raciness so you can easily find the book that’s right for the moment–or the company in which you’re reading? I think your organizational technique says a lot about your own interests, how you view your library, and how you perceive knowledge in general.
So after some time looking over what we had and waiting for patterns to emerge, my husband and I settled on the following categories in the following order:
Nerd stuff: role-playing game guides, video game guides, books about video games, books about computer games
Books about computer stuff (canonical theory books, programming languages, game design, graphic design, other special topics)
Books about math (textbooks first with related fields near each other, then more recreational titles), books about science (by discipline)
Books about philosophy, books about religion (sacred texts, apologia, books about different faiths)
Books about Swedish government and history (from the courses I took the semester I spent abroad)
Instructional and how-to books
Feminist texts, books about politics
Books about music and musicians
Miscellaneous non-fiction
Library science textbooks, books about librarianship, and books about books
Memoirs, narrative non-fiction, humor writing (all interfiled, sorted by author, anthologies come first)
Poetry, then plays, and then classics
Science fiction, fantasy, and dystopian novels (by author’s last name with series in publication order)
Graphic novels and comic books (manga, webcomics, small press comics, Marvel universe, DC universe)
General fiction (by author’s last name)
Young adult books, children’s books, and picture books (by author’s last name), children’s books in other languages (by language)
It’s not Dewey, but it’s a good way to group like things in our own collection, and–most importantly to me–it lets us put things that might fit into two categories at the boundaries of those categories. For example, books on cryptography are at the end of the computer section or the beginning of the math section, depending on how you look at it, and the Swedish-English dictionary is between the other dictionaries and the books about Sweden. Specific kinds of fiction that we particularly enjoy get their own sections, and fiction is all sorted by author’s last name to make finding a particular title easy. We also had to make accommodations to the space in which we were working: I’d like my books on library science to be with the books on writing and language, and I’d like graphic novels to not be in the middle of our fiction collection, but both need to be on a bottom shelf to accommodate oversize titles.
Throughout the rest of our home, media is sorted by platform (movies and television and concert footage and music documentaries on DVD, CDs, vinyl, video games by console) and then alphabetically by author or title. In all we have almost 37 yards of shelving of media (we had to buy three new bookshelves when we moved into this apartment).
Our categories and our system can’t really be extrapolated to anyone else’s library–they’re hyper-specific in some places and very broad in others–but it works well for us because it reflects the way we perceive our collection. How do you organize your library? What principles guided that organizational scheme?
Craft programs usually go over pretty well with teens and if you’re smart about where you get your supplies, they don’t have to be expensive events. A couple of projects have caught my eye recently and I thought I’d share them.
Henna programs (with permission slips if necessary) come up on the listservs every few months or so. Instructables user creativegirlz has detailed instructions and pictures.
James and Sylvia at Make show you how to make your own crazy putty. This one involves Borax and it might be a little ambitious, but for libraries with particularly crafty (or mad scientist-like!) teens, this could be a fun project.
Upcycling (using items you were planning to discard and transforming them into something new) is a great way to cut down on craft program costs. If you’ve done t-shirt surgery programs already and you’re looking for another way to put old t-shirts to use, Michelle, a first-year MFADT student at Parsons, shows you how you can turn an old t-shirt into a grocery bag (or a purse for teens).
I found most of these craft projects via the Craftzine blog. It’s kind of high-volume and some of what gets posted is too ambitious for libraries, but it’s a great source of ideas.
Over the last few years as I’ve gone through library school and started thinking and writing about the field, it’s become clear to me that most people who aren’t affiliated with libraries or librarians in some way (through employment or marriage or frequent library use) have no idea what librarians do–or even who exactly in a library is a librarian. People who use their libraries at least tend to know some of what their libraries have to offer, but non-users are in the dark about both librarians and the libraries where they work. I mentioned in the post I wrote about the Diane Rehm Show about public libraries that I don’t think librarians are always great at explaining to outsiders exactly why the library is awesome and exactly what it is we do, and I’ve been thinking about some of the ways we can get that message out.
