Wendy on the Web

ALA Midwinter Recap

2012-01-26T07:43:00.000-06:00

I was really on the fence about whether I would even be able to go to the ALA Midwinter Meeting. I have always enjoyed Midwinter more than Annual, but I haven't been up-to-par since Christmas and wasn't sure I would be able to take the physical demands of conferencing, especially since I am on Council now.

I'm SO very glad I decided to push through it and come to Dallas. Council was fascinating. Thanks to you all who voted for me as Councilor-at-Large last spring. I especially loved the conversation about the nuances of language in the resolution about publisher's discriminatory policies on sales and pricing of econtent for libraries. Some felt it was caustic, while others argued that we should not name specific vendors or publishers because we need long-term positive partnerships with them. I, having worked for a vendor, was not worried about strident language there.

I took it really easy in Dallas. I took naps, only really went out to dinner two evenings, both of them really early, but was still able to catch up with many friends and colleagues. And it was definitely the best Youth Media Awards for me in terms of having read the winners -- I'd read both the Newbery (Dead End in Norvelt) and Printz (Where Things Come Back), and about half of the Alex list too -- Ready Player One, Salvage the Bones, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, The Lover's Dictionary, and another couple I liked less. And I am really excited about hearing Gantos' acceptance speech; a fan since Hole in my Life, I've heard him at ALAN and found him personally both intriguing and hysterical -- a real life Joey Pigza.

In the most magical moment of the meeting, I was dashing from the awards announcements to Youth Council Caucus when I passed a beaming John Corey Whaley walking down the conference center concourse clutching that morning's Cognotes. I asked if I could take his picture, and he very sweetly suggested I get in the frame, too. I had come upon 28-year-old Whaley's debut novel through word-of-mouth at ALAN, and I was glad to see it was more than my own regional prejudice in appreciating its incredible charm and winsome voice. To take both the Morris and the Printz is an incredible accomplishment, and I am thrilled for him.

Exhibits were, again, a wash. I got some ARCs, few enough to pack in a single checked tote, but nothing I was really longing for (Timepiece by Myra McEntire, I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga), but I think some of the issue were the exhibits-only pass-holders who camped out in line for hot ARCs like Kristin Cashore's Bitterblue. There was some vitriol online about this from librarians, and I was happy when some publishing people I spoke with agreed it was problematic. But the publisher previews have given me all sorts of titles to anticipate this spring, and I really enjoyed attending the RUSA Awards which gave me some grown-up titles to add to my list as well.

Space...

2012-01-20T11:00:00.000-06:00

flickr/wscullin

A high school somewhere else in Alabama is getting a new library. I was tickled they asked me for my pie-in-the-sky vision of a school library space. These are my suggestions:

Connectivity

If there is a single thing I would emphasize, it’s having many more electrical outlets than you think you might ever need. The furniture with it built-in is great, but have it in the floorboard and the floors (in the middle of the space) as well.

Depending on the local Internet setup, I would go ahead and request an equivalently excessive number of drops. Wired networks are always faster than wireless networks. If yours is the rare wireless network than can support a huge number of concurrent connections, think about using them for bring-your-own-device access to a guest partition and using a wired connection for school machines.

I would include a minimum of three mounted data projectors, considering the size of the school and library. This would allow for a variety of configurations for instruction and virtual fieldtrips and other activities.

While I love as much natural light as is possible in the space, I do think all windows need to have shades for projection.

Furniture

In probably the biggest shift in thinking in the decade since our own facility was constructed, I believe seating really needs to be modular and not fixed.

I also think there should be areas where students can spread out at tables as well as areas with really comfortable, nap-inducing furniture. Some libraries are getting furniture from Ikea, and I can’t help but notice how one particular library vendor’s chairs looked as if they were plucked straight out of DWR.

Spaces

Alcoves where students and teachers can talk and collaborate in small groups are going to be increasingly important.

Libraries need a “quiet space,” a place where devices and electronics are discouraged and students can concentrate. I think this sort of disconnectivity will become an increasing luxury.

Library configuration

Computers should be integrated in the stacks, and any lab areas should not be divided out with doors or partitions.

When labs are an element of the library, I love a theater set-up facing away from the stacks.

Dedicated OPACS should not requiring login, and it’s a good idea to have them at the circulation desk for student guidance. I prefer big circulation desks, with lots of space behind them, more like reference desks than circulation counters. I think having a bustling desk reflects a sense of community ownership for the library, which can also be accomplished by having as many dedicated spaces as possible for student workers, parent volunteers, and teachers on their planning time.

In this day and age, you really need special laboratory-type areas with scanners, digital cameras, green screens, and other equipment for student authorship. Those can require special furniture and connections. If you wanted to go all out, you could include gaming areas and recording studios like Chicago Public Library’s YouMedia, the ultimate YA laboratory.

Shelving

Consider interfiling nonfiction and genre-izing fiction. Unifying materials types in one place in nonfiction requires a great extend of shelving which reads as uninterrupted, while dividing fiction into genres can be served by a smaller shelving units. Those are just two trends in organization to bear in mind.

I can't wait to see what they come up with and hope I will be able to visit!

Dallas!

2012-01-16T10:01:00.000-06:00

When I was working for an automation vendor ten years ago, I would always ask for libraries in Dallas. I loved that, thanks to direct flights and efficient freeways, I could be anywhere in the metroplex a few hours after I left my house. Then I really ramped up the Texas travel in 2005, when I began Ph.D. coursework and went to Denton a dozen times in one year.

I'll be going back to Dallas again this week for the ALA Midwinter Meeting. I attended Council orientation this summer, but this will begin my actual term with that. I'm also keeping my fingers crossed that I might be able to attend the Youth Media Awards for the live announcement of the Newbery and all the other awards as well. I've had committee meetings on Monday mornings the last couple of years.

Unfortunate governors aside, there is something I really like about Texas, and I am really looking forward to this conference. Any excuse to wear cowboy boots...

In the spirit of Forgotten Bookmarks...

2012-01-10T07:31:00.000-06:00

a fascinating blog and book by Michael Popek, I have a cache of things I have found in books over the years, but this find over the weekend is among the most intriguing:

Found in a paperback copy of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, with Central Jr. High School written in the front cover and the cryptic "F-CHR 00000934" in the back cover.

I am rather sure I picked up the copy from among the donations to Alabama libraries after the April tornados. One of our novel class reads a Christie, and many choose And Then There Were None, so I would have wanted any I could find. I just hope the reader didn't NEED the numbers, especially that emergency one.

But speaking of bookstores, if this doesn't bring a tear to your eyes... well, you're just a heathen, I suppose.

Trend I love: gorgeous books

2012-01-06T08:00:00.000-06:00

While I believe print is necessarily becoming more physically appealing as part of its evolution, here are some lovely recent book objects with nice electronic versions, too:

Why We Broke Up (2012) by Daniel Handler

Every You, Every Me (2011) by David Levithan

Missed Connections (2011) by Sophie Blackall

How cool that what could be more traditional novels are being embroidered with really lovely, integral art... I am all for 2012 being the year of the most gorgeous books yet.

My library wishes for 2012

2011-12-30T16:12:00.000-06:00

Here's to another year of...

...ereaders...

...cosplay...

...mobile devices at school...

...high cotton...

...incredible authors...

...recreational reading...

...and crafting electronic products for authentic audiences.

Happy New Year!

2011...My Year in Review

2011-12-22T07:13:00.000-06:00

January: The year kicked off with ALA Midwinter in San Diego, which included a fabulous walk on the beach on Coronado Island. I back flew into unprecedented winter weather -- four consecutive snow days! The month wrapped with Educon, which was absolutely mind-blowing, especially the student life panel. I want our students to feel as "at home" as those at SLA.

Student activities at SLA

February: I sent in my petition to run for ALA Council. We went to New Orleans for a long weekend for my husband's birthday, where we saw an incredible Birney Imes exhibit. More snow days. I spoke to the Huntsville Public Library employees on their annual staff day about today's school libraries.

March: I presented with a stellar ebook panel at Internet @ Schools East, making some predictions about the impending Kindle crackdown, print as luxury objects, and the need for better enrichment in digital products. Also saw incredible Gaughin exhibit at the National Gallery.

April: Awesome students rocked the regional technology fair. Spring break getaway to London and Colwyn Bay in Wales, then off to the Redneck Riviera for the Alabama Library Association. The month came to an abrupt end with the spate of tornadoes which eliminated electricity to north Alabama for almost an entire week (and prevented our participation in the state technology fair).

At Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea PL after hours

Alabama Gulf Coast

Shopping Day 5 after tornados

Gas after the tornados

School after the tornados

May: Was elected to ALA Council! Book club stalwart performs as very wicked stepsister in local children's theater production of Cinderella. We are all still recovering from the natural disasters, and the state allows us to end school as scheduled instead of making up those days.

June: Providing PD, and more PD. I gave the Alabama School Library Association keynote, spoke in a series of technology-related state conferences before ALA New Orleans, which might be the best ALA ever. I again presented on ebook topics, won a crown at Pecha Kucha, convened a stellar distance panel for YALSA, and just generally enjoyed all the fascinating conversation about cross-platform publishing opportunities. Start getting some really positive feedback re my dissertation, which is especially exciting.

July: Reprised some of the f2f ALA stuff for a Virtual ALA, presented a YALSA webinar on ebooks, and facilitated some local educational technology PD. I re-started my educational leadership coursework, after some state-level hiccups. We also went to Hemingway Days in Key West.

Hemingway Days

August: School starts back later than usual, after a full week of teacher work days. Did my comps for educational leadership M. Sci., and began the first of two internships at a K-6 campus. Kicked off our Nook pilot project at school.

September: Did the second internship at a K-8 school. Saw traveling performance of Cirque du Soleil with students. Headed to suburban Virginia to speak at the SLJ Summit, saw the incomparable Toni Morrison at the National Book festival.

Toni Morrison at National Book Festival

Galt House, Lexington -- Goldfish bar

October: September ended and this month kicked off with the Kentucky School Media Association keynote. Terrific hospitality, and I am now an Honorary Kentucky Colonel. Spoke at the LJ/SLJ Virtual ebook summit, and to a group of local types at BEST. Spent an amazingly relaxing week lolling on the beach on Maui, before heading up to Minneapolis for AASL. The full-day preconference went amazingly smoothly, as did the leadership panel, and my snarky little Uncommons video is still making the rounds in the biblioblogosphere. Yes, I believe you should read a book a day.

Walker Center de Suvero

Minneapolis shared bicycles

YALSA Teens Top Ten books

November: Saw the Secret Sisters, one of my new favorite groups, at the Princess Theater. Took students to see authors Myra McEntire and Rachel Hawkins at a local branch library. Went to Chicago for ALAN and finally got to Oak Park to see all the Wright houses.

Princess Theater

Walnut Room at old Marshall Field's, Chicago

December: Our principal retired (sob!), so we sent him off in grand style. Went to the Blue Ribbon Schools conference to present our school's "best practices" with regard to materials to support adolescent literacy and technology integration, saw more Cirque du Soleil and enough Disney to last me forever.

It was a wonderful year, but I have a feeling 2012 may just be the best yet...

A really lovely Kindle ebook

2011-12-16T08:19:00.000-06:00

I was reading the gem that is Peter Akroyd's London Under when I started wondering about the ebook incarnation. And it was surprisingly terrific.

Contrast: ebook illustrations

with print illustrations

The e illustrations are ALMOST legible on my iOS devices. Wondering about the Fire display of images...

Contrast ebook chapter break

with print chapter breaks

I do wish the chapter heading was set off on its own, but it's not the worst.

Very elegant little translation into a ebook, in my opinion. We weren't seeing products like this last year, that's for sure. We live in interesting times!

Best books of 2011

2011-12-05T06:06:00.001-06:00

Another year, another couple of hundred books. These were the best of my year.

Fiction, realistic and historical

Some of the better voices I encountered this year, in short pieces as well as novels, intended for grown-ups.

You Know When the Men Are Gone (2011) by Siobhan Fallon
I found this collection of realistic contemporary stories set at Fort Hood through my library’s ebook interface, and I was immediately transported into the lives of Army wives. The scene where the wives watch their husband shipping out, and count the dangerous number of women among them, is still chilling even upon many recollections.

Salvage the Bones (2011) by Jesmyn West
I read some buzz about this one coming out of a preview and preordered this as well as West’s first novel, Where the Line Bleeds. She captures the American gulf coast in all its strangeness, and the Hurricane Katrina setting which is the linchpin to the plot point is dizzingly evocative. But I was surprised as anyone when it took the National Book Award, frankly.

Rules of Civility (2011) by Amor Towles
Another book I couldn’t wait to get my hands on. Set in the very late 1930s, among a milieu shifting from boarding houses to the upper crust, it’s giddy and surprisingly resonant for contemporary American historical fiction.

Aga plus sagas

You know I love my British authors, and feel I should be able to buy anything, in this digital age. The good news is that many more U.S. editions DO seem to be appearing…

Comfort and Joy (2010) by India Knight
A Christmas story which revisits the characters from My Life on a Plate and exposes all of our worst anxieties about the Christmas season. Well worth the international postage (though it was more of a New Year’s read for me…)

The London Train (2011) by Tessa Hadley
Intersecting stories from London and Cardiff explore the lonlieness and disconnection of modern life. I said it before, I think Hadley is almost up to the caliber of Margaret Drabble with the left-leaning social realism.

Homecoming (2011) by Cathy Kelly
This book, about a famous actress who resorts to coming back to Dublin after acting as “the other woman” in another actor’s long-standing marriage, is so terrifically warm and fuzzy, I knew Kelly was channeling Maeve Binchy. I enjoy her long and absorbing novels, but this one, set in appealing Georgian square peopled by warm eccentrics, was a particular treat.

Dystopian YA

Sometimes, it seems like the world can’t get any worse. And then you read a dystopian novel…

Awaken (2011) by Katie Kacvinsky
A world where there are no schools and all interaction is done via computers seems like a frighteningly possible, if not inevitable, outcome of the shift to online learning.

Bumped (2011) by Megan McCafferty
When a virus renders adults infertile, the pressure to conceive makes demi-celebrities of fecund teens who “preg” for profit. McCafferty should win some sort of prize for the inventive slang alone.

Realistic YA

Sometimes, the dystopian is a bit dark…

Small Town Sinners (2011) by Melissa Walker
A realistic story about a small town girl realizing that things aren’t quite as black and white as her preacher father’s fundamentalist doctrines would have her believe. The fascinating backdrop of church theatrics makes this one a go-to title for teens looking for relatable characters grappling with burgeoning issues of identity.

Ten Things We Did (and Probably Shouldn’t Have) (2011) by Sarah Mlynowski
A hysterical book for older teens about misadventures of two best friends when they are left “home alone” for their senior year.

A Shore Thing (2011) by Nicole Polizzi / Valerie Frankel
Don’t hate on Snooki – she was smart enough to snag the brilliant Frankel as her ghostwriter, so the book is actually rather adorable. We’ll call it realistic, even it is about a rather limited milieu.

Versatility plus

I have to give it to Marcus Sedgewick, the guy can cross genres handily, and it's all awesome.

Revolver (2010) by Marcus Sedgewick
A breakneck historical drama set in an Alaskan mining camp that will keep any reader on the edge of their seat, with not one but two clever twists. I will be recommending this to boys FOREVER.

White Crow (2011) by Marcus Sedgewick
An amazingly menacing story about an English town tumbling into the sea, two girls who might be friends or enemies, and a legacy of evil surrounding a very dark place. Incredibly atmospheric.

Hip hop hurray

A couple of splendid books from some heavy hitters.

Decoded (2010) by Jay-Z
It’s not biography as much as exploded liner notes. If you can’t get enough, there’s a standalone book app in addition to the really nice enhanced ebook version. And Sean Carter, forever the entrepreneur, has added three tracks to the “paperback release.” You’ll be humming, it’s inevitable.

Playground (2011) by 50 Cent, Laura Moser, Lizzi Akana
Curtis Jackson writes about contemporary middle schoolers with some real understanding of what it is to be bullied, and to bully in turn. The language is strong, but otherwise quite diverting.

On the digital realm

Not technical, more sociological.

How to Leave Twitter (2011) by Grace Dent
I agree one hundred percent: without twitter, life is like slogging through molasses. Dent captures perfectly all there is to love and hate about the microblogging platform in her typically hysterical, but deadpan, way.

The Filter Bubble (2011) by Eli Pariser
Explores how customized display filters are actually creating very local and personal version of online experiences, as well as the ramifications for media consumption where we have become accustomed to our own niche.

I re-read a lot of Agatha Christie, plenty of recent YA, and all of JoJo Moyes. Here's to another year with lots of time with books.

Anyone out there?

2011-11-30T07:20:00.000-06:00

I have had a number of conversations recently about blogs. All surrounding ongoing viability, something which has already been broached by many smart people (NY Observer, Wired). Is amateur journalism too time-consuming to be viable? I spend a good amount of professional energy writing for (and even more energy trying to coerce other people to write for) the AASL blog, and know it isn't the kind of thing people are likely to take on without branding themselves, or some sort of renumeration.

flickr/koeb

Turning it over in my mind, it seems these his "no one reads blogs anymore" thing is predicated on some lazy assumptions:

That blogs are all one thing. I seem them as a disparate array of rich content. It is a format, not a genre, in other words.
That readers aren't using aggregators. One person's "magazine" or "website" might be another person's "blog."
That everyone can read the web at work. I don't have a lot of the browser plug-ins to make many sites "work," but can read rss feeds without incident.
That reliance on "pointers" from twitter and other places obviate the need to "follow" a blog. What about vacations, and weekends? One can't watch twitter all the time, not if following more than a handful of people and without using lists (a topic for another day).

I know not very many people read this, which is fine with me. It is my professional journal more than anything else, and who wants a lot of people poking around there? But it does make me wonder, is it all for naught?

Giving thanks for readers and reading

2011-11-28T17:45:00.001-06:00

Last year, I posted some thoughts about libraries that had come up over the holidays. Though I spend so much of my time surrounded by books and reading, I always enjoy some covert and slapdash ethnography amongst middle Americans who are not quite as obsessed with those topics as I happen to be.