In some ways it’s easy to talk about why libraries are great. We can point to all of the resources and services that we offer and make a case using outcomes-based measures for how we have a positive impact in the community. And we can (and should!) tailor our message to the listener: parents want to know about storytimes and how early literacy skills give kids a developmental leg up. People seeking entertainment will love hearing that the library lends DVDs for free (and that libraries lend more DVDs than Netflix!). Entrepreneurs in the community can make good use of our tax help sessions or business databases. Families on vacation can come to us for audiobooks–and for recommendations on what stories they might like. Politicians need to hear that we help people navigate government websites and access government information and forms online. I really do believe that everyone in the community can find something useful or enjoyable to them at the library, and it’s just a matter of us letting them know that and helping them find that useful or enjoyable thing. (Getting them into the library in the first place is another post altogether, I suppose.)
But it’s trickier telling people what librarians do, especially when we’re trying to fight the impression that all we do is check books out to people and read all day. It doesn’t directly benefit people to talk about ourselves the way it does to talk about our libraries, so finding an audience for this information is hard. It can also be difficult not to sound defensive when we’re trying to explain how librarians are different than the front-line staff at the checkout desk, since they’re often the first point of contact for many people at the library. And as Lino pointed out in a comment on a post I wrote about a corporate librarian’s talk to our student group in library school, people’s perceptions of librarians change as they encounter different libraries and different types of libraries.
If people ask directly what we do, we can point them to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s librarian profile, but that’s pretty dry. It helps when the New York Times does pieces on how librarianship has changed in the digital age since it directly explains some of the things librarians are doing, especially in the age of computers. But librarians need to do their own explaining and tell their own stories, too.
In a response to Lino’s comment, I mentioned two of the things that we can do to educate people about what librarians are and what we do. The first is to mentor people–particularly young people–through things like Teen Advisory Boards and library volunteer programs. Having repeated personal contact with a librarian or being involved in the library yourself shows you first-hand what librarians and libraries are like, and for young people, it can even awaken in them a passion for library work. (And since we can’t get everyone to marry a librarian, more structured programs seem to be the way to go to give people that personal connection.)
But as powerful as that one-on-one contact is, we need other ways to reach people, and I think blogging is one good way to do that. A number of librarians have written blog posts and articles specifically about what librarians do. For example:
Susan Kusel writes for the PBS Parents blog Booklights (hooray for librarians in non-library contexts!); one of her posts from this spring answers the question “what do librarians do all day?”
Twice a year, the Library Day in the Life project asks librarians to document what they do on a particular day every year. Round 5 happened yesterday and there are already posts available. This project is especially interesting because librarians from lots of different kinds of libraries talk about their days, not just public librarians, who seem to be the most vocal in explaining who they are and what they do, most likely since they’re most often asked to justify their existence.
And while library blogs tend to be written by librarians, for librarians, there are a few that I think would appeal to non-librarians, too. The most illuminating and accessible librarian-blogger I’ve found so far is Brian Herzog, the Swiss Army Librarian. His posts never seem too long and each week he features a reference question (they’re usually the particularly funny or interesting or challenging ones) he was asked that week and the strategies he used for answering it. He also includes posts that are useful to practicing librarians (super-especially his recent “Checklist Manifesto for the Reference Desk”) or musings on current events and controversies in librarianship, but overall I think his blog is a great example of how we can document what we do and what we’re about.
Librarians aren’t always great about explaining to non-librarians why libraries and librarians are important, but there are some good examples of how we can do so. Positive media coverage helps librarians show off our skills and our libraries. Personal contact and repeated positive library experiences are the most powerful way to show people what libraries and librarians are all about. Talking and writing about what we do (and why we do it!) lets us reach a broader audience and tell our own stories. We need to be able to see our institutions and ourselves from an outsider’s perspective and then find ways to reach people with our message of the awesomeness of libraries and librarians.
Rob Beschizza toured the the Preservation Research and Testing Division and the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center of the Library of Congress recently and posted gorgeous high-res photos (and a couple videos) and descriptions of a lot of the preservation technology on BoingBoing. He talks about both the preservation of old print materials and digital items–everything from the Gettysburg Address and the 500-year-old Waldseemüller world map to nitrate film and RCA Selectavision and DVDs–touching on some of the issues involved (damaging an item to learn about it, DRM, digitizing vs maintaining old technology) and explaining some of the different tools and the science of preservation. Preservation nerds will love this, but everyone should click through just to check out the photos.