This year, there were lots of things surrounding ebooks, particularly given the $79 nook which brought many relatives out to Barnes & Noble early Black Friday. The local library "doesn't have its ebooks ready yet," said one cousin, but she is aware of the Nook's compatibility with "the library" and personally owns both eink and color Nooks. She travels with both, to read inside and out. Interestingly, she said she did not plan to renew her B&N "membership," since the associated discounts don't apply to ebooks.

Another avid reader asked me what I thought about "ibooks," which I took to mean any electronic reader. She is incredibly clued in to print -- mentioned the new Peter Ackroyd, Under London -- but resistant to e. I told her I had a variety of hardware, but still read 80% of my stuff on paper.

I spoke at length with two nieces, 6th and 9th graders, about the libraries in their suburban public schools. They seemed to be really keying on a few things:

First graders did not use the library but read from leveled readers from the textbook series. They mentioned how unappealing those books happened to be.
Students in the high school are less likely to get to the library during the school day. The ninth grader had been only once, with a class. I suggested she asked her teacher's permission to go. This had not occured to her.
Middle schoolers had strictures about the types of materials they could take. One had to be nonfiction, and one had to be a "chapter book on our level." They mentioned the scarcity of the required nonfiction materials on particular topics of interest to them, like hamsters.

I know no one working in their school system, but their version of policies smack of some arbitrary, not very literacy- or student-centered educational mandates. The very sort of thinking has been countered with yesterday's very exciting announcement from the AASL Board approving the Intellectual Freedom Committee statement about the "chilling effect" of labeling books. I have heard from some elementary librarians that their entire collections were arranged by AR Level, which I can imagine would make it neigh on useless for developing any real love of reading. I feel lucky to have gone to school before the fad for reading "on level." See Venn Librarian for more on that.

The most interesting conversation regarding librarians was an image-related one. A sister of an in-law had died suddenly, and she was described as a librarian and a lesbian. My husband mentioned that the rate of homosexuality was perhaps higher in the profession, which caused some really interesting comments. Relatives speculated it was because librarians tended to be "neat," "quiet," or "lost in books." I said perhaps it was because librarianship attracted tolerant, progressive people. This seemed to be news to them. Again, our perception of (or knowledge about) ourselves diverges from that of the public.

ALAN Workshop

2011-11-23T00:11:00.004-06:00

I'm just back from the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents workshop (ALAN), held after the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) conference. It's an interesting setup. Tables (accomodating 500 this year) are arranged length-wise in one large room, with speakers on a dias and a real minimum of multimedia distraction. I enjoyed having the time to relax and reflect among other readers.

Chicago is always fun, and this trip was no exception. I saw Murder for Two, a two-man murder-mystery spoof, at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. On Saturday, I visited Frank Lloyd Wright's home (as well as other structures he designed in Oak Park) with a friend and her adorable first grader, who is reading Harry Potter. Then Sunday I went to the Palmer House Hilton, co-headquarters hotel, where I was disgorged into a crowd of school teachers. As I have observed before, NCTE seems even more female than AASL.

The ALAN workshop was all day Monday and Tuesday. ALAN is a strange event. There is a compulsive energy in the room, almost an obsession with YA lit that I only catch a whiff of at YALSA events. It is an interesting mix of English teachers, librarians, university professors, and authors. There were tales of larceny (people stealing signed copies) and collapse, as Laurie Halse Anderson passed out, but went on to deliver her speech from a prone position just before being taken off to the hospital. How incredible!

ALAN has an award, named for writer Amelia Elizabeth Walden, for books that should "possess a positive approach to life, widespread teen appeal, and literary merit." Francisco Stork won for The Last Summer of the Death Warriors this year, the third time it was awarded. There was also a new award for best paper in the ALAN Journal.

One of the real highlights came in the half-dozen breakout sessions are held for an hour during one time slot each day. Even the most illustrious authors will still not have so many teachers crowded in at breakouts, and you are able to interact with most of them. I went to a particularly good on on Chicago as a setting Monday, and on Tuesday I asked Heather Brewer to inscribe a Vlad Todd book for a student, and she was terribly sweet about it. In contrast, the signings held in the ballroom are famously "silent," and I saw a woman ejected for using packing tape too loudly.

Even with the ensuing relentless queueing for signatures, hearing from the authors in quick succession was rather thrilling. I didn't take a laptop with me, but got by with my iPad and iPhone. I paid $18 for Internet access for one day, and used cell data the rest of the time, quite distracted with the contents of my cardboard box of books. I was thrilled with some I hadn't read (Lola and the Boy Next Door, Every You, Every Me) and some I had (Bitter Melon, Revolution), I was also jealous (of the boxes with Divergent and The Lover's Dictionary, both of which I read but would have liked for school). I began reading Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler's The Future of Us at lunch Tuesday, and I finished it on the flight home.

Next year, both NCTE and ALAN are in Las Vegas. I have marked my calendar.

Budding digital librarians

2011-11-18T18:00:00.000-06:00

I skyped in to Marc Aronson's class at Rutgers Wednesday night while he was away at the National Book Awards. David Rothrock from Follett was there to pinch-hit for Marc, and I talked a little bit about my experience with ebooks and ereaders in a school setting.

I was a little jealous all the students there had the luxury of thinking deeply about digital resources. I know that expertise will come in handy immediately, since this seems to be the flashpoint of the day. And it actually made me think of the Digital Libraries class I took in 2000 with Professor Malinconico, where I did a final presentation on Project Gutenberg, which I love more deeply now than ever and now use almost daily. It was tremendously heartening to see all these young professionals asking really intelligent questions about a very murky and confusing topic.

One student asked specifically about current awareness mechanisms. I promised to send this list of blogs, events, and review sites:

Blogs

Future Book http://www.futurebook.net/

No Shelf Required http://www.libraries.wright.edu/noshelfrequired/

TeleRead http://www.teleread.com/

EduKindle http://www.edukindle.com/

A Kindle World http://kindleworld.blogspot.com/

Digital Shift http://www.thedigitalshift.com/, especially content by Josh Hadro there and in Library Journal

App reviews

YALSA App reviews http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/category/apps/

Touch and Go SLJ App reviews http://blog.schoollibraryjournal.com/touchandgo/

Events

SLJ Summit http://www.sljsummit2011.com/ (face-to-face)

LJ eBook Summit http://www.thedigitalshift.com/events/e-book-summit/ (virtual)

Thinking about it now, I would have added some more general interest library blogs, like Bobbi Newman's Librarian by Day and Sarah Houghton-Jan's Librarian in Black, which almost necessarily bump into ebook issues these days. I find I tend to get "too narrow" in my thinking in the first iteration these days. But I love the idea of helping young librarians cultivate their own professional learning ecosystems.

At AASL

2011-10-31T10:48:00.000-05:00

More stuff from around the web related to things I did at AASL this past week:

AASL Day One: E-ink and Collection Development from American Libraries

Preparing Tomorrow's School Library Leaders from School Library Journal

Buffy's YouTube Video from my Talk on Librarian Image in the Learning Commons

50 Cent and school libraries

2011-10-30T22:41:00.001-05:00

I just got off the plane from the AASL National Conference. Every little bit of it was terrific, most especially the F. Scott Fitzgerald Walking Tour and the Closing Celebration at the Nicollet Island Pavillion. I also had great visits to the Walker Art Center and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Minneapolis (and St. Paul!) are way cool and I never knew it...

In the learning commons, the preconference, and the convention center, I managed to catch up with too many colleagues to list, but my favorite sessions by far were Lisa Perez's wonderful but unintimidating discussion of the important role librarians serve in integrating technology in schools, and Mimi Ito's closing keynote on harnessing student's digital energy for the good.

Ito's positive examples of media production were on my mind when I started reading 50 Cents' forthcoming book, Playground, on the way home. The protagonist is Butterball, an eighth grader with a passionate interest in film and manga and comics. The plot centers around an incident stemming what he believes to be a deep betrayal on the part of one of his few friends at his Long Island junior high school. But I keyed on two passages in particular:

"...when I was at the library at school, I looked up Batman and ended up finding out a bunch of shit about the guy who'd made the latest adaptation. Christopher Nolan, that's his name. I was interested, you know? He was like my opposite in every way -- from England, and rich and snooty and all the shit you'd expect, the kind of guy who'd cross to the side of the street if he saw me coming. But one thing really stood out for me, and that was that this cat made his first movie when he was seven years old. Isn't that crazy? I mean it was the same age I was then, and that brother had already made a movie? Man." (p.111)

Butterball began saving for his own camera, and edits video on it until he eventually gets a computer from an unlikely ally to craft a film, "The Superhero of Suburbia," for application to an arts magnet.

"I bought a Kryptonite lock for my locker and spent every free period and lunch holed up in the library, reviewing the footage Malik and I had shot the afternoon before" (p.227).

The language is a little strong, but it was otherwise a rather inoffensive read for middle grades, and very entertaining. As with last year's Val Frankel-ghosted Snookie book A Shore Thing, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and what an important representation of the potential role of school libraries in both young people's everyday life information seeking and multimedia production!

Thanks, Curtis. And thanks to the great conference committee -- it was my very favorite AASL (so far!).

Gearing up for #AASL11

2011-10-23T10:58:00.000-05:00

The every-other-year experience that is the AASL National Conference really IS the ultimate professional experience for school librarians. I've added more sessions than I could ever attend to my conference planner -- oh! the conflicts... -- but I'm very excited to see old friends and meet new ones in Minneapolis.

You can catch me ---

at the full-day preconference Wednesday on 21st Century Collections with Angela Carstensen, Buffy Hamillton, Frances Harris, and Laura Pearle

at a Thursday learning commons discussion of school librarian image and proactive ways to combat negative stereotypes which dog us

in a Friday session on leadership routes in school libraries, with Sarah Kelly Johns, Gwyneth Jones, Shannon Miller, Margaux DelGuidice, and Laura Warren-Gross.

I am also going on the F. Scott Fitzgerald walking tour and will be blogging for the AASL blog throughout. Hope to see you there!

Reading, on the beach

2011-10-22T00:31:00.002-05:00

I should be on my way across the Pacific Ocean right now, but American Airlines (who robbed me of the first days of my last two vacations, incidentally -- you'd think I'd learn) had other plans...

Anyway, I spent the last week on fall break in Maui. It was a rather atypical vacation for us, being resort-based, but I did get to observe the reading and working habits of many middle class individuals in Wailea, so that was something. My ethnographic notes:

• Dedicated ereaders abounded. And on the beach, and by the pool. I saw all varieties of Kindles and nooks, but also a bunch of Kobo readers.

• I was a little flabbergasted with the number of people contending with with iPads and MacBooks while sopping wet. And iPhones, Blackberrys, and SLRs. I am loathe to bring an iPod on the beach, but I seem alone in that reluctance.

• European visitors to the Fairmont Kea Lani were more likely than American counterparts to stick to print.

• Roughly one in four female visitors reading books were reading one book. The Help. I think that book is deeply offensive on so many levels, but that's an entry for another day. But the irony of reading something so self-congratulatory in such a context of privilege smacks on confirmation bias of some sort.

I read a stack of vintage Agatha Christies (all Poirot) instead of anything e. And I've caught up on 1200 entries in my RSS reader while stranded in Honolulu. Which was entirely depressing.

And I saw the Lahaina Public Library.

1:1 versus 1:100

2011-10-13T07:19:00.000-05:00

Since my trip to Kentucky, I have been fretting over how far behind we've fallen over the last few years. I am thrilled that we have maintained our staffing. With the exception of the increased divisor which left us with five fewer faculty members this year, our schools are more intact than many. But there are still problems.

The area I am most concerned about is technology. The district technology coordinator came by my school two weeks ago to help set up a mobile IVC lab for a virtual field trip, and he told me the number of computers in this year's budget -- about five per school, for 27 schools -- with the caveat that he was asked not to buy those until later in the fiscal year, suggesting he really might not be able to order them at all. Meanwhile, in many of the schools of the Kentucky media specialists who I met over there, there are laptops for each child. How can our students catch up in a 1:1 world, given the 1:100 ratio in my library and little open lab time? I have been working around it by bringing computers from my home, but I don't have an unlimited number of those, and they can't go on the school networks, which limits their utility to offline multimedia production.

Our library's student machines are limping along. I've paid from my scant funds to max out the RAM, but the newest are more than six years old. When I contrast them with those in the labs, they are positively zippy. Though I'm down more than $45,000 over the three years of zeroed materials funding, I can scrounge books, between conferences and publisher's samples and my own pocket. But computers are a larger proposition, especially given the ridiculous bid list pricing. I am afraid it will be a bloodbath to jockey for position when we open a new high school, given the increasing contest for scarce available resources. New schools get three years of library materials funding...and new computers.

I said this summer that their hadn't been palpable anxiety about the state cutting librarian and media specialists from the schools, but doesn't it feel like that might be an inevitable long-term outcome when those resource-based professionals are not given sufficient funding to carry out their job properly, year after year? Doesn't that increase the likelihood they won't be able to satisfy the needs of our students and teachers?

The young faculty don't know how their teaching lives could be different, with money for technology and professional development and common purchases. A member of our English department asked if I would get the $140 in classroom supply money that the teachers were allotted. When I told her about my prior budgets, literally more than a hundred time that amount, she expressed sheer surprise. I hope she is a teacher long enough that she will experience the luxury of those funds returning.

The evolving nature of intellectual freedom

2011-10-03T08:25:00.001-05:00

When I began my work as a school librarian, I believed standing against censorship was the most fundamental tenent of our profession. I did a big banned books research project with some English classes, and intellectual freedom was at the center of much of my earliest writing and presenting.

But I have been thinking about the elimination of school librarians and school libraries as another, more insidiuous form of limiting our students' access to information. And I chalked up another roadblock over the weekend. I got to speak to the Kentucky School Media Association, and my suggestion that we read a book each day was met with some disbelief. What can I read everyday? Well, somedays it's adult books, some days YA, somedays nonfiction, but I do average a book a day. Where do I read? Well, not at school, which seemed to be the anticipated answer. But think about it. If we aren't modeling reading daily, and we aren't getting to know our collections to connect them to both student readers and curriculum support, isn't that information as good as banned? As librarians, we alone can make the connection between the materials and the readers which enables real intellectual freedom, or so I would like to think.

And, as Banned Websites Awareness Day highlighted, access to information is more complex in a digital environment. Equity issues still plague us. I am anticipating some of the multimedia files in the ebooks I have bought from Amazon will work with the new $199 Kindle Fire, but what about with their $79 entry-level e-ink reader?

The 2011 National Book Festival

2011-09-27T12:31:00.001-05:00

I can't stop talking about the National Book Festival. It had been on my radar since I arrived in D.C. on October 9, 2004 -- just after that year's event -- to visit the new National Museum of the American Indian. Little had I known, I would had left home a day earlier. This year, I finally got to go...

I arrived about an hour before the speakers began, which put me in a prime viewing location for Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison, who wrote Song of Solomon (which I read for class in high school), Sula (which I read for class in college) and Beloved (which I wrote a paper about for my English M.A.). Our Nobel-prize-winning American woman author. And since I scored an awesome seat in the second row, I felt like she was making eye contact with me the entire time, as she talked about:

the excellent education she obtained from her normal-school educated teachers in Lorain, Ohio
Muhammad Ali, and how his religion shaped his attitudes towards women
William Faulkner, who wrote perfectly realized characters across race
Washington, D.C., black intellectual life the 1940s

Next, I did beat a path to the Teen tent next, to hear Sarah Dessen (and hear the questions from her many adoring fans. To the college girl who announced herself "on the upper end of [Sarah's] readership" -- I don't think you are anywhere towards the limit of that bell curve. But the real *shocker* for me was the fact that Sarah used to work for Lee Smith. Lee was also Susan Gregg Gilmore's seventh grade English teacher... what an amazing literary legacy there.

I was able to stay just long enough to hear Katherine Paterson. Jacob Have I Loved (which I read in middle school) is one of the most powerful books I keep coming back to again and again, and hearing Paterson speak about the primal sibling relationship (as well as showcase her new book, The Flint Heart, with illustrations by John Rocco, who did the covers for the Percy Jackson series) was terrific. Their emphasis on books as gorgeous objects was especially dear to my heart (and gorgeous The Flint Heart is, as it was published by Candlewick).

I had met (and gushed) to Sarah and Katherine before, but I certainly hadn't attended a book festival on this scale. I really do recommend it if you ever have the opportunity to go. Being surrounded by tens of thousands of people who all love books is quite heartening.

School Library Journal Leadership Summit -- Best of the Best

2011-09-23T17:03:00.000-05:00

The School Library Journal Leadership Summit is probably my favorite conference, because of the baseline presumption that everyone is sort of with-it when it comes to technology, and all the exciting backchanneling and just generally top-notch attendees. That was doubly true this year, as everything dealt with the shift from print to digital.

I spoke on a ebook panel, a first for me at this event and a tad intimatidating given the fact I knew and stood in awe of so many in the room. I was a little leery about the whole thing, frankly, because I don't want people to copy my sometimes half-baked strategies wholesale, because I think every library is very different. And I had to follow Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, so no pressure there. But it was fun to share a model that wasn't about the big ebook players (sorry, vendors), but about leveraging student devices and using the simplest hardware to access public domain works. And to hear Chris Harris say, "Do what Wendy is doing. Buy hardware," was a bit surprising, but very validating.

Other highlights included the amazing Brian Selznick sharing the process for Wonderstuck, his latest, and screening the trailer for Hugo, the upcoming Scorsese movie version of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which looks so much like the book it's eerie. Evidentally, it's being called Hugo Cabret in France. It was a sort of strange flashback to this same weekend last year, when I'd seen Brian at the Center for Puppetry Arts as part of the ALSC Institute in Atlanta. And I finally met Laurel Snyder, who I'd been looking for that night last year but never found. And I actually got the first signed copy of her new book, Bigger than a Breadbox.

I'm staying over for the National Book Festival, but the forecast is for a rainy Saturday, which makes me happy it's also Museum Day.

Book Book

2011-09-09T16:35:00.002-05:00

is the perfect camouflage for your computer! My husband said he catches himself wondering what that very old book could be. I just like the meta aspect, myself...

Where I've been

2011-09-09T05:49:00.000-05:00

I felt as if I spent all last week away from the world during my administrative internship. This week, I scrambled back, only to have the rug yanked out from under me again next week, going back to another school to finish up those certification requirements.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dangerbird/

Being unplugged made the time at the K-6 school much more immediate. I was definitely registering more stimula than I do sitting working at the computer (and now often at two computers, since I have the kiosk going for the catalog and printing and email and troubleshooting). It was actually a relief not to be swallowing whole raw information about ebooks or social justice or machine intelligence or whatever else I'm obsessing over at the moment all day long.

But, in some ways, I need that distracting stream of content to keep me focused. My acuity decreased, I lost hours of time offline once I went home. I found it almost impossible to write anything much all week. I can usually crank out copy, so the mental effort it took me to readjust was a marked change. All that reminds me of the AASL 2011 One Conference, One Book selection, The Shallows. Minneapolis looks like a great conference...

I do have lots of comings-and-goings before then. I will be at the School Library Journal Summit in Virginia, September 21-23, then at the Kentucky School Media Association, September 29 - October 1.

With this internship wrapping up next week and the Praxis on September 17, everyone wants to know what is going to be next. After this certification, all I am concerned with is finishing my dissertation. I keep saying I won't commit to much else, and probably have been better about parsing back and getting rid of clutter, like deleting Google+ and cleaning out my file folders from 2003. There are aspects of my job from which I continue to derive great pleasure, but I can't say I'm not scanning the horizon for the next thing.

Echo chambers, ostriches, and navel gazing

2011-09-01T07:06:00.000-05:00

Preaching to the choir here, but if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.

We are abandoning the cornerstones of democracy, couching it as temporary austerity, and no one seems to care or even notice. Communities are evolving without oversight. And all everyone seems to care about is the Hunger Games, when very real ones are being played out daily.

A local superintenedent with a mere year of educational experience crows about his cost reductions in using a temporary service for instructional support staff, so they didn't have to be provided benefits. Paying people starvation wages and then expecting them to nurture our most vulnerable children is unrealistic, especially when you don't even support them with basic needs like health care.

I didn't think it was possible for me to get more upset than I was when I wrote about similar issues for the Future of Libraries ebook project spearheaded by Kristin Fonticiaro and Buffy Hamilton, but I am very worried that as a society we have abandoned any pretext of equality. And without that undergirding, we might as well just fight hand-to-hand.

And, really, I feel like our students (and their families) need really fundamental survival training now.

What has been missing from my educational leadership coursework

2011-08-19T07:17:00.004-05:00

Being in the middle of two different grad programs simultaneously has been making me a little nuts, but last night something rather incredible happened.

I had comprehensive exams for the educational leadership certificate. We had to prepare a position paper on a controversial topic, and I chose school libraries materials challenges. Frankly, I wanted a little soapbox to talk about libraries, because they hadn't come up at all in the coursework. Not even one sideways mention of school libraries. If I had a nickel for every mention of coaches, or even yearbook sponsors, I'd be heading to Starbucks, but not one little utterance, from professors or practitioners, about the librarian and the media center. And, otherwise, the curriculum has seemed both pragmatic and exhaustive. So I wrote about materials selection policies and the importance of school libraries as laboratories for intellectual freedom and the wisdom of following an objection procedure to mitigate your chances of appearing in Censorship Watch.

In an intersting pedagogical twist, we had to describe and defend each other's papers. Anyway, after we completed the exam portion, the director of the program, who happens to be one of those indefatiguable educators, in his 70s but still energetic and incredibly thoughtful, said, as he wished us well, "I realize now we have two holes in the curriculum, libraries and counseling. We should cover those."

Gratifying.

Now I have a two-week internship, a week each in two elementary schools in my district, then the Praxis next month...and then I can focus entirely on getting my dissertation proposal together for my other grad program...

Back-to-school

2011-08-12T06:00:00.001-05:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/darkmavis/125597326/sizes/o/in/photostream/

I facilitated a two and a half hour literacy workshop for our faculty yeterday morning. It was really unlike anything I've ever done at school in that I did not break a sweat. Granted, it wasn't terribly demanding of me -- I introduced two hours of Cris Tovani video and led discussion every half hour, in between tapes (yes, we use VCRs, go head and laugh). But I do usually get anxious when I have to present anything to the whole staff.

I often talk to larger groups, usually librarians or technology teachers, but for some reason speaking to my own faculty always worries me out of all proportion. Maybe it's all the men, the sometimes loutish coaches (I mean the one who left the Mountain Dew can with the tobacco spit out in it where I had to pick it up this morning. Yuck!). I'm starting my tenth school year here, so maybe I have the veteran status which quiets them. Maybe it's because I'm old enough to not play the smiling ingenue. Or maybe just because I'm on my game after a summer off. Or maybe it was the incredibly applicable strategies Tovani showcased. Whatever the reason, I felt like the group was actually quite easy to manage and even engage on the topic of improving adolescent literacy, our school-wide mission.

We've 76 certified staff members, down from 81 last year, and of course more students. Our really wonderful principal, who has been in that position almost three decades, announced he will be retiring December 1st. When school starts on Monday, the classes will be huge, and this will probably be a third year without instructional supply money, including library materials funding. But, on the whole, it seemed like everyone was in an incredibly positive mood, despite the S.O.S. Rally, despite the teacher-bashing in the media, and despite the sense of gloom and doom from outside. We have eight new teachers, and I'm particularly excited about our new social studies department chair, since I especially love to work with history classes.

Today, my terrific paraprofessional aide returns, and I'll hold a website training for new faculty. I have a few new books I begged and borrowed to get to our kids, and four computers in the back room. If I can figure out a way to get them on the network, it would bring us to 18, which is how many we would need to accomodate a class with 2 students per machine. Since getting the second librarian unit for the second semester last year, I've been in the building more and have both recovered and scavenged some things.

I am trying to relax and savor the possibility and promise of this fresh start. Who knows where I'll be this time next year...

Could riots in London be bad for students in Alabama?

2011-08-09T05:40:00.000-05:00

I have been trying to push for the use of student-owned hardware to help improve the overall level of technology integration in K-12 education for a bit. Now, in addition to the anxieties about cheating and sexting, I have to worry about one of the subtler thematic elements playing out now in the press coverage of the London riots, that of the subversive possibilities of organization, be it political or criminal, via mobile devices.

While the Blackberry might be uniquely suited for these purposes (and, meanwhile, I am the only one noticing the predeliction for BBs among teen texters, especially if they have a model with a grandfathered "text-only" plan without data?), I worry that the hysteria will extend to any device which allows students to communicate. Pencil and paper? Slates and chalk?

I guess I have been thinking a lot about organization versus control in school environments. I have been wondering how many policies have been put into place because of the inability of a handful of teachers to manage their students. But, chasing cell phones, I feel a little like these blundering security guards, pulling at some straws related to terror attacks:

Meanwhile, I have resorted to the Torygraph.

#libday7

2011-07-30T16:38:00.004-05:00

As a school librarian, this is my much-coveted summer break. I was at a board meeting years ago where there was some suggestion the librarians' contract be extended, so they could serve students all year. Those of us that were there bristled, and we still have our summers off.

What is typical for summer? Would that be traveling, or presenting at a conference, or leading a workshop? Well, for the purposes of #libday7, Monday, I was out of town, Tuesday I was in a meeting until the early afternoon, but Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were all more typical "summer vacation" days. I woke up after 6, about an hour later than I would for school.

I spend my morning reading. I received The Rules of Civility by Amor Towles the day before, and I was desperate to finish it. I'm very glad I got this one in print, I know I will pass it around. The voice is so incredibly convincing that I gasped at the author picture, determined it would be the product of a woman. I also made notes for an article I want to write intermittently, using a black flair pen and a legal pad.

By 8:00, I'm dressed "Portland-style," with a red ikat dress over one of my many pairs of white jeans. I add some sandals when I leave the house. I drink Antony and Cleopatra (a black fermented tea) from a big, Cath Kidston retro 1950s mug I bought in the Seven Dials. I wake up my husband.

I get to my current awareness later in the morning that usual because of the novel. I work creating on my to-list for the rest of the week (and the summer break) with some dissertation targets, a grant application, and some paperwork. I move through my email, my rss and twitter feeds. Everyone I know seems to be in Boston for #blc, which looks like a terrific time. I see that the Kindle terms-of-service have come back to haunt some of the school libraries using that hardware. This was something I've been worried about for a while. I mentioned it explicitly at Internet Librarian in March. It seems to have created a big ripple in the biblioblogosphere.

I switch from the iPad to an actual computer around 9:15. I write up the App of the Week for the YALSA blog, but have trouble with manipulating the images in WordPress. I send the screenshots from my iPad to flickr, and then capture them to the desktop. I have trouble uploading images, and I see multiple iterations of each screenshot but can't embed seem to them from that screen. I switch to the PC, which wants to update, then restart the Mac. At 10:15, I am still fighting with the Mac, and I reset the cable modem and wireless router. It's 10:45 before I'm done posting, which is ridiculous.

As far as the post itself, I had wanted to write about the new feature of the Kindle App ever since I heard about the new support for magazines, but of course it was an especially potent moment with all the anti-Amazon sentiment engendered by their terms-of-service. I bought Self, because I thought it would provide a digital conversion challenge that The Economist might not, but I was not one hundred percent about the admittedly superficial content. I compromised by NOT including the cover with the bikini pose...

Because of the computer woes, I know I will be spending time looking at hardware. Maybe I just need to upgrade! I have trips to plan for fall break and New Year's. I spend a lot of time on this sort of thing during the summer, requiring some elaborate calculus like "x pairs of Frye shoes equal y tickets to Paris equals z iPads."

I pick up my husband for lunch, but we walk out of the first restaurant after a half hour and the wrong drink order. We end up having veggie burgers which are only so-so, but we are both feeling rushed and I am feeling poisoned from accidently drinking diet soda. I run errands after lunch, going to Starbucks, but it is too crowded, so I don't park. For dinner, I want to re-create an avocado, Brie and pear sandwich from Blackfin Bistro in Key West, and go to both the chi chi market and the bakery. I go to the pharmacy and pick up my prescriptions. I don't take a nap, but spend the afternoon down several online rabbit holes, shopping for airfare, setting up AASL blog logins for a couple of people, looking at some little-used email accounts, reading about Lucien Freud and adding titles to Shelfari. I watch an episode of Bewitched and a show called Nazi London on the military channel, which makes me all the more determined to visit again soon.

In later afternoon, the mailman brings a kaftan-top and shawl I ordered from Cath Kidston a couple of weeks before (and had completely forgotten about in the meantime). They are pink ikat, and the tunic sleeves are 3/4 length and the embroidery's not really my thing, but the shipping was astronomical. At one point, I rub what I think is Molton Brown lotion onto my arms only to discover it's really hair conditioner. Most of the afternoon is spent feeling vaguely guilty for not going to school, but my last trip out there was frustrated because everyone is away from campus, and I don't want to replay that.

Frankly, this summer hasn't reached the atelier-like levels of production I'd hoped. But there is another week to write and plan before we return to school, and I still have a couple of personal days left to plot out.

Borders...

2011-07-21T08:57:00.000-05:00

I was working with a a group of teachers in our county, talking about the kick-backs from Google's digital bookstore to local bookstores yesterday when I realized we don't have any independent booksellers around here. Two Barnes and Noble, three Books-a-Million, a couple of remainder outlets and secondhand places. Then, just this morning, I saw Susan's excellent post about Borders closing, and it started me thinking about the strange relationship I have with big bookstores.

I have never lived in a town with a Borders, except for the year we lived in Ann Arbor. We were not far from Borders Number One at Liberty street. I found the Paperchase things I had only ever bought in the U.K., and the Post Secret books, and more of the graphic novels I needed for the English department class I was taking second semester than I would at the comic book shop, the Vault of Midnight.

Prior to Michigan, I'd always been a used bookstore kind of girl. I worked at one during high school and college, and it really fit my eclectic and generalist ethos, but the used stores in Ann Arbor were dreadful. There was one shop where all the stock was mildewed, just walking by gave me an asthma attack, and while I scooped up an Agatha Christie or two from the Dawn Treader, it was a rather miserable experience. By contrast, Borders with their weekly 20% off Internet coupons, was a clean, neat, and well-organized nirvana. Plus it was incredibly central, across the street from friends of ours' downtown apartment, a place I met my husband when either of us would need a ride back from campus.

It was so cold that all I did was huddle under the covers, fully dressed, for about seven months. and I did get the bulk of my reading that year from the Ann Arbor District Library. I would go multiple times a week, and it was really rare that they didn't own something I wanted. You could place holds against items on the shelf, too, and I don't think I ever waited more than a couple of weeks for anything.

So while this begun as a paean to a bookstore I am finding is really iconic for a lot of people in my generation, it ended as a celebration of libraries. I somehow always get there in the end.

What I've been up to...

2011-07-20T17:55:00.002-05:00

Many of you know how much time I've been devoting to moving forward on my dissertation this summer. I really feel some momentum, and I am giddy with excitement. I know I still have many, many stages ahead, but I am moving, and that is almost entirely new.

Last week, I spent an inordinate amount starting at an Adobe Connect screen. I did a couple of Virtual ALA presentations based on actual ALA presentations from June. The first was Pecha Kucha, with my topic being "reading on the screen." Fun, I love the concept and hope to keep using it with my students this fall.

The second of my Virtual ALA presentations was my piece of "From Gutenberg to Google and Glogs, Books to Vooks," which was immediately afterwards. Beyond the simple, getting-connected issues that plagued the event, it was really fun, particularly the backchanneling. At one point, someone commented that they wanted less of a philosophy course and more practical ideas. I have actually been finding that I enjoy presentations that are more abstract and less proscriptive, so it was a grounding thing to hear. And some of their comments, especially in the social media panel before Pecha Kucha and danah boyd's keynote, really gave me some insight into the minimal level of technological comfort or understanding that some of our membership possess.

Then, last Thursday, also using Adobe Connect, I led a webinar on "eReaders and your Library" for YALSA. Earlier today, I was in a conference call with one of the YALSA members who had participated, and she really emphasized my discussion of low-cost ways to connect readers with ebooks in our later conversation. This was something it was really important for me to convey, so I was glad to know it came across and had obviously inspire her to think beyond paid models. That webinar, like all of those in YALSA's monthly professional development series, will be available to members in a couple of months. At one point, I polled the audience, and it did seem like most libraries were in the planning and research phases, figuring out how to serve their communities with ebooks.

I spent the past two days with teachers in my district, working through the Google Apps but also just talking about e-reading, augmented reality, html5, the stupidity of student response systems, the filter bubble, and playing with Google+. I let them see all my circle and experience the post-and-reply. I wish I could have coordinated a hang-out, but we didn't have a webcam, and most of them were pretty dazzled as it was...

I really enjoyed getting to work with a broad cross-section of teachers, and helping them set up feed readers to create their own PLNs was especially fun. I was so happy I could suggest someone in almost every content area and grade configuration, as well as a lot of general education and reading people, too.

Those were the last of my summer workshops...

Why I don't follow you (or unfollowed you) or twitter

2011-07-19T17:41:00.000-05:00

Perhaps it's the new Grace Dent book or the great migration to Google +, but I have been thinking about my own social media practice, what makes it fun and rewarding, and which elements are stressful and need to be minimized.

I think every tweep has some twitter kryptonite -- that individual, esteemed in their field and a valuable contributor, who nonetheless cannot be followed. I am rethinking using twitter as an awareness technology, as its users real a critical mass and its norms shift and mature. There are lots of you I love in real life, ones whose blogs and articles I devour, but I might not be in step behind you on MY favorite social networking site. My kryptonite:

Twitter as self-promotion, number one: The person who uses tweetdeck or hootsuite or some other software to send the exact same tweet three dozen times. And you can assume they're not reading anyone else's tweets, or they would get how useless and annoying that is...
Twitter as self-promotion, number two: The person who refers to their own projects using superlatives. You wouldn't describe your own work so enthusiastically if you were face-to-face, would you?
Twitter as private conversation: People using the @ when it should be a dm. I can see how this is an easy habit to slip into, but really -- do go private.
Over-tweeting, especially of non-original content. This is a sad one, because if those links or resources were packaged more judiciously -- perhaps as a blog entry-- you could scan it and pick up on the few new to you and feel gratified. Instead, you are forced to look at the same tweep again and again, for little reward.
Twitter as a means to save yourself a little money. Once in a while, I might be interested in a Groupon, but is it worth spamming all your followers for a $5 Amazon video credit? Also applies to the "retweet this to enter" contests. At what cost?
Are more than half of your updates Foursquare checkins, paper.li dailies you have automated, or your auto-tweeted horoscope? So not interested. GoodReads I can just about bear...
People who re-tweet the things our thought leaders say. I really don't get this one, since it logically follows that we all pay attention some of the same people. I really don't feel you get a lot out of someone RTing some XX,000-follower tweep who everyone is following. Too many of these tweeps, who I have decided not to follow, make their way into my stream in this way. I think it's finding those gems from tweeps with single and double-digit followers that proves real twitter acumen.

With those thorny issues in mind, I think I will either have to create lists to manage my tweeps, something I swore I'd never do, or just unfollow a particular dozen or so, mostly people I know in real life, who don't use microblogging the same way I do. I feel both are losing propositions.

I don't think my way of using twitter is better, just different, but it is better for me.

I get tricked by the Internet...

2011-07-11T09:12:00.001-05:00

Since the late 1990s, I have used aldaily.com as my homepage. It's a wonderfully curated collection of articles of political, literary, and academic interest. But just last week, the filter bubble caught me there, to a potentially ruinous degree.

I returned an email from my dissertation advisor, and when I relaunched my browser, I saw an ad for some scientific research at UNT, where I am working on that degree. OMG, I thought, UNT is really spending money on advertisitng (and I am a donor as well as a student), but given that aldaily is now under the auspices of the Chronicle of Higher Ed, it seemed an audacious move for what is essentially a normal school.

Well, I only realized my folly much later, when I saw the same ad, but where North Texas had been earlier, it read Vanderbilt University. Just before, I had been looking up directions to Nashville's Kidlit drink night, a stone's throw from the Vanderbilt campus. I have tried to replicate this, and I mostly end up with ads for Bryant in Smithfield, RI (yes, the one from the NPR ads).