A piece of strange, sad news: a public library in Dover, New Hampshire recently discovered 5,000 anti-public school bookmarks tucked into books in their collection; staff spent 30 hours removing all of them. The bookmarks espoused the ideals of the School Sucks Project and Freedomain Radio and were strategically placed in books in certain sections of the library. Other nearby libraries have also found the bookmarks in their own collections. And lest anyone think the library was trying to censor the School Sucks Project’s message,
Although Beaudoin said she didn’t want library patrons to think the library supported the messages on the bookmarks, she wouldn’t have denied a request to post a poster or literature on a public board or display.
But library policy prohibits the dissemination of information through bookmarks in books, she said.
“If I had found 5,000 bookmarks staying ‘Stop the oil spill in the Gulf,’ a message I think everyone can get behind, I still would have pulled them,” she said. “It’s not what it was about, but that the act was done.”
Brigham Young University recently took a page from Old Spice’s book and put together this fantastic video, “New Spice: Study Like a Scholar, Scholar,” in which BYU student and comedian Stephen Jones extolls the virtues of studying at BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library. So many elements of the Old Spice commercials are nailed so perfectly and it’s a great mix of silly and accurate and man I love this video.
I’ve been thinking recently about how libraries (and librarians) are seen by people outside of Libraryland. The old stereotypes (glasses-wearing, hair-in-a-bun old lady shushing people, primarily) persist even as libraries become more active in their communities and younger people join the ranks. Every time some reading-related technological innovation is announced, people predict the death of libraries, which are apparently just big rooms full of outdated books. But libraries have their supporters, too–bibliophiles who love their libraries and wear “librarian” glasses, frequent library users, even just those feeling nostalgia for the good experiences they had in libraries growing up. And all of these people see different things in their libraries and expect different behavior from their librarians, so it’s interesting to see what non-librarians think about libraries and librarians.
There have been three things in particular recently that have gotten me thinking about our image in pop culture and the media. The library-oriented corners of the Internet imploded with glee yesterday when the Old Spice guy (you know, the sexy shirtless one) posted a video response to a tweet asking him to say a few words about libraries. (See the original requester’s blog post response, too.)
While the Huffington Post called this a “defense” of libraries, I’m not sure it goes quite that far in just 34 slightly silly seconds, but it’s still exciting to have that contact with pop culture. And, you know, to have a sexy shirtless guy talk about books.
While it was first posted in January, someone recently pointed me to Flavorwire’s mixtape “10 Best Songs About Libraries and Librarians”. Lots of the songs feature the librarian (a woman, of course) as an object of desire, often unaware of her own sexiness. The library itself is a place to tell your parents you’re going when you’re really headed somewhere else as well as a place to study.
And over the Fourth of July weekend, Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion included a new “Ruth Harrison, Reference Librarian” sketch. Ruth, keeper of the books and answerer of questions, harbors a secret interior life of passions and crushes. The stereotypes are amped up to ridiculous levels: most recently Ruth was planning a vacation to “The Readers Resort [...] for two delicious weeks by Lake Bellelettre in Reading, Pennsylvania.” But the sketches occasionally have little details that seem surprisingly spot-on and make me wonder if one of the staff writers was (or still is) a librarian. In 2008, Ruth met Brad Carruthers, the author of a romance novel involving a librarian that she rather enjoyed, and she desperately wants to become his personal librarian and live aboard his ship with him. In that episode, though, the initial reference interview is just perfect with the patron’s initial vague request and Ruth’s probing questions and reflective listening to discover just what it is Brad wants.
I’m not really sure that there’s some sort of overarching conclusion I’m trying to draw here, but it’s interesting to see what people who aren’t librarians think of us and our institutions and how we appear in culture and the media.
When my Youth Services class visited the Greenwood (IN) Public Library in February, one of the things assistant children’s services department head Anne Guthrie mentioned in passing was that you could make your own finger puppets by cutting open a small stuffed toy and sewing in the fingertip of a glove. I loved the DIY aspect of this and was struck by how easy and clever it was, so when we had to do an assignment that required us to plan a library program in detail (like, fifteen-page-writeup level detail!), I outlined a preschool storytime with a “tails” theme and created mice finger puppets that could be used as manipulatives during a recitation of “Three Blind Mice” using Anne’s method.