I gave a keynote speech just last month warning of the dangers of the increasingly customized web experience, and here it bites me, and I am none the wiser. It didn't help that that the ad was green and white, UNT colors. But think about our students -- suddenly, they see ads from the school they were considering. How does that reinforce its primacy in the world of academe? It MUST appear to be the best school, given that it keeps appearing everywhere they go...if it gave me the warm fuzzies, how might they react?

And now we are all jumping on the Google+ bandwagon, giving marketers even more information about ourselves and our associations to better target their products and services. Scary stuff, be careful out there.

ALA wrap-up: The conference just isn't complete without a little longer-form reflection

2011-07-04T20:24:00.001-05:00

I have spent the last week physically recovering from whatever I picked up at ALA. What can I say? The sessions were terrific, the author events unparalleled (the Printz speeches were in turn hysterical and distressing, the Newbery/Caldecott left me in a puddle of tears), and I attended new councilor orientation (convincing me I won't ever have a spare minute at Annual, not for the next three years -- I will have to sneak off to Youth Media Awards events from here on out). Except for the Out of Print Nancy Drew tee and a signed copy of One Crazy Summer, I didn't do very well on the exhibit floor, emerging without the few ARCs I particularly coveted, but I need to be working on my dissertation for the rest of the summer anyway....and it was my most favorite American city, which made the (surprise!) drive a little bit more bearable

What I noticed: there was palpable anxiety about e-reading, which I wrote about for the AASL blog. I think dedicated e-readers have gone from being a novelty to being a point of either pioneer-type pride or abject derision for school librarians. I don't know how this will all shake out, because the emerging models don't take libraries into account and the new K12 etextbook model is based on per-student licensing. I don't want this to be the hill we school librarians die upon...

Most exciting: meeting new school and youth services librarians, full of energy and idealism. There is a new attitude there, and I find it quite invigorating, but it does make me feel a bit of an elderly stateswoman, if one from a very small and insignificant country.

10!

2011-06-15T03:53:00.000-05:00

Believe it or not, it has been just more than ten years since I graduated from library school at Tuscaloosa. I had several different careers before then, in production at a local television station, freelancing features for the newspaper, teaching community college English and three-year-olds at preschool, among other things.

I went to work at Sirsi ten years ago this month, and it was a wonderful education in networking and computing in general. It was really fascinating to see all the different types of library settings and hear about their practice, but I did want my own library laboratory. I've been at Buckhorn for eight and a half years now, and it has been wonderful.

I'm celebrating this decade in myriad ways:

I was asked to present the keynote for the Alabama School Library Association annual conference on Monday, and a session on technology in the library that afternoon. I was really overwhelmed by the kindness of the board and the members, their engagement, and their interest in the topic, which was Future-Proofing Your Library.

I received the new Ann Marie Pipkin Technology award from that organization, our AASL affiliate. It is an honor named for one of Alabama's most influential school librarians. It was all the more wonderful because my assistant principal, Sarah Fanning, won the ASLA Distinguished Administrator award this year as well. She has been a tremendous professional inspiration and personal support. We owe Carolyn Starkey tremendously for her nominations!

I spoke four different times at the Alabama State Department of Education Technology Initiatives Library Media Symposium Tuesday -- first for the general session, twice on what I'm calling the Google reading suite (reader, news, scholar, and books) and once on Google searching (which was a pinch-hit). Exhausting but such fun and important topics! I loved the circularity in talking about digital equity more than ten years after I wrote my first survey paper on the topic (and, as a huge bonus, my professor from that course was there to hear it!) The Symposium is part of the Alabama Educational Technology Conference, which is always terrific. I'll be back there presenting again Thursday...

The Library Symposium was really exciting. Everyone was buzzing about Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble and RSS. So almost ten years after XML changed my life, I am finally selling it... Also, Cyndy Dunning and Charlotte Owen, two of the elementary librarians from my district, were in Birmingham for both the events. It made for a really powerful learning experience for all of us, because we were able to confer after the sessions and throw ideas about.

It was also terrific to hear and see the work of my PLN in every corner of the Symposium -- watching a recorded Skype interview with Shannon Miller about web 2.0 tools, a clip with Buffy Hamilton interviewing students about Evernote, or seeing Comic Life posters inspired by Gwyneth Jones' creative signage. These amazing women are changing the culture of school librarianship everywhere!

Anyway, I will continue the decadery celebration at ALA Annual -- again, my first ALA Annual was San Francisco in 2001! -- where I will attend AASL All-Committee, the Web Presence Advisory Committee meeting, and the Council orientation and Youth Caucus.

I am also presenting a few times:

AASL: From Gutenberg to Google and Glogs panel Saturday June 25, 1:30 to 3:30.
YALSA: Distance Issues in Teen Librarianship panel Sunday June 26, 1:30 to 3:30.
YALSA: Pecha Kucha, Sunday June 26 at 10:30.

I hope to post more about the specifics of the programs, but, in the mean time, the latest incarnation of the ALA Conference Scheduler is really fab.

I feel really fortunate to have found my way to such an invigorating and vital profession.

In the land of dreamy dreams, New Orleans

2011-06-02T20:29:00.001-05:00

I haven't even begun to get my schedule together for ALA Annual in New Orleans later this month, but I can't wait to visit one of my favorite cities with my people.

If you're headed to New Orleans for the first time, I hope you have lots of time to wander around. Don't miss the Odgen Museum of Southern Art. It's a Smithsonian affiliate, a great space with excellently curated exhibits. I saw their last Birney Imes photography exhibit, and it was incredible and how perfectly appropriate for a visit to the Deep South! And if I had never been to New Orleans, I would definitely take the streetcar, probably into the Garden District. A few more suggestions....

Everyone likes Cafe du Monde, but I really like CC's Community Coffee House on Royal Street. Royal Street is what you think of, all the wrought iron, crumbling plaster, and street signs in French. Someone asked about music. There's music everywhere. Try Frenchman Street any evening. The Avenue Pub over there is fun, too. If worse comes to worse, there's always Preservation Hall.

I'm a teetotaler, but when in New Orleans I will have a Pimm's cup at Napoleon House, which was closed during the last ALA Annual in 2006, and a hurricane at Pat O'Brien's, where you have to sit in the courtyard. Whatever you do in New Orleans, it should involve ample sitting in courtyards. And, when I was there in February, there was a new Pinkberry near the conference center, but no courtyard.

New Orleans is NOT vegetarian-friendly. When I was there last, I was served a grilled cheese sandwich filled with bacon. So don't say I didn't warn you... If I were going to splurge on one meal, I'd eat at Bayona. You'll get all the Susan Spicer references in Treme. It's an incredible menu that melds all kinds of influences. I also really like the strawberry milkshakes at Stanley! on Jackson Square, a stone's throw from the cathedral and all the street artists and performers. Also try Stella! and the Cafe Beignet, with its courtyard next door to the police station, where there are usually some cats.

For shopping, you will definitely want to hit the French Market for the best tat. There's Hemline, and some great stores in the Shops at Canal Place and at the Riverwalk, especially the store which sells repro folk art. Also, some of the stuff from Marie Lauveau's House of Voodoo is worth a look. Also, find Faulkner House Books in Pirate's Alley.

Both new vintage Drabble and the next-best thing

2011-05-28T12:18:00.001-05:00

Left-leaning, intellectual with working class cred, Margaret Drabble stands alone among contemporary novelists as uniquely loyal to socialist ideals almost unknown today. I don't typically associated her with short fiction, but was elated when the publication of her uncollected stories, A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, was announced for this spring. There is a rich range of material spanning decades with Drabble's attendant preoccupations represented.

Tessa Hadley's The London Train is a novel I never would have selected based on the cover -- still not sure about that U.S. version -- but the novel itself is preoccupied with both the same intersections of private life and society which typifies her work. Hadley's protagonist of the first half, Paul is precisely situated, "Most of the cohort of cousins in his generation had done well for themselves, they had made the archetypal baby-boomer move out of their parents' class, they were in local government or in hospitals, or worked in middle management."

Hardcore Drabble fans, and there are such things, will delight. When I was working for a library automation vendor, I was sent to a very lovely liberal arts college outside Toronto for the go-live date of their new catalog. Troubleshooting, I searched for Drabble's The Millstone to check how one of the bibliographic fields was reflected after the data conversion. The assistant director caught my query and told me that the sys admin was a Drabble fan as well. She told him of our affinity, a strange thing to share. Another time, I encountered a Drabble cache. Some friends in Ann Arbor had arranged a house swap with their London place. There were multiple copies of he Penguin paperback among the academic couple's books.

The end of a long, strange school year

2011-05-20T07:24:00.000-05:00

Looking back, this has been a long, strange year for me at school. It began with the defection of my chief instructional collaborator, the senior economics teacher, who left to become director of a local park. For four years, we had team-taught a documentary project where every student in the school was required to do research, practice citation, and learn to manipulate audio and video. I saw her classes every week, and stayed late late at night for lab time when the projects were due. It was part of the senior experience, and its loss meant that now we didn't even have anyone who could put together a senior slideshow without hand-holding. It gave me a lot more time to work on other things, but I realized there was no coordinated way to reach the number of students I was able to work with through her.

In January, we had the exciting advent of a second librarian. That has really helped both my stress and workload, and it is lovely to be able to confer with someone sitting beside me about their opinion on a professional topic. Plus, Carolyn's strengths and interests are entirely different from mine. She like desktop publishing, which drives me nuts, and doesn't hesitate to raise her voice to control behavior, something I have always been lax about. My favorite experience has been hearing her tell the parent of a graduating student that their child was irresponsible for having had a book out for four year and yes, they would be required to pay for the fine and the book. I am much more mealy-mouthed and forgiving.

Also, I think because of this third person behind the desk, it seems I don't have the same close bonds with as many students. I think, with three adults, there's more an "us against them," dynamic present.

The year itself was unusual in that we lost a week of instruction to winter weather, and then another to the catastrophic storms April 27. I would say about half of our school, students and faculty, are still suffering with either PTSD or depression. We got a state waiver so we don't have to make up those five school days, but it was really little consolation. The landscape on the drive out here is still scarred past recognition.

Even before our inventory, we were noticing an unprecedented level of theft. Since we don't have state materials funding, and haven't for three year now, so many of those books were the results of hard-fought grant funding, or brought back from conferences like ALAN, or purchased out of my own pocket. Those holes in the collection are causing me tremendous grief right now.

I won't be at graduation, I have a class Monday night so I won't even see my students at their happiest. What class? Well, regular readers will note that I have been allowed to complete my administrative credentialing, almost eight months after the beginning of the wrangling with the state department of education about whether or not I had sufficient teaching experience (shades of the L.A. Inquisition, no?), itself a draining process, even if it did shake out in my favor.

And I expect over the next year, that I will have more tough choices to make as I am forced to contemplate what I want to do next and the long-term viability of school librarianship as a profession, and try desperately to complete my dissertation

Why I actually wish I had a school-aged child

2011-05-19T07:29:00.000-05:00

This isn't about the Godin stuff. mk Eagle and Bobbi Newman expressed the bulk of my sentiments and reservations on that one, other than the fact I would bet money Godin hasn't been in a library in a decade. He's just downloading digital files as he needs them and then crowing about how inexpensive those happen to be, for him. I wrote quite the epic response (for me) response to that all yesterday and lost it in the interwebs.

But I do want to talk about the Los Angeles school librarian interrogations, and what I feel this will come down to, in the end. Parents are going to have to to take up the cause, not my speaking to individual boards or even state legislatures, but by litigating. I don't think many of our schoolchildren, either avid readers or those who need more literacy support, will have access to the print resources they require to understand or extend content objectives or improve their own reading and writing without the range of text in our libraries. And I think we will have to seek legal redress, to ensure school libraries and certified personnel are court-mandated.

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/judicial-system-5.jpg

I wish I had a child (and I have certainly never typed that before!) at a school where services are impacted, because we need a plaintiff. Even in Alabama, where our state-mandated staffing levels for library media specialists lead the nation, and our district recently got told it needed that second unit (that had been funding athletic coaches) in the high school libraries, there have been some upsetting trends emerging. Two of my feeder elementaries will be without paraprofessionals next year. I heard a neighboring district will be filling a librarian vacancy with a half-time employee rather than a full-time one. I plan to make some calls to check in on the legality of all this today. I think this may be a more productive avenue for us than the tired suggestions for grass-roots advocacy.

ASLA/Library Symposium/AETC

2011-05-09T08:46:00.000-05:00

I am still a little beside myself about my election to ALA Council. I have a really full ALA Annual conference schedule looming, but before that, there will be a whole week in June which our state devotes to professional learning...and helping Alabama librarians and teachers improve their practice is something very dear to my heart.

I was very flattered to be asked to give the keynote for ASLA, our recently-renamed (was AIMA) state school library association at their annual conference on Monday, June 13th. It will be about "Future-Proofing The School Library:" In the era of dispensable librarians, there are some easy, digitally-enabled ways to make yourself the school's lead information broker and technology point-person. Discover ways to make increase your program's profile, integrate information literacy, and real-world technology skills, and boost your circulation and increase both student and teacher door count.

I am also going to embed a lot of the experiences I have had recently dealing with our state department of education and their view of librarians as less than classroom teachers, suggesting ways we can change that mindset.

For my breakout session that afternoon, I will be looking at "The Librarian as Technology Leader: One Dozen Ways to Create An Information-Rich, Technologically-Enhanced School Culture:" Online applications can create real opportunities for global connectedness, offer opportunities for authentic information literacy, and showcase student work and learning. Learn about ways to keep your students in the swim of things with an emphasis on free applications and lowest-common-denominator hardware solutions.

This session will be extra-fun because I will get to share the inspirational work of my PLN, so will get to look at a variety of library settings and network restrictions and how school librarians have worked around limitations.

The educational techology conference, AETC, run by our state department of education Technolgy Initiatives division, begins Tuesday June 14th with preconference workshops, including a full-day School Library Symposium. I will be giving some "inspirational" opening remarks as well as a concurrent session on "Reading with Google: Search and Embed Google's Books, Scholar and RSS Reader in Your Library:" Dip into the world of electronic reading using the rich trove of content available via online application. The Google Certified Teacher will present tips and techniques for identifying and accessing the content you and your students want for reading on and offline, on any web-enabled mobile device, and using dedicated e-readers.

That Wednesday, I will get a bit of a breather to enjoy the AETC opening conference session and some of the concurrent ones, but I am presenting again the afternoon of Thursday June 16th. My first session will be "21st Century Reading" and will look a lot like the Google session from Tuesday, and the second will be "eReaders for the Classroom," an e-reading presentation with Carolyn Starkey, not too dissimilar from the ones we have given at Computers in Libraries and the Alabama Library Association conferences.

With our school year extended until June 4th (yes, that is a Saturday) because of the recent weather events, I will be scrambling to pull all this together, and I am thankful for that week between the state stuff and ALA Annual. If you are an Alabama school librarian or teacher, be sure to register for ASLA, the Library Symposium (through AETC), and AETC today.

After the storm

2011-05-02T09:52:00.000-05:00

We spent two hours with the students, without electricity, in the halls under tornado watch last Wednesday. Our school was mentioned by name as the site of a hit that morning, so my cell phone lit up with texts and tweets, but the damage was limited to some smashed safety glass and an detached awning -- entirely superficial. By the time we were released early, I thought the worst of the storms had passed and hurried home.

Dozens of tornadoes went on to hammer the northern part of the state into the night. This Monday is the third of at least four days of school we're out, after the deadly storms which killed a ninth grade girl in our district among more than 200 hundred other people, devastating Tuscaloosa in particular. Lots of people want to know schools they can help. Right now, they are still accounting for people, a task hobbled by lack of electricity. More than a half million homes and businesses in North Alabama lost power when the TVA transmissions lines from Browns Ferry nuclear plant were demolished. TVA and Huntsville Utilities basically had to recreate the power grid from scratch. This morning, they said in the media briefing that about 30 percent of their electricity load was coming through, but that's a lot more than the one percent making it to the hospitals and water treatment plant on Friday morning. We're one of the fortunate households with power.

It was an exercise in patience, but also gratitude. So many people offered me a place to stay. I wanted to be with my home and husband, but I would have been ready to leave town like so many people did if we had lost water. Everyone who stayed was sleeping better without the streetlights and electronic distractions (and the dusk-'til-dawn curfew). I was so grateful not to have significant damage to our house or to have lost family and friends, everything else seemed insignificant. I was also appreciative for all of the people who have ever given me candles (I had some I knew were fifteen years old) because they came in particularly handy. I didn't miss warm water as much as I did cooked food, but I think I was in the minority there.

What would I do differently? Charge up all my electronics. My cell phone battery was less than half-charged when we lost power, and even sending texts required numerous, draining attempts, but at least I had a car charger. And I would fill up my gas tank. I wanted to stop on my way home from school Wednesday, but all the pumps I passed were taken. Lack of gas led my husband and I on an awful trip south Thursday, where he had to abandon his truck in Birmingham. We had to have a friend bring us gas to get home, which was an awful thing to ask under the circumstances. I think charging my devices and keeping the gauge near full will my new compulsions.

So many people around here had generators, and gas or charcoal grills, and ingenuity. I have really been impressed with the community as a whole and the generosity out there. When I went to pharmacy yesterday, to pick up the refills I had called in Wednesday, they were working off generators. It was terrific to see the cashiers I recognized. "Are you making it all right?" one woman asked. I almost cried. And I feel barely affected. I am not sure if we will have to "make up" the days at school, but I can tell you one thing, we are all going to be very happy to see each other.

Why I am an iPad hater

2011-04-27T08:38:00.000-05:00

Last June, I ordered an iPad, the 3G version. I have MacBook Pro, and I already knew I didn’t like the Apple computers, but I had nothing but positives to say about the iPhone, and this looked like a larger version of that device. Most of all, I was ridiculously excited about the tiered data options, since there were many months where I didn’t use my AT&T aircard at all.

Frankly, there wasn’t much use for the iPad because of the iPhone. I used it a few times: from a meeting to make a lunch reservation for a group from my school at P.F. Chang’s, because I couldn’t do it via my phone because of the interface. Another time, I used it to navigate to a bookstore in Decatur, Georgia (which I really could have done with my phone, anyway, but maps do look nicer on the iPad). When I did use it, I picked it up (like my phone) more than once to take a picture, but this was the first generation, so it actually had LESS functionality than that device.

I did read one iBook, because it wasn’t available in Kindle format, but I frankly found the thing too heavy and rounded to work as a reader. Anyway, to say I hadn’t used it much is a huge understatement. But it was at Educon in January that I got my first SIM card error. I had left my laptop at home for the conference, and everyone else seemed to be wielding iPads, and there was accessible wireless at the Science Leadership Academy, but I couldn’t use it in my hotel room, so I was limited to the phone there.

I read up on the SIM error, as one does, and used a pin to pop out the SIM card and blow on it (exactly what my “genius” did when I did take it to the Apple Store, but I had barely used the thing, so odds were it wasn’t dirty). They restored it to factory settings, but it errored again after an update. I was getting ready to go to Computers in Libraries to talk about ebooks and wanted samples of hardware when I remembered the error and went back to the store.

That “genius” (a nice girl, an art major, a painter) almost conceded getting data was a lost cause when she finally resorted to wiping the thing and restoring it to its factory settings, which seemed to work. I had told her I had done the updates the day before, so I had backed it up then, not like there was much data but I would be able to get the applications back, I assumed. I restored the data and synched to iTunes the day before I left for the conference and, last I checked, the SIM card was detecting a 3G signal. Then I got to the airport. The SIM was gone again.

The most ridiculous part of the whole thing is that you can’t discontinue the $15 a month AT&T data plan without the SIM card being active. So I keep being billed for data I can’t deactivate. It seems like a paltry amount of money, compared to the $60 for the aircard, and the device is no superfluous to my needs, I really just tend to forget about until it is time to pack for a trip, and then I start imagining how much weight I could save if I could do without a laptop, and I pull out the iPad, and it fails.

http://www.geekosystem.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/cat-ipad-video-550x374.jpg
If I had a cat, he would have a really cool toy.

I am at the end of my tether and want a refund for both the $649 device and the $15 a month I have been hamstrung into paying to AT&T because of their ridiculously defective product. I will eat the $100 for the Zaggmate bluetooth keyboard case that fails to properly hold the thing in any secure fashion – I have resorted to double-sided tape to attach it, but did allow me to type without looking like I was imagining I was conducting the London Philharmonic. And the Zaggmate made the device more useful for content PRODUCTION. I can consume all the media I want via my phone. I have real misgivings about buying these things for educational use if you can't write on them in a sustained way.

Now, another trip to the Apple store looms on the horizon. I consider it a particular kind of hell, the one near me is filled with people I don’t particularly want to be near, scrawny braying electrical engineers in filthy running shoes. The “geniuses” treat everyone like they are mentally deficient. There are only two Apple stores in the state of Alabama, and one is in my city. What if I lived hours away? Can they really expect people to make that trip?

Obviously, I should have just gone with a Verizon mifi for my mobile data needs.

Alabama Library Association wrap-up

2011-04-25T12:19:00.001-05:00

I spent last Wednesday and Thursday in Orange Beach, Alabama, at the Alabama Library Association Annual Conference. Alabama has a tiny shoreline, but it IS rather gorgeous and unspoiled by development -- I was actually rather distressed that they put the beach on our latest license plate. I guess don't want to share it. The conference opened on the anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, but the beaches were pristine.

Mystery writer Carolyn Haines opened the conference, touching on everything from the 99 cent ebook price point to her covert check-out of the once-scandalous Forever Amber from her childhood public library. Some other highlights:

Jane Daugherty from the Gulf Shores public library talked about helping patrons with workshops and one-on-one in using the Overdrive ebooks available from their eresources consortium, Camellia Net. Very interesting to hear about a tech-y topic from someone working across a digital divide unrelated to income, given their influx of snowbirds.

The CUS Research Forum featured three presentations of award-winning research, including one practitioner study about improved collections in a middle school library and increased circulation among underprivileged students. Elizabeth Hester, who worked on her National Boards certification at the same time I did, is the librarian and Melissa Sherman her collaborating reading specialist at Irondale Middle School where they compared circulation statistics by low SES after an infusion of Title I money for materials. They also recommended ordering multiple copies of popular titles and improving subject-related signage, including anticipatory signage about popular sequels.

The CUS/YASRT breakfast is always one of my favorite events, and we were lucky enough to have Irene Latham come to speak about the process of writing and the reception of her terrific debut novel, Leaving Gee's Bend. Our Teachers as Readers book group had skyped with Irene in the fall, but getting to meet her and thank her face-to-face was very special. There were also some very provocative booktalks from librarians around the state which I will be using for collection development.

I attended David Brown from the First Regional Library System in Mississippi's presentation on reader's advisory for graphic novels, which took an interesting approach -- pitching graphic novels to the readers of traditional formats, especially when it involves graphic format versions of their favorite books or informational topics of interest. Brown really stressed that additional cataloging was required if these items were to be discoverable via the catalog.

My co-librarian Carolyn Starkey and I presented on ebooks, and the crowd was incredible. We had some women from a small public library come up afterwards to talk about their few requests for the format from patrons and discussed ways they could satisfy their patron's desire to read in that format without heavy investment by connecting them with free sources, which was one of the best conversations of the conference.

ALLA is always fun because of getting to catch up with friends I don't see anywhere else, and it was really on-point this year. Next year's conference will be in Birmingham, April 24-27. I have marked my calendar.

The royal wedding

2011-04-09T20:12:00.000-05:00

Thirty years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night so I wouldn't miss a minute of the Prince Charles-Lady Diana Spencer wedding.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2010/07/the-wedding-of-charles-and-diana-picture-of-the-day/

It was all anyone was talking about -- real "social media." The press coverage of the event and the young marriage might have actually be connected to the glossy magazine obsession I had through all of the eighties. Am I the only girls forever scared to be photographed in a skirt after this?

http://lisawallerrogers.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/princess-diana-f-and-g/

And then there were the paper dolls...

http://www.amazon.com/Princess-Diana-Prince-Charles-Fashion/dp/0486249611

It was only after I had booked spring break tickets to London -- to catch a few shows in the West End (Keira Knightly in The Children's Hour and Allison Steadman in Blythe Spirit) and visit with friends, too -- that I realized I will be only be missing the upcoming royal nuptials by about a week.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Royal+engagement+spikes
+Canadian+interest+monarchy/3873760/story.html

Fingers crossed there's some terrific Will and Kate commemorative paraphernalia in the markets. I think these bode well, but on a related note, I wish I had never discovered Tom Tierney paperdolls on Amazon...

http://www.amazon.com/William-Kate-Paper-Dolls-Commemorate/dp/
0486483789/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300061291&sr=1-1-spell

Is you library a department store or boutique?

2011-04-07T15:24:00.000-05:00

In D. E. Stevenson's Sarah Morris Remembers, the heroine goes from a curate's daughter turning hay in the fields to a silk-clad sophisticate, and it's all down to the opportunities she encounters in a department store. While by night, Sarah endures the blitz, with bombed-out families sharing her shelter, by day, commerce goes on with no hint of austerity:

"It was a 'luxury store,' warm and comfortable; even in wartime, Barrington's had a wonderful display of goods. On the ground floor, there were wide, carpeted corridors with stalls on each side on which were displayed perfumery and soap, ribbons and laces..."

I happen to love "shopping" books, and I do think there is something here for libraries to take away. A library is not a bookstore, but could be more like a department store. Culture shouldn't be about base consumption. Contrast the delight Sarah feels in her store (and those in Betty Cavana's Connie Blair series, whose stilted prose did not obscure the prospect of retail nirvana) with the retail models which began to emerge over the past decades. We have super-stark, J. Crew and Gap-y minimalism on one hand and hand-curated collections on the other. Consider Scruples, Judith Krantz's torrid book about high-end boutiques. It wasn't enough to be a successful merchant, Billy Ikehorn had to be an arbiter of style.

I prefer the model of expansive department store to either the boutique or bares-bones options. Anyone who has played around with the library digital music solution freegal must bemoan its lack of discovery features. It is more like locating a known item through a torrent site than the exploratory iTunes experience.
I think, as with Barrington's in Stevenson's novel, we must inject whimsy and delight into library-going. But it might be hard to figure out how to do this when even the remaining American department stores like Macy's and Nordstrom seem to display so many similar items, promoting quantity instead of privileging real variety and service. I found it difficult to find a person to ring up my Anna Sui tights at the Nordstrom on Michigan Avenue in October.

While I do love the notion of personalized services like print-on-demand, e-reader assistance, and patron-driven acquisitions, I worry that when attempting to be responsive to users, we will end up reflecting the requests of the few who are relatively enfranchised. The boutique model does not welcome everyone and will be off-putting to many. If they won't know our code, we need to give them a range of discovery options and recommender systems, ones that are easy, intuitive, and as seductive as iTunes and Amazon. And I love the idea of of creating a dedicated girl's space, like those women's lounges in the better department stores....

Regional favoritism

2011-03-30T07:10:00.000-05:00

I first heard of Nanci Kincaid when I was at library school in Tuscaloosa. They held some of her papers there, one of my classmates told me, and she used to teach there, having been married to one of the assistant football coaches. I read her novels and stories immediately and loved her work so much that I reviewed her next two novels for our local paper, but Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi languished on my wish list for quite a while. When I finally got a copy, I was guilt-riddled for having left it so long.

The book is about siblings who leave Mississippi for California for college, but cannot abandon the folkways of home. There is heady stuff about Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, young men being maimed in Iraq, and gun violence in inner cities. Kincaid now divides her time between California and Hawaii, but it is the Mississippi scenes which sing. The passage where Truely's father watches his son's football practice from the sidelines will feel familiar to almost any Southerner. And there is the most accurate description of the concept of money in many people's lives in this part of the world, a perspective I fear few enjoy today:

"Before meeting Hastings, neither Truely nor Courtney had ever known anything at all about money or the people who had it. Like most Mississippi kids, they had dreamed dreams that had little or no significant financial dimensions to them. They thought of money the same as they did weather -- necessary in some form, unpredictable, volatile enought to wipe you off the map at any given time. Truely and Courttey has little interest in money, peoople with it, or ways to get it."

The later parts, the ones with Arnold, have some uncomfortable elements. Kincaid reminds me of Ellen Douglass in her ability to get at the complex relationships between people, particularly when clouded by race or issues of servility and civility. Truely and Courtney take in Arnold and look after him,but it's more a commentary about their empty California lives than his neediness, and it's nothing near as neat and self-congratulatory as The Help. I am still gaping at the number of otherwise reasonable adults who don't see anything wrong with that book.

I do take issue with the publisher's promotional materials, jacket copy, and the Publishers Weekly review. Arnold is NOT from Mississippi. He is from San Diego, and only knows of Yazoo City second-hand from his grandmother. Kincaid suggests a shared culture, but does not pursue it. This is California she is writing about, after all.

A bad case of the half-empties

2011-03-25T07:24:00.000-05:00

Read the comments following any news article and it's enough to get depressed, and somehow I looked away for a minute, and we wound up bombing another country.

On the hyper-local level, since our economics teacher left, no one can imagine how to create a senior slide show, so it's left to me, or my two library aides, now the unwitting class historians. The slideshow has necessarily has a pictureof all three hundred graduates...

Yesterday, before the student body, I felt as if I (and not the teacher team) was routed by a student (note the singular) from our scholar's bowl team. Our teacher team competes in a local "bar-style" trivia tournament this Tuesday...

And that was before the tremendous attenuation in our poetry slam, where thirteen poets signed up, six submitted their poems, but only three turned up to read last night.

We used to have much better-attended events, but I fear those are victim to teens' over-scheduling, building around the spring sports, the band trip, with students in Serbia.

But why am I focusing on the negative? Those poems ran the gamut from sad to mad to romantic. There were tears and giggles, and it didn't drag on forever.

And I somehow can't believe it was just last Friday that I met a group of students to see Little Women (the first production of the musical in Alabama). In an unanticipated bonus, the female lead, a show-stealing Jo March, was a high school student from another school in our system.

Then, there was a too-quick trip to Washington to present at Computers in Libraries' Internet at Schools track, which pulled many people outside the purview of schools. I got to talk with people about re-thinking collections and ebooks, saw friends, and met some new people, many whose names I knew, and hopefully didn't embarrass myself too badly, but I do tend to mention that stretch in the airport on the way back instead of the cherry blossoms, or the Gauguin exhibit.

And, in a rare flash of rationality, a federal judge has held that banning payroll deductions for the state teacher's association is equivalent to viewpoint discrimination, and now the firefighters have agreed.

When I think about everything that has happened recently, it's no wonder I feel on the brink of exhaustion. We've two more weeks until out spring vacation, but tomorrow night, I will put on a suitably dark and severe dress and chaperone the prom, which is at the art museum this year instead of a hotel, which should preclude some of the anxieties which punctuated the event for me last year at the Westin. Seeing them all dressed up and shining is so heartening, but I will never attend another prom without thinking about how Ally Condie used school dances as inspiration for Matched.

So, I will wait until next week to try to figure out ways to limp through another year without any money to buy materials or replace our groaning computers, figure our how to martial my resources to get to the next thing, whatever that may be.

Leading & Learning, the Alabama School Librarian, & ALA Elections

2011-03-16T18:41:00.002-05:00

If you're an ISTE member, you might have seen the March/April issue of Leading and Learning with Technology, where the incredible Lisa Perez showcased some cutting edge librarians -- Joyce Valenza, Keisa Williams, Chad Lehman... and me. Such august company!

	Look inside >

Not Your Grandmother's Library!

Then my co-librarian Carolyn Jo Starkey cataloged every nook and cranny of our facility for a new feature for the Alabama School Librarian's Spring Issue. It's sort of like having strangers come over and peek in your closets, but I am all for transparency (click through to see the document reader below if it's not visible via rss).

In other news, the ALA elections opened today. I'm on the ballot for Council. I was thrilled to find I made Sarah Houghton-Jan's recommendations. I plan on penning a post with my own picks soon, but in the mean time am rather in awe of Bobbi Newman's ability to harness social media for her own Council bid. That gets my vote!

Jumping ship

2011-03-09T18:15:00.000-06:00

I can't be the only educator thinking about it. All the teacher-bashing in the media has me considering leaving K-12 altogether...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gomattolson/3473596420

I visited Siberia through a U.S. Department of State program in 2006. The day I arrived at my host school, I realized how entirely differently the teaching profession was perceived in that culture. Americans have none of the respect which punctuated every interaction with educators in the Russian schools. Teachers are honored, wield an enormous amount of influence, and are even offered inducements. Those teachers get a lot more than apples, let me tell you. I had a very bright professor once who constantly kept coming back to the anti-intellectual aspect of American life. Maybe it's a consequence of that, that the oppressed populace is rife for revolt against some of the only working-class Americans left with any sort of employee benefits.

What scares me the most? I can't escape this anxiety on the news or online, but I hear precious little about it in my building. Only one of my assistant principals seems aware of all of this. She is one of the only professional educators in our school. A proud and active members of her professional organizations, she attends workshops voluntarily and at her own expense and reads journals, listservs, and both trade and practitioner-oriented books.

Many of the rest on our faculty are craftsmen. Some are very fine teachers, but on the whole, they don't want to devote too much time to their occupation. They watch American Idol instead of school board meetings in the evenings. I still don't think they work part-time or are overpaid, as some of the critics assert, but the conversations about union bashing masked as school reform masked as budgetary crises somehow haven't reached them, and I'm jealous.

Oh, odds are I'll be back at school next year, and for the foreseeable future after that. But this is the time of the year when many things seem possible. My administrators are getting older and will retire soon. My knee-jerk reaction is that I don't want to work for anyone else. I've been told by the state of Alabama I lack the requisite credentials to be certified as a school administrator, which minimizes my professional opportunities.

That jump is looking more attractive by the moment...

What I'm Up To...

2011-03-05T18:39:00.000-06:00

Things really ramped up beginning with the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library system staff day on February 21. I was really delighted to share the work of the most progressive school librarians with our public librarian colleagues. There were lots of really interesting comments and questions after each of the two sessions, too.

I have been getting ready for two Internet @ Schools East presentations in just a couple of weeks. One, with Angela Carstensen, Frances Harris, and Laura Pearle, highlights building digital collections. The second, with Carolyn Starkey, talks about ebooks in schools. I have heard good things about the conference and am looking forward to it.

April, we will have our state library association convention. It's at the beach. I'll be talking some more about ebooks.

So, it's obvious I've been playing a lot with ebooks and ereaders. I have been using the Pandigital Novel to read Adobe Editions from both Netgalley and the public library via Overdrive. I had to take the iPad to the Apple store for a restore, trying hard not to want the new one. I haven't turned on the Kindle in a couple of weeks, but I did download the Send to Kindle extension for Chrome today, so I should have that, some subscription pieces, and a dozen samples waiting for me...I discovered the whole @free.kindle.com, which, along with pagination, is ghettoizing readers based on Kindle version. I did wish I had that extension to publish the piece of student work using that extension I read yesterday instead of transfering it via USB, a la Kristin Fontichiaro's piece. He would have been tickled.

I have been watching the #hcod kerfluffle with something approaching schadenfreude. I went through my access-versus-ownership crisis with digital music, and the movie and television shows I thought I bought from iTunes in 2006. I can testify that many books in my library circulate 26 times in a semester. This is a dangerous precedent, so I am glad librarians are not acquiescing without a fight.

I've also been working on my dissertation. Keep your fingers crossed for me -- I have the tiniest bit of momentum up now and am trying to propel myself towards the end. Shocking spoiler: students with low family socioeconomic status tend to use the library twice as much.

The android tablet reveals the crown gem of ebooks

2011-02-22T19:40:00.000-06:00

It had been a while since I had requested anything from Netgalley -- which is the most brilliant concept and I can only day I am green that I did not think of it myself! -- but I noticed last week that none of the last spate of electronic ARCs I asked for seemed to have the option to send the file to my Kindle. Someone in the twittersphere suggested it would return soon.