They took me longer to make than I was expecting, but I think that was mostly due to lack of experience not only with making finger puppets like this but with sewing in general. Even for a domestic arts pro, though, it’d be tough to whip up a batch of 30 the night before a program. If your library has a strong volunteer group, especially including people with sewing experience, this could be a good project to farm out to them.
Blind Mice Finger Puppets
Materials: stuffed mice (I used cat toys from a local pet store), an old glove, fabric scraps for tails, a little bit of sew-on velcro, a seam ripper, needle, thread, and scissors
Mouse #1, pre-surgery
1. Using a seam ripper and scissors, cut a finger-sized hole in the bottom of the mouse. Pull out a fingertip-sized chunk of stuffing (and maybe catnip), but make sure to leave in enough stuffing for the toy to keep its shape.
This mouse's seam was reinforced with glue, hence the gross ragged edges around the edge of the fabric
2. Cut a fingertip off of an old glove. It helps to put on the glove, put your finger into the toy, and then mark around the bottom of the toy so you know how much to cut off. More tightly-fitting gloves work better than loose ones, and if you plan to have children use these as manipulatives, be sure to plan for little fingers.
Reminds me of my marching band days
3. Insert the glove fingertip into the toy and sew around the edges. A whipstitch is easy, but if you’re not using a thread color that blends in, it makes the fingerpuppet look a little like Frankenstein’s monster. I also recommend choosing toys made of a forgiving fabric; the knit mouse in my collection really showed off every mistake in cutting and stitching.
Post-surgery Frankenmouse
4. To create detachable tails, fold a rectangular bit of fabric in half (or in quarters with the raw edges on the inside) and sew the sides together. Then fold over a bit of the end of the tail and sew it down to create an elongated t-shape. Cut a piece of velcro to size, cut off the mouse’s original tail (if it has one), and sew the velcro onto the new tail and the mouse’s behind.
Removable tail--no carving knife necessary!
5. Repeat as many times as necessary to create your own nest/colony/harvest/horde/mischief of finger puppet mice.
My mischief of mice earned me an A!
While the storytime I planned was tail-themed, these could be reused for a more general animal storytime, a pets storytime (although the detachable tails are a little sad in that case!), or a nursery rhyme-themed program. They’re not too hard, especially once you’ve gotten a little practice, and they’re pretty cheap, too.
Last week children’s book author KP Bath was sentenced to six years in jail for possessing child pornography. This brings up questions of what librarians should do with his books if they’re held by the library. Should they be removed from the collection? Should they be booktalked and suggested? Should they be featured in displays? In South Carolina where the book won the 2007-2008 Junior Book Award, should the book be stricken from the award list?
Bath was originally arrested in April 2009. At the time I was taking both a seminar on intellectual freedom and Materials for Youth, and I brought up his arrest in both classes to gauge my fellow students’ reactions. While my seminar classmates were all vociferous in their defense of the book (but not the author), I was surprised by how many of my classmates in Materials for Youth would have removed the book from their libraries’ collections, even if they hadn’t read the books themselves. I think that were KP Bath an author for adults, even more cautious librarians would be less likely to pull his works; it’s providing his books to children, the very group he was exploiting, that concerns us.
At the time I hadn’t read any of KP Bath’s books, but by the end of the semester had read both THE SECRET OF CASTLE CANT and ESCAPE FROM CASTLE CANT, the first two books in a trilogy that will now probably never see completion. I thought they were mediocre fantasy novels that started with an interesting world but fell short in their narration style and details. But aside from a few notes about how insufferable adults are (which you’ll find in many books for older children and young adults), there was nothing in the books that seemed unusual or uncomfortable, much less exploitative. So, wearing my librarian hat and separating the author from his work, I concluded that it would violate the Freedom to Read Statement were we to remove the book from our library shelves.
But this also illustrated to me the occasional separation that occurs between my professional ethics and my personal ethics. While I’m not always great at it, it’s important to me to spend my consumer dollars wisely since it’s the only vote I get in the behavior of corporations and the business world in general. And I definitely don’t want to financially support someone who exploits children–especially someone so downright skeezy as Bath. He wrote in one of his chats, “I’m glad there are molesters out there,” and “I wish a 9 yr old was doing that to me. This from a man who’s writing books for 9-year-olds.” While he was enjoying (and trading) videos and images “depicting sadistic conduct, rape, sodomy and bestiality,” he was also volunteering at the Beverly Cleary Children’s Library in Portland. He was volunteering at the local children’s library. It chills my blood to read that sentence. Knowing what I know about Bath, there’s no way I could spend my money on his books, recommend (rather than suggest) his books to any children I know, or in any way not oppose him.