The 60-day clock (another innovation, that) was ticking! So, to read Lucy Kellaway's British potboiler In Office Hours and then A Girl's Guide to Homelessness, Briana Karp's memoir derived from her blog, I pulled out the Pandigital Novel, the Android reader I bought last summer from Bed, Bath & Beyond. It was $149, I have since seen it advertised for $99, and if the $99 Kindle rumors are to be believed, I think $50 ereader is possible by fall. I had not used it since September though, upon retrospect, the touchpad wasn't as bad as I'd remembered, I couldn't use it for checking Twitter as I kept inadvertently re-tweeting. And the Adobe Digital Editions software is so much clunkier than the consumer-oriented functionality of the Kindle! And the wires! I despair of those. But it is great for the Overdrive books from the public library...

Meanwhile, reading In Office Hours (in its epub format) was terrific. The font was sufficient, the cover art maintained. A Girls' Guide, which was pdf, was clunkier, because the spacing between lines varied wildly at the "large" font size, and the margin symbols transformed into date stamps. Meanwhile, I couldn't read either Everything I Was or Plan B on the little tablet, because they crashed the Adobe software. They both have graphics-heavy front matter, but I can't see why that would be happening...

Then I found the crow jewel of ebooks, something that takes it to an entirely different realm. Something that threatens to be so democratizing as to evoke Gutenberg -- a gorgeous picture book on Preservation Hall done by LSU Press. With layouts that looked almost optimized for the tablet, the integrity of the text was such that you could see the effect that its influence would have on any reader, something I hadn't seen done with a purely electronic work. This doesn't do it justice:

I want some more of these...

In other events, my second generation Kindle is still waiting for a software update for pagination...

Is Amazon the next Apple?

2011-02-11T06:25:00.000-06:00

Early this week, the biblioblogosphere was buzzing about pagination coming to Kindle. A tool that might make the ubiquitous ereader useful for scholarship! As soon as I saw that the software update was available, I logged in, only to find the software update wasn't yet available for my second gen Kindle.

Now, that does suggest it will work well with old versions in the future. But it's ghettoization based on hardware version. But it reminds me of inherent limitations tag-teamed by hardware and software at Apple, which might be close to ending support for its original iPods. Speaking of which, these drag-and-drop binaries to update? Strike me as very vintage Apple-y.

In a related note, in my recommendations (part of the user experience which Amazon is SO GOOD at), I began to see "enhanced" versions of ebooks I've already bought. Decoded with enriched with an hour and a half of video? Now, that's a way to sell both the print AND paper products. But again, check your hardware.

Maybe it would work on Kindle for the iPad, but I can't get mine to connect to the Internet, my 3G data plan with AT&T held hostage until I upgrade to Snow Leopard and the wifi not playing along right now, either. I had discovered Kindle was supporting color for its iPad version last month:

(which I had to take a picture of, with iPhone, since I could not get either network mechanism on the iPad to output a screenshot. Maybe you can tell how thrilled I am with that piece of hardware.)

Meanwhile, harbingers of an Apple/Amazon schism indicate Apple wants a share of Amazon's profit for those in-app Kindle reads. So what's the point of building in (and flogging) functionality your proprietary hardware doesn't yet support? Just part of this weird, morphing ebook landscape.

Things I can't do

2011-02-01T12:35:00.000-06:00

This is not a post about personal shortcomings, but rather one about institutional ones. I have become accutely aware of the amount of time I spend everyday engaged in needlessly repetitive tasks. Telling students the name of the library's printer, or walking over to the computer to help them choose the printer is perhaps the biggest time-suck. And that is necessitated because I cannot set a default printer for all our users.

In the same way, I cannot set the library homepage to the OPAC or our excellent state-funded databases. Instead, when our students open the browser, there are immediately confronted with the blocking screen from our district's web filter. The MSN site, because of its social aspects, is out-of-bounds for students, but they are constantly re-directed there since it is delivered with the machine.

I was reminded of how innured to all of this I have become over the weekend at Educon 2.3. I was admiring some of the great digital storytelling tools like MixBook and Scrapblog that the incredible Joyce Valenza uses with her students, but knew immediately that the requisite plug-ins would be a prohibitve issue. I cannot update anything, and though our district does push some updates out, sometimes these machines don't have enough disk space to load those. Because I cannot defrag the disks, or delete the temp files, or free up the space occupied by the profiles of the hundreds of students, many of them long graduated, who ever logged into that machine.

So I came back from SLA frustrated, and not just because all of our students don't have the same sort of supportive learning environment, but because there are so many barriers to the tools they need to be even minimally successful.

Getting ready to learn

2011-01-28T11:30:00.000-06:00

I am so excited to be at Educon, at the Science Leadership Academy, one of those fantastic student-centered schools which have actually altered the trajectory of my professional life. But I arrived after days spent with an eye on the weather (Philadelphia canceled school for the second day in a row), a sleepless night broken by a 4:00 alarm & a 5:30 flight, minus the two cups of tea on which I have become quite dependent, and after an undignified spill on a spot of ice...but my point is, I wasn't ready to learn. Some of the smartest teachers I know are gathered here, and without a Starbucks stop (and a good look at the back of my favorite coat, now ever so slightly soiled by water and salt), I wasn't up for it...

It makes me come back to school readiness. And not just daily readiness, but preparation for learning, an environment conducive to thought and growth... I keep thinking about Stephen Krashen, and PISA scores.

Give them what they want

2011-01-18T18:15:00.001-06:00

I recently got into a conversation with a friend who doesn't get conference-going. It's not integral to her profession, she says. As I was stumbling to defend my own professional development, I mentioned one of my favorite events at both Midwinter and ALA Annual, YALSA's teen feedback session for the Best Fiction for Young Adults selection committee. It is the best collection development advice I encounter outside my own student readers.

At BBFA, teens from local library teen advisory boards have access to new titles and ARCs and contribute their thoughts as readers as the committee members move through the list of hundreds of recent titles. The only downside is that the teens inevitably make me homesick for my students.

Some of my recent favorites made the Best Fiction for Young Adults list this year, including Mitali Perkins' Bamboo People, Margaret McMullan's Sources of Light and Numbers by Rachel Ward. Unlike the other two, Numbers was mentioned in the feedback session. The young woman said she didn't like the ending -- a complicated observation when the unavoidability things fuels the entire plot. I didn't understand how she could want something so antithetical. It reminded me of one of my students, who always requests romance, but ones where there is only one boyfriend. The idea of having rivals seems abhorrent to this girl. In the same way, the idea of a less-than-happy-ending ruined the whole reading experience for the BFYA teen.

The Martin Luther King holiday was the last day I will have off for a while, and I reached for the sequel, The Chaos, because I wanted something escapist. And it was terrific, it's 2027 and Jem's son Adam is seeing patterns in the numbers (which presage the death of those who meets) just as his mother had before the London Eye terror attack. Chicken House imports such consistently high products, I enjoy all of them. (And I want everything I read from here on out to have genre tags for action/adventure AND love stories/romance AND science fiction.) But strange Ward chooses to subvert the premise of the first reality she crafted. And if the numbers are mutable? Where did that leave Jem and Spider in the first volume? If The Chaos would satisfy that reader's complaints, where does it leave its fundamental concept?

Unpacking after Midwinter 2011

2011-01-12T09:53:00.002-06:00

My school district's on its third snow day this week, but I am feeling very fortunate not to be stranded in San Diego. I can use the extra time to follow up on ALA Midwinter, which began early with Friday's all-day #alaremix unconference convened by Allen McGinley and JP Portero, featuring a really invigorating cross-section of librarians from all different settings, sharing challenges and opportunities common to all information agencies.

That afternoon, I had an ALA intern meeting. It was really rather exciting to get to participate in "big ALA" or "ALA proper," and to my relief, I was far from the oldest intern in the room. We were welcomed by ALA President Roberta Stevens who, along with a range of other former interns, shared their experiences and encouraged our organizational involvement. I recognized a few faces from the Emerging Leaders program, another leadership development project. As far as the intern thing goes, I feel very lucky to have a really interesting committee to work with, the Website (soon perhaps Web Presence) Advisory Committee, an umbrella group where divisional representatives come to share their group's observations, concerns and visions for networked organizational communication. Because of the scale and variability of the membership and myriad different requirements, the organization's online presence is particularly interesting. While the committee's Monday morning meeting conflicted with the Youth Media Awards, but I was able to watch the announcement hashtag to learn about the winners in what was almost real time.

Between the exhibits opening and a couple of publisher previews, I felt especially fortunate in finding the 2011 titles my students are particularly looking forward to, including Demonglass by Rachel Hawkins, What Happened to Goodbye by Sarah Dessen, and Wolfsbane by Andrea Cremer. Now, a decade into librarianship and largely because of social media in general, I am finally beginning to associate authors with houses. Understanding publishing has been vital to obtaining the ARCs my teens are already buzzing about, as well as the most lauded debuts. I expect the haunting, lyrical Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma to be a Morris contender. I'm also totally jazzed about Beth Revis's debut, Across the Universe.

Among the sessions I attended was a joint RUSA/YALSA discussion where the topic of young adult reference services were eclipsed by general Oh tempora! Oh moraes! teeth-gnashing on the part of academic librarians decrying teens as rowdy, prevaricating, disorganized, and exasperating, forcing the school and public librarians there to defend their kind wholesale. An antidote was the Best Fiction for Young Adults feedback session, where local titles weigh in on titles under consideration for that list. I am always intrigued with the reactions of actual teens to the range of literature under consideration.

I am almost always exhausted by Monday evening, but this year, a walk on the Pacific restored me sufficiently to rally for the AASL/ALSC/YALSA joint divisional reception. It was a terrific chance to see everyone all dressed up, with ambient lighting and grown-up food, especially the giddy selection committee members, done with their year's work. I don't think I'll ever miss it again and will plan to stay for the signings after, next year.

I came back from California with a handful of projects, one of them being the videotapes of the AASL candidates speeches to post to ALA Connect. As always, I was impressed with the prescience and accomplishments of my colleagues.

All the terrific conversation that will give me food for thought, and at the end of the conference I ended up with a signed petition to run as candidate for ALA Council. The real genus of that was hearing, again and again, that school librarians won't participate in ALA when asked. I think it is especially important to represent the professionals that work with the next generation of taxpayers. One of the women at the unconference made the comment that one of her concerns was helping to elevate the status of school librarians so it was more equivalent of that of public and academic librarians. My knee-jerk reaction was outrage at the perceived slight, but I have been thinking about what she is saying, and really believe it is because we are the one arm of the profession that most often works independently, without a cadre to support us in our overarching professional goals. Also, I am really compelled to better understanding the organization, its component parts, their constituencies and concerns.

There are always session conflicts, but I was especially sad to miss Nancy Pearl's interview with Neil Gaiman, where he announced an addition and expansion of American Gods, Vernor Vinge, and the session on Turning the Page on eBooks. And next time, I'll know about the Seuss Collection. There's always Anaheim next summer...

Also, in the spirit of newspaper corrections, Blythe Woolston is the Morris winning author with the uproarious speech. So sorry for misspelling her first name, which I especially hate as her pithy, "shit happens in your head when you read" was retweeted.

Forbidden love & dystopians

2011-01-06T20:15:00.003-06:00

One of the wisest teachers in my school recently commented that maybe we shouldn't be so hard on the lovebirds who sneak kisses and cuddles at school. For those too young to drive, she said, this might be their only chance for a little affection.

That conversation came on the heels of a recent and upcoming spate of dystopian novels concerned with the regulation of affection, as well as the New York Times panel reflections (and kidlitosphere blow-back) over the attraction of this genre for young people. So I have been thinking a lot about how teens connect in dystopias (including school).

Probably the most on-point novel I've read recently was Delirium by Lauren Oliver, situated in a future Maine where love has been excised by medical intervention. That is made effective by a proscribed surgery to remove emotion, once the citizen reaches adulthood. Lena, the heroine, has some family skeletons related to the sickness, and over the course of the book, her attitude on the procedure which will mute her life so that will no longer want to run or sing shifts. As she considers the disorder and its victims in a new light, she must make a choice to leave society or remain in the cordon sanitaire provided when feelings challenges public health and safety.

The society in Matched by Ally Condie attempts to direct passion instead of contain it, using data to determine optimal combinations and matching young people for later marriage so that courtships are directed in the most efficient and societally beneficial ways. The novel opens with Cassia's matching ceremony and follows her through a series of events as she begins to challenge authority, including the official processes of sorting and matching which demonstrate the limitations of a rigidly ordered community. The end-of-life questions raised are powerful, and all the characters well-drawn.

Pam Bachorz, whose first novel, Candor, was just terrific, follows up her debut with Drought, concerned with Utopian history of upstate New York and as geographically-informed as Candor, both throwing into relief the idealistic ambitions and insular natures of particular communities. Ruby is a two-hundred-year-old adolescent whose blood has the ability to heal and imbue others with longevity, so there are more unexplicated aspects than in Delirium or Matched. Ruby and her community are enslaved as water harvesters, using pewter spoons to gather the liquid believed to possess miraculous attributes. Parallels with the Christian tradition are emphasized and might be problematic for some readers, but Ruby's brushes with the modern world, and one of the guards assigned to oversee her sect, are fascinating, Bachorz writes with vigor.

Oliver and Condie's books feature interesting commentary about the future of work. Higher education does not seem to figure in there visions of the future, and Condie's descriptions of the destruction of the library, the 100 official poems, and the underground preservation of literature are particularly chilling suggestions.

2010...

2010-12-21T18:12:00.000-06:00

It was a banner year. Some of my personal high points:

January: Presenting "Flip Your Library" with Laura Pearle and Buffy Hamilton at the YALSA Institute preconference at ALA Midwinter in Boston.

February: Presenting an Elluminate session on Google Searching for the Alabama State Department of Education Technology Initiatives.

March: Visiting Sedona, Arizona over spring break.

April: Hosting fifty-odd youth services librarian for an Alabama Library Association preconference

May: A long weekend in Chicago including Topolobampo, The Green Zebra, Billy Elliot, Avenue Q, and some terrific company.

June: Chairing the YALSA preconference on online reading promotion, WTF? They ARE reading.

July: Attending training at the Library of Congress as part of its Teaching with Primary Sources Mentor program, which included spending lots of time with Joyce Valenza.

August: Beginning coursework towards administrative certification, which helped me think about the library from other viewpoints.

September: A month marked with literacy as our Teachers as Readers group skyped with Alabama author Irene Latham, the public library comes to school to visit every ninth grader, and our book club orders cute, student-designed tee shirts.

October: I really start enjoying the Computer Applications curriculum I cobbled together for our College and Career Readiness curriculum, and at least a few juniors are as fascinated by location-based technologies and hardware as I am.

November: With both the YALSA Lit Symposium and NCTE/ALAN, November was a terrific month for talking about literature for young people.

December: The advertisement for a second librarian unit threw me into temporary paralysis, but everything seems to be resolving in an absolutely exciting direction. More on that in 2011!

Hanging on

2010-12-15T08:47:00.000-06:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stureyk/58123933/

The interviewing for a second librarian position for our high school is underway, and I am riding a daily rollercoaster from elation to despondancy about this coming librarian. Some of the candidates have been top-notch, especially the ones who found out about the gig through social networking...more on that later. Others don't seem to have ANY qualifications and seem to be playing application roulette.

This has such great potential to change the culture of our school, but it seems like everyone has a different idea of what they want...

... some administrators are all about "getting you into the classroom to work with teachers on technology."

... some administrators want someone to design a better website. Difficult, when we are hobbled by the district's Microsoft Sharepoint software.

... some administrators want someone to work on the community library project.

All of which leaves me wondering, what about the library? The actual school library?

But, seriously, social networking has proven invaluable in turning up viable candidates. My administrators are taken aback that people are willing to come from distant states, leave academia, even, to come to work here, with me. If I had been left to the candidates who hadn't found out about the gig through social networking, they might be looking for TWO librarians.

Some things I have learned in general about interviewing for jobs:

Having a website? Can be impressive. Doesn't have to be fancy or hand-coded. They seem to like templates just fine.

Submitting a vita instead of a skeletal one or two page resume? Can be impressive.

And now, the most shocking thing. The fact that the administrators were able to dissect in detail the CLOTHES the candidates wore. I'm sorry, I was too busy trying to assess their skill level. But on that note, shoes matter. And you might want to tuck your shirt in.

Books of 2010

2010-12-09T11:52:00.001-06:00

It's been a very good year. I could have added another dozen, but these are the ones which have stuck with me.

The real thing, and better than

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand/ Helen Simonson (2010) Major Pettigrew is a widower whose main concern Is reuniting the pair of guns he and his late brother inherited from their father, that is, until her begins a misalliance with the south Asian widow of a local shopkeeper. The two sensitive and intelligent creatures communicate in a pure and rare way that is more romantic than little else but perhaps the Moyes.

Zuleika Dobson/Max Beerbohm (1926) We all know Zuleika, but not only is she an innocent who cuts her way through Oxford society, she is refreshingly un-selfconscious in a way that presages Bridget Jones and every subsequent novel with a pink cover.

Aga sagas plus

The Truth about Melody Browne/Lisa Jewell (2009) is slowly following Kate Atkinson into the realm of the thriller. I loved this book because the twist is so extreme, I could never have anticipated it.

The Other Family/ Joanna Trollope (2010). Coming on the heels of Friday Nights, I’d say Trollope’s in her prime.

A Winter’s Tale/Trisha Ashley (2008) An adorable romance with a heady Shakespearean twist, sure to be beloved by English teachers everywhere.

The Last Letter from Your Lover/JoJo Moyes (2010). This structurally complex, riveting narrative follows the intergenerational, interrelated stories of an amnesiac. From the South of France to 1950s and current-day London, the book reeks of a romance too real to be puppy love.

Older teens

Ballads of Suburbia/ Stephanie Kuenhart (2009) If you’ve have a special place for flannel shirts and mosh pits, this is a book you’ll adore. A heartfelt and compelling story framed by an older narrator remembering the fraught incidents of her youth. A realistic depiction of the nuanced nature of female friendship over time, too.

The Hole We’re In/Gabrielle Zevin (2010) The economy sucks. But this family has been living beyond their means for a long, long time beginning when the assistant-principal father went back to school for a doctorate he never finished. The passage describing his advisor’s birthday celebration should be required reading for all graduate students.

Finding H.F./ Julia Watts (2001) The world needs more Southern lesbian YA, and Watts' voice is spot-on. Heavenly Faith and her friend Beauregard are two of the best-drawn teen characters I've encountered in a while.

Dash and Lily's Book of Dares/Rachel Cohn and David Levithan (2010) The third co-authored book from this winsome duo, it beats the Will Grayson any day of the week in my book. From the Glass family to the Strand to the OED, geeks of all persuasions will find much to love in this charming, quirky novella.

YA/MG

Leaving Gee’s Bend/Irene Latham (2010) I read this book twice, and each time Ludelphia became dearer as the heads towards town for the medicine that will save her mother. Latham’s narrative uses dialect and poetry to evoke mythology and folk tradition. A really nice piece of work with faithful attention to and reverence for the places Latham describes. Plus, our teacher book club skyped with Latham, and she was delightful.

Sources of Light/ Margaret McMullan (2010) I think of this as the anti-Help. A book where the depictions of people of different races that manages not to be patronizing or self-congratulatory. This story of a young girl who moves to her dead father’s Mississippi hometown with her bluestocking mother in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. They bear witness to the atrocities of that period.

Nemesis/Phillip Roth (2010) Who knew the story of a polio outbreak in the Newark tenements could be so compelling, and Roth manages it in a book that manages to include a scant few curse words and only a couple of allusions to sex. Is this Roth’s bid for a curricular title?

Quirky Nonfiction & Graphic Formats

French Milk/Lucy Knisley (2007). Knisley draws (and writes) about a month-long trip she and her mother make to Paris after her college graduation. Full of youthful exuberance, true affection for all things Parisian, and a fresh approach to storytelling.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks/Rebecca Skloot (2010) While not the best-written piece of literary nonfiction , this book is all about one woman, her extended family, and the bizarre persistence of her cells. Strangely humanizes the world of cellular biology.

Smile/ Raina Telgemeier (2010) A charming, all-ages graphic novel about the transition to high school.

Mass observation

Nella Last’s War (2006)/ Nella Last’s Peace (2008)/Nella Last in the 1950s (2010)

I have been reading Mass Observation all year. It’s sort of an earlier equivalent of the web diary circa 1998, people just babbling away. My hands-down favorite Mass Observation contributor was Nella Last, and a third volume in her story was published just this October. It’s my dream to go to Sussex and see her papers, though entire months were lost in the archive. Nella’s story has also been turned into a television movie, which didn't quite do her subtle observations of her neighbors justice.

Will two librarians be better than one?

2010-12-06T11:48:00.001-06:00

Last week, I got the happy news that my school would be hiring a second librarian. For the past seven years, we've been at the threshold for an additional unit. Until now it, the second librarian salary was going to the assistant football coach, make of that what you will.

I am DESPERATE for some help -- serving 80 teachers and 1300 students single-handed has me at the end of my tether. But will we get qualified applicants at midyear? I am encouraging our administration to consider tech-y librarians with public library orientations instead of teachers "leaving the classroom" for this position. I have taught both groups, and find students going into public libraries to be heads-and-shoulders above their school library counterparts. Sorry, but that's what I've seen from an instructional perspective. And ALA program accreditation matters.

I have started thinking about what this person needs to know.

First, the negatives:

I work a lot. I am here at 6:30, an hour before the school building opens, most mornings. I don't get a planning period, and I see classes most of the day, not the 60% recommended by ALSDE. Hopfeully, another set of hand may alleviate some of that workload.
We haven't had a materials budget for two years. I spend a lot of my own money on this program. I have been buying the cleaning supplies, the office supplies, and most of the books. If you're not willing to chip in, you had better be an ace fundraiser. We don't have a PTO.
On a related note, there isn't a budget for professional development. If you want to go to a conference or workshop, you pay your own registration and expenses. That said, they are quite kind about encouraging professional growth, and will always let you away from school.
Our teachers are spoiled. I will set up technology projects, pull books, fix their webpages and their gradebooks. Expect unrealistic expectations.
The computer network is locked down like Ft. Knox. You won't be able to do much of anything requiring plug-ins, and the filters are typically Draconian, but easily permeable when you don't want them to be.

The positives:

The administrators ROCK. They have tremendous support for what goes on in the library. Just don't expect any money, because there isn't any.
The students are, for the most part, well-behaved. There are few discipline concerns.
The collection is so much better than it was eight years ago -- lots of recent fiction, and nonfiction and reference are looking up, too.
Our paraprofessional aid is a real pro and knows the school culture quite intimately.

If you are interested, we are in Madison County Schools, District 8.

Affected or infected

2010-12-01T09:10:00.001-06:00

It's World AIDS Day. Any mention of HIV make me think of my friend Tony. Tony and I worked together on the early morning news back in the mid-1990s. We bonded in the way that only morning people that go to work at 4 a.m. can do. The son of a Harlem-raised WWII G.I. and his Italian war bride, Tony told some hysterical cross-cultural stories. I still remember him demonstrating his mother's pasta puttanesca for a cooking segment, relishing the idea of proper southern women making a Neapolitan streetwalker's supper. Tony himself was a former Navy man, had been stationed at Guatanamo, and he was one of the best reporters in our region. When I started working at this school, I caught him on the morning show on my way to work. My husband teased me that Tony was my favorite reporter.

The last time I saw Tony was at a Nappy Roots concert in 2004. Only two months later, I was out of town when my husband gave me the news that Tony had died. "Of what?" I was flabbergasted. Tony made no bones about being "that way," as we say in the south, and it seems that, at the radio station where he worked, his declining health was an open secret. To me, the saddest part was that so many of his friends didn't know he was sick. But I understood his reticence. I lived throught he AIDS scare of the 1980s. Remember Alice Hoffman, the realist, with At Risk? I thought we were past that.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/london/71462331/sizes/o/in/photostream/

As Kanye says, Magic Johnson's got the cure for AIDS. I'm still sad Tony didn't find it.

Thanks to libraries...

2010-11-29T20:21:00.002-06:00

...for providing some interesting conversation this Thanksgiving.

I was forced to confront the fact that every clerk who wields a date-due stamp is considered a librarian, and their knowledge seems to represent the whole of profession, however the miniscule collections and occasional the open hours of the institution. "Well, the township library is only open one afternoon a week, and there are always buses from the senior center and day cares then, so the librarian can't help me with my geneology..."

And school librarians are not mandated by the state of Pennsylvania and are thus vulnerable to being cut, warned one cousin.

http://onceuponageek.com/images/thanksgiving2.jpg

Another cousin, looking for electronic resources for homeschooling, reminded me that we all could do a better job of publicizing state-funded databases. She also opened my eyes to the tremendous potential homeschoolers represent for niche curricular marketers.

I remembered that classification is really what separates the amateurs from the professionals. Its inherent messiness was intuited by my husband's aunt, involved in cataloging a 4,600 item church collection. I shared methods of Dewey-snatching from World Cat and the Library of Congress catalog.

Wait lists for popular new materials seem insurmountable to an aunt living in South Carolina. Rather than be 40-something in line for a title, she gets her friend to borrow them from another county system. I go to great lengths to describe interlibrary loan processes -- go to the reference department, I stress, not the circulation desk -- only to have her produce a limp list of Nora Roberts titles. Do libraries ILL Nora Roberts? I did try to emphasize that many libraries scrutinize hold queues to order additional copies, that she shouldn't abandon all hope. Also, she seemed to be il fait with exact copy statuses -- "awaiting processing," or "in transit."

Their patron satisfaction seems to all boil down to better customer service, better communication. The collections and databases are useless if the library users don't know about them.

Willing suspension of disbelief

2010-11-11T10:15:00.001-06:00

I heard author Ginger Rue speak at the Alabama Library Association conference last spring, where I won a copy of her first novel, Brand-New Emily, by answering literary trivia (and what an awesome way to distribute prizes was that?). Emily is about a girl who decides take the tenets of commercial marketing to heart to increase her popularity and appeal. It was a cute read, and I expected more of the same when I snagged an ARC of Rue’s latest novel at ALA Annual. It's Jump, published by Tricycle Press.

But while Emily is more middle grade, Jump is definitely YA (hooray!). Brinkley, a shallow and selfish cheerleader and star of the school play, has been ordered to therapy because of her nasty habit of tormenting other girls. As Brinkley begins “jumping” into the bodies of her classmates, -- walking a mile in their moccasins, but also bodies, clothes, and lifestyles -- she very gradually learns empathy.

I felt for Brinkley as she was a product of benign neglect. Her parents throw money at her and give her precious little attention and no real boundaries or consequences. She recounts in one therapy session how, when she and her friend were caught sneaking out in the middle of the night, her friend was grounded for a month while Brinkley’s parents were either unconcerned or uninformed. Her parents are conveniently out of the country for the bulk of the book, so her strange disappearances (and reappearances as other people) are almost unobserved. I think as many teens have always lived in the same way as Brinkley as have been under the scrutiny of “helicopter parents,” but it is interesting to see a portrayal of parents emotionally absent because of disinterest rather than their own addictions or mental health issues, which seems to be a recurring model in YA.

Brinkley is left in the care of her maid, Talullah, who she ultimately realizes may be the only one with her best interest at heart and, in Brinkley fashion, rewards her with a yellow Tory Burch bag. In fine style, Rue incorporates many wonderful details about the school’s production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, with Brinkley playing Laura, despite, as she realized having a much more talented understudy. (Speaking of literary allusion, am I the only one compelled to start reciting Houseman given the author’s name, “With rue my heart is laden…”)

Brinkley takes the transition to other people’s bodies in surprising stride, and develops a new confidant in Miranda, the rather goth theater techie who was her first “jump,” and begins to have her doubts about her best friend Bette. There are some rather fantastical plots holes. The principal orders her therapy. Hmm, I wish they had that discretion. And the “jumping.” Is it some sort of mystical technique employed by her therapist Irirangi? I went with it. I have mentioned that I tend to like science fiction, which tends towards overly-elaborate explanations for strange happenings, to the willing suspension of disbelief needed to read much fantasy. But this reminded me more of Melvin Burgess’s terrific Lady: My Life as a Bitch, where one individual experiences inexplicable fantastical personal transformation in the midst of an otherwise realistic universe. And of course, this doesn't apply to dystopias, because I'm naturally rather pessimistic, so it all SEEMS all too realistic.

After the bare-bones ARC, I was glad to see Jump's final cover displays Brinkley as she might have experienced her “jump” to Miranda. The cover art, like the ample fashion and pop culture references, could entice girls who might be a little like Brinkley at the beginning to think a bit about their classmates’ lives, their choices and challenges.

Beyond good intentions

2010-11-08T10:30:00.000-06:00

I am heading home from the second YALSA Literature Symposium with enough must-read titles on my list to see me out this calendar year. The Lit Symposium is a bi-annual event, and I feel very lucky to have gone to the inaugural symposium in Nashville two years back. Despite the logistical challenges involved in travel to Albuquerque – I had to take a personal day Monday, because getting there and back from Alabama is a day-long proposition – it was well worth the rally. To be surrounded by 450 other librarians, authors, and academics with a real interest in young adult literature was really invigorating experience.

The conference had a diversity theme, and while I know I immediately think of racial and ethnic diversity, the conference did make me think of inclusiveness in a new light. My Friday began with the excellent preconference (organized by the incredible Angie Manfredi, who was also an excellent local hostess), which talked about Body Acceptance and Fat Positivity and how to connect young people with a range of books that discuss these important issues so they can begin to develop a sense of self-worth beyond the basely physical.

Other sessions expanded that knee-jerk definition of diversity to focus on the portrayals of disability, religious experiences, sexual orientation, sexual content, and diversity in graphic novels (with the extremely knowledgeable duo of Francisca Goldsmith and Robin Brenner) and historical fiction (Melissa Raby, with authors Christina Diaz Garcia and Ruta Sepetys). I also especially enjoyed meeting Megan Frazer, a high school librarian in Maine who is living the dream as author of Secrets of Truth and Beauty. The closing session with Lauren Myracle and Ellen Hopkins was phenomenal, as they shared correspondence from readers. Hopkins believes all middle schoolers should read her books to discourage drug use and will supply compelling testimony from teens about the worth of her novels should they be called into question in your library.

The only thing I would like to have seen more of was on technology, perhaps the digital divide and as a diversity issue and how libraries help. The symposium was also rather short of take-aways in terms of programming and ideas for implementation in your practice, but I am sure the literary love-fest will affect all of our collection development as we attempt to fill these gaps with the resources showcased.

I have also been reflecting on how new media has completely changed my conference-going experiences from rather lonely to completely social. So many of my YALSA friends I got to know in various ways online before meeting face-to-face. Twitter was HUGE at this conference, possibly more so than at any other I’ve attended, not only for backchanneling sessions but for building community. I had dinner with one tweep, lunch with another, and caught a movie with a third, none of whom I’d laid eyes upon before this weekend, but with all of whom I am eager to remain in touch.

I will point you towards Gretchen Kolderup's blog for more thoughtful analysis. I have a presentation to cobble together for NCTE in the meantime. The next YALSA Lit Symposium will be November 2-4, 2012, in St. Louis. I’ve marked my calendar!

Just sweet

2010-11-02T09:02:00.000-05:00

In Fixing Delilah Hannaford, Sarah Ockler plays with that Sweethearts trope about meeting the boy who was once your best friend years ago. In this case, it's the dishy contractor-and-coffeeshop-crooner Patrick, who Delilah remembers as "Little Ricky," her grandmother's neighbor and the companion of her childhood summers. It doesn't help that Delilah has the worst "not-boyfriend" ever, Finn, back at home. There is some mild intrigue surrounding the reasons Delilah and her stressed-out mother stopped visiting eight years ago. Delilah pieces her own history together only after she and her mother return to Vermont to settle her grandmother's estate, but it changes both their lives.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/futurowoman/4279289274

This book is utterly charming, and it left me thinking about particular students to whom I would recommend it. I found it not dissimilar from

Blue Plate Special by Michelle D. Kwasney. About three generations of women, all with their own issues. I think this tale resonates for girls who have or are seeking maternal ties in particular.

The Sweetheart of Prosper County by Jill Alexander. All she wants is to ride in the parade, and Austin decides raising chickens will win her the affections of the 4H. I love that she takes Ag and feel that her experiences are not far from many of my students'.

Into the Wild Nerd Yonder by Julie Halpern. Love the accuracy with which Halpern describes high school group dynamics. I think the bits about D and D will ring true for many survivors. of middle school.

How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford. This has some sad bits, too, but on the whole it's such a precious narrative, like Sara Zarr's Sweethearts, I think it does appeal to the same readers.

I heard Halpern at last year's ALAN conference and know Alexander is one of the finalists for that group's Amelia Elizabeth Walden award this year, so I suspect she'll be in Orlando. I'm excited to be presenting at NCTE alongside some amazing librarians later this month, and staying over to hear the authors at ALAN, my new favorite conference.

Do publishers need to rethink their approach to egalleys? Or, where I whine about my inability to get everything I want for free

2010-10-28T06:22:00.000-05:00

It started when I read Michelle from Galleysmith's review of Carrie Philby by Caren Lissner. The heroine sounded quirky and independent, and I wanted to check it out. She had gotten it through NetGalley, but I couldn't find it there. I did find three other novels while browsing around to request. Imagine my disappointment when the first was returned within minutes with this email (identifying information removed):

I noted the suggestion about the profile, but my twitter, my blog, my website, and my K12 public school email address are all there. I don't know what other credentials I could supply for the publishers to vet me. I have used NetGalley lots, and have praised its excellent environmental model for delivering materials for selection. And since I am paying to have these files converted for my Kindle, I have a vested interest in being selective as far as requests and have made less than a dozen total.

This rejection plunged into a momentary crisis. Obviously, I had been judged by someone and found lacking to be granted access to this digital file. But the more I thought about it, the more offended I became. To me the refusal of the ARC was an absence of professional courtesy. I'm not a book blogger per se, but I have attended kidlitcon and have chaired and am chairing national library association committees. I write about books here and there, I present about ebooks and wrote about them for the June issue of VOYA. And I know I've sold dozens of copies of Sources of Light, which I first read on NetGalley, through glowing recommendation, and more than a handful of Wildthorn which I read from them as an e-galley, too.

But is it strictly a digital anxiety? I have have publishers mail me copies of ARCs, including the publisher in question. I could digitize and distribute those if piracy was my true intention. But it doesn't make me want to look for the ARC at NCTE or ALA Midwinter. Sour grapes, maybe, but still. So I began to think about what requires the publisher to mediate these requests in the first place. Was it an issue of which book I requested? It was a paranormal romance. Does that make it ripe for pirating?

One of my other requests was granted. I'm waiting to hear about the third. And Carina Press, the digital-only imprint, is going DRM-free...

ebooks: modern-day travel checkers?

2010-10-25T18:55:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite moments of the School Library Journal Summit on the Future of Reading involved one of Frances Harris's self-possessed and articulate students saying he didn't purchase first-generation hardware. I admire him from a philosophical point-of-view, and while I believe all files should be device-agnostic as well, I have a real weakness for gadgets, even the ones riddled with the DRM the students also cannily rejected.

I remain convinced that the Kindle delivers the superior reading experience and am working on an ereader pilot project. But, unlike many librarians who have been lauding Amazon for allowing access for up to six simultaneous devices, I plan to begin by using only public domain text without DRM restrictions to manage manually. Isn't that utterly scalable? And we have enough call for spare copies of The Count of Monte Cristo, Ethan Frome, Edgar Allan Poe and Alice in Wonderland that Gutenberg alone could keep hundreds of devices in constant use. Of course, I believe the ultimate leap will be to student-owned hardware that kids can manage themselves.

I have been thinking about ereading for pleasure in terms of thinking about my own adoption of digital video. I purchased my first modern piece of Apple technology as soon as the video iPod became available. Prior to that shift, I had been using a Sony player with a similarly proprietary format and software management system. But the video capabilities proved sufficiently enticing to pull me to the other side. I found it fascinating I was able to download a digital file of a Hollywood blockbuster, a network series that updated itself each week, and converting my own files to watch on that tiny screen or hook into the television. I remember watching Psych and Heroes for the first time from iTunes.

But my digital consumption habits have shifted in the past year. I realized that I have only purchased one series, from the BBC, in almost 18 months, and I haven't watched any of those episodes yet. The Kindle had supplanted the iPod video in my estimation. I have never used the Kindle daily, it was almost always a device for either travel or convenience, and sometimes for sheer novelty as with the videos or games. The fact of the matter is that there is too much good video content out there for free for me to continue paying the prices demanded for corporately controlled files which, as Francey's students noted as well, I cannot share or convert.