But those are my personal values. My professional values demand that I treat his books as I would have before his arrest and conviction. Normally I feel like my own values and my profession’s values are a good match, but I really struggle with this case. I know that as much as we want it to be or might claim it is, our collection development isn’t objective. I want social justice to be a part of librarianship. But intellectual freedom is at the core of librarianship and is the defense for some controversial things that happen in youth librarianship. If we start making compromises, how can we continue to defend controversial books being on our shelves? If we make exceptions and remove KP Bath’s books from our collections, then how do we retain the works of other felons or of anyone–atheists, gay people–whom someone in our library’s community might think immoral?
But can I really set aside my personal values in favor of my professional ones and be okay with myself? I certainly expect it of any librarians who personally think that (for example) people in the queer community are on the path to hell–I’d still expect them to collect books by LGBTQIA authors. Is the reason I think this is different because the law and a majority of people in our society agree that pedophilia is wrong whereas (in most states at least) homosexuality isn’t a crime?
I struggled with this conflict of values last spring and now that Bath has been sentenced, I’m thinking about it again. Professionally the right thing to do is to treat his books no differently, but personally, I’m torn. Intellectual freedom is important to me, but so is supporting good in the world and opposing evil. I feel okay keeping Bath’s books in a collection and with giving them to patrons who ask for them directly. But can I, with a clean conscience, add Bath’s books to a booklist? Can I booktalk them? I think I’ll probably do so–and feel good about it at work but feel guilty about it at home.
Once I started library school, my mom started noticing libraries in the news. Every month or so she’ll send me a clipping or a link to a story about a library in our area, a report on a new trend in librarianship, or a write-up on some controversy at a library. Today she showed me “Libraries branching out to malls”, an AP article that describes how some libraries are opening branches–some that look like your normal neighborhood library branch and some that are more like bookstores–in shopping malls. The article points out that library usage has been increasing steadily (citing the IMLS report that I recently mentioned) and notes that one library mentioned in the article had to increase their storytimes from 2-3 a week to 12 a week at their mall location. Overall the article paints libraries in malls as positive and notes that they’re part of a trend toward convenience and customer satisfaction.
And in general, I think that this form of mild library outreach is a good way to get the library to where the patrons are. Our private spaces are increasingly becoming commercialized and clearly there are a lot of people in shopping malls. Having a mall outlet is a good way for the library to be a part of patrons’ routines in a way they might not be able to as stand-alone buildings.
But I wonder what it means that libraries are stepping up and standing alongside commercial spaces. Will this commercialize the library? Part of the library’s greatness is that everyone is welcome and everyone has (or we strive for them to have) equal access to what we provide. That’s not what commercial enterprise does, and I wonder if people start associating the library with the mall if they’ll start to think of the library differently.
Don’t get me wrong: I think any chance to bring more people into the library or to bring library service to people is great, and having libraries in malls is a great way to capture a different segment of the library’s service population. As long as libraries don’t wind up exclusively in malls, I think it’s a great idea.
But it’s also not without its dangers. One library mentioned in the article rents their space for $1 a year and their programs are sponsored by a local energy company. But to offer another data point, the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library system is facing budget cuts, and one of the two branches that’s on the chopping block in all three plans that involve closing branches is the Glendale branch, which is located in a shopping mall. Even though the Glendale branch has some of the highest circulation and gate-count data, the powers that be are concerned that they’re renting the space rather than purchasing it and having that equity. The library board should be making a decision about how to cope with budget reductions this month.
If libraries can find a good deal in renting a space in a mall, it sounds like that’s a great way to make the library more available to certain people and to raise the library’s visibility in the community. I’m a little concerned about whether or not that might commercialize the library–an organization whose greatest strength lies in its public nature–but so long as libraries aren’t located solely in shopping malls, it sounds like a good opportunity.
This post has been edited to correct the ages of the characters in the first Harry Potter book. They were 11 when the books began, not 12.
A couple of weeks ago Miley Cyrus was named as the lead in the movie adaptation of Lisa McMann’s thriller WAKE. Discussion on the listservs was mixed: it sounds like there are plenty of people who aren’t Miley fans, but a few people pointed out that getting someone with that kind of star power would get more people to see the movie, which is great.
But what I really like about this casting decision is that Miley is 17, just like Janie, the protagonist of WAKE. It seems like a lot of the time teens in movies and television are played by twentysomethings, or 12-year-old characters become 16 year olds when a book gets adapted for television. Using movie release dates and actors’ birth years from IMDb to find some examples:
In Glee, the characters are in high school, but the actors playing those characters range in age from 19 (Chris Colfer, who plays Kurt) to 27 (Cory Monteith and Mark Salling, who play Finn and Puck respectively)–just four years younger than Matthew Morrison, who plays their teacher and coach.
And those are just a few examples. A movie adaptation of Ally Carter’s HEIST SOCIETY is in development now with a scheduled 2012 release date. In April, Carter wrote a blog post about the characters being aged up from their teens to their early twenties for the movie adaptation. Specifically, she wrote about why she was okay with that change. Her reasons ranged from simple ones (money, a bigger audience) to more complex ones (Kat will have been gone longer and will be rustier, an older character being seen as a little girl hurts her more), but Angie Manfredi disagreed on Twitter. In a short conversation (12345) we touched on how this is disrespectful to teens because it tells them that they, as teens, aren’t interesting, and it means that movies teens watch that are supposedly directed at them don’t portray characters who are like them. Just as teens deserve literature that reflects their lives, the movie adaptations of that literature should reflect teens and their stories and abilities and fears and triumphs.
There are some movies that get it right. Weirdly enough, the Twilight actors are pretty close in age to their characters (Kristen Stewart was 18 when the first movie came out and Taylor Lautner was 17 when New Moon was released; Robert Pattinson was 22 in the first movie instead of 17, but I guess you can argue you want an older actor to play a character who’s actually a few hundred years old?).
But I think the Harry Potter franchise is the best example: Harry and Ron and Hermione were all 11 in the first book; Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson were all 12 when the first movie was released (so they were probably 11 when the movie was filmed). They’ve gotten a little older now (Radcliffe will be 22 when the final movie with an 18-year-old Harry comes out), but that’s just because you can’t crank out eight movies of that magnitude in seven years. Through that series (both the seven books and the eight movies) we get to see Harry mature from a kid to an adult, something that we wouldn’t have seen in a movie that started out with an older character or an older actor. Teens deserve depictions of teen characters that show that kind of reflection of who they are and who they’re becoming–both in literature and movies based on that literature.
This Japanese YouTube video demonstrates how a book and an iPhone (iPhone + book = PhoneBook) can combine to create something clever, cute, and fun:
During my last semester of my MLS I worked on an independent study group project with a number of other students and a professor to help create a community digital repository with a library in northeastern Indiana. That library, the Eckhart Public Library, recently celebrated its 100th anniversary and got a write-up in one of the Fort Wayne papers that includes some neat photos. (More on our project)
The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) issued a press release today announcing–among other things–that public library visits and circulations per capita had increased 20% from 1999 to 2008 but that the number of librarians per capita had remained the same (about 4 librarians per 25,000 people), so the same number of librarians are handling more patron visits and more circulations. The press release also mentions the availability of computers (doubled in the last ten years), attendance at children’s programming (up 13.9%) and overall programming (up 17.6%), and “the distribution of library outlets by state and geography type” (in 16 states more than 50% of library outlets are in rural areas).
Brian Selznick’s Caldecott Award-winning THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET is being movie-fied by Martin Scorsese; the cast includes Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield, Chloë Moretz, Jude Law, Ray Winstone, Christopher Lee, Helen McCrory, Frances de la Tour, and Richard Griffiths. The film is going to be in 3D and production recently began in London. As always I’m nervous about movie adaptations, but I’m really excited about who’s involved with this one so I’m letting myself get my hopes up.
And finally, more book art! This time it’s by Su Blackwell and it’s amazing. These are just a few examples; you’ll have to check out the artist’s gallery for more.
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