Because the models are so unfriendly to libraries, the shift to ebooks produces equity issues as well. I bristled when one presenter mentioned requiring permission slips for ereaders. After all, those aren't required for texts of comparable cost or the reference books it's all the rage to interfile and circulate. And there are issues of access. I would never invest in browser-based ebooks (rather than downloadable files) because so many of my students wouldn't be ABLE to connect from home. I'm also concerned about prohibitions against simultaneous use, and 24-hour minimum checkouts when seven periods of students could be using the same print text.

When I read about the Publishers Association suggesting that physical barriers to downloads limited to library premises, I realized I had to consider my own consumption habits. It's important to not to support models that don't take the missions of libraries and schools into account. On the whole, the Summit reinforced for me the absolute distinction between reading for pleasure and reading for information. Most of the speakers focused on factual retrieval rather than leisure reading, and while that is one role of the school library program, it is not the only one. I think of Elizabeth Hardwick,

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."

And, like the video iPod, I almost only opt to use the Kindle when traveling. And I wonder what the next miniaturized toy for the airplane will be? I once compared ereaders to electronic football games, but now I think they might be closer to those tiny versions magnetic of travel checkers. Effective and diverting, but no real threat to the more robust and pleasingly tactile objects.

My life as a reader

2010-10-11T20:21:00.000-05:00

This meme was too fun not to jump into... Melanie Holtsman from Jacksonville my fellow NYC '08 Google Certified Teacher, is starting a fall blogging challenge, and for the first week offered this prompt:

What is your life as a reader like? Do you read for work, pleasure, instructions or emails? What is your favorite author and/or genre? What is your favorite reading spot? What did you like to read when you were the age of your students?

Reading has been a constant in my life since before I was school age. I read for work, constantly scanning feeds for resources I can share with my faculty or ideas for student projects. Most days, I read blogs and tweets and articles online and in print. I also read for pleasure, averaging about four or five books a week, more if we're on vacation. As a high school librarian, I read a lot of YA literature, but my favorite genre is that of British domestic fiction, classics like D.E. Stevenson and Barbara Pym and newer comfort reading like Maeve Binchy, Sophie Kinsella, and Joanna Trollope. I adore Agatha Christie. Phillip Roth is another of my favorites, he seldom disappoints. I have also discovered over the past few years that I have a bit of a taste for science fiction. I still have a hard time with "fantasy."

When I was in high school, I read most of what I came into contact with -- classics, lurid Jacqueline Susann and Judith Krantz novels, some YA. I liked the Sunfire historical romance series and Maggie Adams, Dancer and Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington and Marjorie Morningstar by Howard Wouk. I re-read Gone with the Wind and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn regularly. I read American Psycho in high school, and, pretentiously enough, Ezra Pound's Cantos. I loved Katherine Anne Porter and Sylvia Plath and Erica Jong and Rona Jaffe pretty equally. I thought Absalom, Absalom! was the best book I was required to read for school, with To the Lighthouse a close second.

Thanks, Melanie, for giving me license to think about this for a little bit. I'm not sure I'll be in every week, but I'm excited for the Book that Changed your Life...

School, in books

2010-10-11T19:54:00.001-05:00

I suppose we all choose to return to places where we feel comfortable. I've been reading a lot about school lately.

Not That Type of Girl by Siobhan Vivian. Natalie is an overachiever with her eyes firmly on the post-graduation prize, but she's susceptible to the charms of a bad boy...I especially enjoyed Natalie's conflicted relationship with Spencer, the girl she once babysat who is now running wild. It recreates a sense of high school competition rather faithfully. I think this will be popular.

You by Charles Benoit. Kyle is an sympathetic underdog who meets a Faustian newcomer out to exploit his weaknesses. This book starts strong, with a heady sense of adolescent obsession and a nice sense of sibling fidelity, but its ending was a little pat and did not really push the envelope. There will be inevitable comparisons to Cormier.

The Ivy by Lauren Kunze and Rina Onur. Set at Harvard, this book does a generally good job exploring the strange things that happen your first year away at college. Not terribly plot-heavy, and at moments strangely melancholy instead of frothy. Somehow, the characters seem younger than I felt at that age. First in a series.

Invisible Girl by Mary Hanlon Stone. Not strictly a "school" book as it begins over the summer, but Stephanie's life with her abusive "bar slut" mother in Massachusetts is a crazy contrast with that of her prosperous family friends in California. They become suspicious of Stephanie after her insecurities cause her to misrepresent her life in Boston. Will appeal to the many teens who want to read stories of abuse and neglect.

A reminder about the importance of early childhood, from ALSC

2010-09-27T08:17:00.001-05:00

I spent the three days last week in Atlanta, at the eight biannual ALSC Institute at the Emory Conference Center. The setting was a lush updated complex with high craftsman styling, as the librarians from the Chicago suburbs dotted with real Frank Lloyd Wright buildings noted archly. I attended sessions on everything from gaming to diversity to the Coretta Scott King award and saw three spiritually nourishing performances, and while the proximity to the incredible authors and outspoken and visionary professionals in the youth services field was stimulating, it was Susan Neuman's closing session that will stay with me. Neuman is a professor of education at the University of Michigan and a former Assistant Secretary of Education under the last presidential administration. Among her work is a joint PLA/ALSC project for public libraries to improve early childhood literacy skills known as Every Child Ready to Read, which sounds like a better notion that No Child Left Behind.
Neuman really punctuated the need for early access to literacy for all children, demonstrating amply that "it is poverty that is the determinant of success, not ability." The three most important actors in determining reading readiness is poverty (which trumps the other two factors handily), the mother's educational attainment, and the mother's command of language. The advantages of educated parents are illustrated when on an average the three-year-old children of professionals have vocabulary equivalent to that of parents living in poverty, said Neuman, a deficit that would require 41 hours of intervention a week to correct.

Nonetheless, said Neuman "it is remarkable what environmental stimuli can do." To bridge this gap, Neuman suggests cognitive challenging talk from birth, frequent exposure to words, and repeated reading and re-reading since vocabulary required 28 reiterations before it became integrated. Because children's book have more sophisticated vocabulary than adult television programming, Neuman suggested books are the most effective way to develop vocabulary.She stressed multiple encounters with text, at least three with each book, and advocated watching a video and then watching a book to reinforce the language introduced.

The new literacies were another issue. Neuman said children in poverty average one functional computer per 1000 children, suggesting that less expensive hardware has done little to expand access. And what happens when kids without experience use the school computer lab? They flail, says Neuman, uncertain what to do until their time in the lab is up. That seems to suggest their is a persistant digital divide, and the myth of digital natives inherent fluency with computing may be overestimated.

It was interesting to hear Neuman speak about early childhood literacy since school readiness is something that teachers often dismiss as outside their control. Being with public librarians, one can easily imagine whole communities where early childhood literacy is encouraged through partnerships with hosptials and health care providers, the kinds of partnerships that eductors can also leverage.

Everybody's up in arms

2010-09-21T07:17:00.001-05:00

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention...

Some uninformed fool in a Midwestern business department makes incendiary comments about a book that's ten-year tenure makes it practically canonical YA. I know the conflation of rape and porn makes this irresistible for the biblioblogger types, but if any book can hold up to the scrutiny, it's Speak. I'm much more concerned with censorship that's systematic (Common Sense Media), institutional (the Burlington, NJ library) and from within the educational establishment (Humble, Texas), particularly against authors without Laurie Halse Anderson's support and accolades.

I didn't watch Oprah yesterday, but I felt the blowback from the twittersphere:

I saw the trailer for Waiting for Superman last weekend and wretched involuntarily. I am disappointed Oprah would be manipulated by that dreck. Anyone who has seen illiterate relatives attempting to sign the paperwork for their child or grandchild to drop out on their sixteenth birthday can foresee the end result of charter schools, schools without standards like the "segregation academies" run out of people's living rooms a few decades ago. As long as our culture refuses to esteem or fund education, public schools with governmental accountability will be the only way to teach the masses.

What I'm outraged about: fewer than half of those polled by CNN oppose gay marriage. Yet the family and consumer science teacher at my school gets called in for suggesting that gay marriage doesn't affect those outside the relationship. I suppose the Nontraditional Families unit in her Family Dynamics course of studies should be limited to blended families, to allow the church-going, only-sex-within-marriage, who-cares-how-many-marriages to salve their consciences? Meanwhile, I have a student who lives with her two mothers. Evidently she (and her teacher) should allow another student to indict her home and family, because it isn't conventional and, as the protesting student kept insisting, violates her religion. So now I'm stuck babysitting that conscientious objector because, as well all know, any student with problems with the curriculum should be redirected TO THE LIBRARY.

This long road

2010-09-15T11:02:00.001-05:00

Image from Bob Jagendorf

Last weekend, I had an exceptional breakthrough in my dissertation work. Can Gerard Genette's concept of the paratext be used to understand the evolution of multimodal texts? It has produced some intellectual momentum I haven't felt since December 2007.

Comfort reading

2010-09-09T14:29:00.000-05:00

Last month, the wise and witty British novelist India Knight used Twitter to crowd-sourced an amazing collection of comfort reads.

I have long decried the lack of availability of Aga saga, imported or domestic, from American publishers and booksellers and am constantly looking for anything which bumps into the genre, so the list was absolute manna.

Okay, well, I HAD read most of the books. But there were a few I hadn't seen, which sent me scrambling to order:

Miss Buncle's Book by D.E. Stevenson. I hadn't run up on any Stevenson in YEARS, adn never this one. This one is a fantasy we all hope will play out -- a quiet spinster pens an anonymous tell-all which sends ripples of speculation about its authorship throughout the community. This and the sequel (Miss Buncle, Married) both crossed the $25 limit for foxed and brittle paperbacks, but they were well worth it. If you are an aficionado of E.M. Delafield's Provincial Lady, these will enthrall you.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy. Dundy chronicles the European adventures of Sally Jay Gorse, living the expatriate dream in 1950s Paris, complete with DDT bombs for the bedbugs. I suppose it was the mild licentiousness which made this book the "cult" classic it appears to be. Vaguely reminiscent of Breakfast at Tiffany's, another book where a young woman's sexual activity is explored a decade before free love drew more attention. I particularly enjoyed Sally Jay's attempts to obtain a replacement for her lost passport, having had that experience at a foreign embassy myself.

Hens Dancing by Rafaella Barker. Two pages in, I was convinced I had read this book. Well, I had read one of Barker's books about a divorcee named Venetia with a baby daughter she called The Beauty. Turns out, I had read the second book, Summertime, published two years later as well as, I can now categorically say, the rest of Barker. Not sure how I missed this one. Maybe it was the image of poultry in terpsichorean splendor evoked by that title that put me off. But it's a gorgeous pastoral diary of a woman struggling with three children with a rather attractive builder disrupting the rural idyll. Fans of early Katie Fforde will love it.

The Darling Buds of May by H.E. Bates. I suppose this book attempts humor, but it's of a particularly coarse kind. When the fumbling tax assessor turns up, he's foisted upon Mariette, the oldest, already-pregnant daughter of a messy, hungry farming family. Give me the Grundys from the Archers any day. And there are four more of them, and a movie with Catherine Zeta-Jones.

But I thank India, and her more than 22,000 followers, for the exceptional effort, and know her My Life on a Plate would definitely make my own list of comfort reads any day.

The facebook thing

2010-09-07T16:58:00.001-05:00

If you're one of my few fb friends, you've probably noticed I'm not there a lot. I find it impossible to navigate the privacy policies and frankly distrust the format, having no desire to expose myself, my desires and behaviors to nefarious uses by marketers interested in targeting their advertising even more precisely. And many of my tech-ier teens have cooled on the social networking tool, now that their grandmother is checking their wall...

But I'm confronted with fb on a daily basis. Student profiles on our school network are blocked from http://www.facebook.com/ But our district didn't pay a premium to block secure sites, so https://www.facebook.com allows you access, open sesame, and there's not a student that doesn't know it and consequently violate the district's acceptable use policy on a regular basis.

When I started working at my school, I really wanted students to have unlimited and, to a great extent, unfiltered access to the Internet. With fb, the purpose of use has become an issue for the first time because of the extremely limited resources at our school. Right now, two girls are regularly coming to the library to use the computers for fb fourth block, in some cases muscling out students doing research. We have only 14 machines, so most are being used instructionally at any given moment.

The official district fb blockage introduces other issues. Should I as a steward of network resources confront them for violating the usage policy? How could I do this equitably, when all students seem to participate? And what about students doing coursework who have fb open, too? In another browser window or with a document open, that seems like multitasking. And I keep wondering WHY these girls would choose the library to check fb. Maybe they don't have Internet access at home, to say nothing of the smartphones many students use to check fb in class (under the desk, or in the purse albeit). Is it an equity issue? There is that one math teacher who posts his course videos to fb, as well... I would limit access to instructional resources.

I'm sickened and daunted by the prospect of monitoring use. I once visited the library in the better-funded city school I graduated from twenty years ago, where software observes all activity at student workstations, and the librarian can close a browser session or send a note to the student's desktop. While I love that idea for bibliographic instruction, I'm not sure I want to invade their space, mechanically or otherwise.

Finally fall

2010-09-01T10:21:00.001-05:00

Despite the wonderful daily input provided by the interwebs, back-to-school time has me still craving a little face-to-face learning. Fortunately, I have an insanely full professional development calender for the next few months. I'm really looking forward to seeing so much of my PLN and fueling this dissertation thing with some fresh thinking.

ALSC Institutue, September 23-25. Though my patron demographic is more YALSA than ALSC, ALSC always gets my vote for friendliest ALA division. Atlanta's drive-able for me and the Technology strand includes "Transforming Gamers Into Readers" with David Levithan, feeding my obsession with Scholstic's multimodal forays! As a bonus, I'll get to see Susak Kusel and Susan Polos, who I met through the amazing ALSC Newbery course taught by K.T. Hornig a couple of years back.

School Library Journal Leadership Summit, October 22-23. I love the SLJ Summits because they bring in really smart speakers instead of the usual suspects and also eliminate so much of the obligatory lowest-common-denominator element when it comes to the tech-y side of our work. I missed last year because it overlapped our fall break, but I hope to see much of my PLN in Chicago this time. The fact that it's underwritten by generous corporate sponsors (no registration!) and tends to happen in really nice places are bonuses.

YALSA Literature Symposium, November 5-7. I went to the first YALSA Lit Symposium in Nashville in 2008 and knew I'd never want to miss it again, so Albuqurque was a must. I think ALAN is the only place I've seen a similar constellation of YA luminaries, and the Morris lunch was a don't-miss. I signed up for Angie Manfredi's "Body Positivity and Fat Acceptance" preconference, too, which I just know will be awesome.

NCTE, November 19-21, ALAN November 22-33. I attended NCTE and ALAN for the first time last year. They, unlike ALA, still recognize my student status (I am currently enrolled in TWO graduate programs, but ALA still won't cut me a break...I tithe to ALA), which makes attending more affordable. The legendary "box of books" at ALAN offsets my registration, and the chance to hear from so many YA authors (albeit in a rapid-fire format) is compelling enough to draw me, even to Orlando.

So what aren't I going to?

The AASL Fall Forum, November 5-6. It's in Portland where my BFF happens to live, but it conflicts with the YALSA Lit Symposium, which was on my calender much earlier.

Kidlitcon, October 23. Kidlitcon is a wonderful amalgamation of librarians, writers, bloggers, and readers, which I enjoyed thoroughly last year in Washington, D.C, but which conflicts with the SLJ Summit this year. I'll visit Minneapolis for AASL next fall, and Chicago is SO MUCH easier to get to....

Where will YOU be this fall? Looking forward to seeing you.

Questing for books

2010-08-30T10:24:00.001-05:00

The whole Mockingjay kerfluffle has made me think a lot about how getting books has changed in the past few decades.

As a young girl, I loved Nancy Drew. Before I knew the word completist, I was one. It was the yellow-spine era, and I spent a couple of years checking every bookstore I came across for any of the 56 hardbacks. Strange how the small bookstores that dotted our town and every other then seemed somehow to have more stock than the massive chains which have replaced them.

When I had all but three of the yellow Nancys, I was allowed to use the form at the back of the book to order the copies to round out my set. My parents wrote a check to the Strathmore Syndicate. It took six to eight weeks for delivery. It was magical when those three books arrived.

Aside from this, which now seems a rather Herculean effort, I always read what was around. At home, it was wildly age-inappropriate things scavenged from my mother and grandmothers. My senior year of high school, I had an after-school job in a used bookstore which did a brisk trade in mass market paperbacks, and I read my way through anything in their stock that looked interesting.

In college, I had ample access to almost anything I wanted to read via the trifecta of an Ivy League college library, an excellent independent bookstore (now, sadly, a Barnes and Noble), and a well-supported public library. I DO remember going to the Strand in 1991, looking for a biography of Gilles de Rai that appeared in the NYT without luck, but most of my bookquesting was fulfilled for a while.

After college, left the vagaries of used book stores and underfunded public libraries, I became a much more eclectic reader, borrowing anything anyone recommended or was new, but always with crumpled pieces of paper in the bottom of my purse listing books I was looking for, questing for, in every bookstore I passed…then everything changed.

In 1997, I was taking a class on Irish literature for my first master’s, and saw a review of The Dower House by Annabell Goff Davis, which manifested the Irish history we had been reading about in fiction, in the New York Times. That was just after I had read about Amazon in the NYT (and that was when we got the NYT by mail, the next day). And then, for the cost of shipping, just about any book in the world could be mine. When I consider all my reading over the last decade – deep forays into Angela Thirkell, Barbara Pym, and Margaret Forester – it overwhelmingly represents things I would never have been able to find locally.

I don’t read many bestsellers, so most of what I’m after is definite long-tail stuff, but I think the Internet has actually tripped me up on Mockingjay. Had I gone to Barnes and Noble, I could have read it Tuesday, but I preordered, Apple’s preorders having spoiled me. I didn’t want the Kindle version, because I wanted to share it with my students before our library copies arrived. So I didn’t get my Mockingjay until Thursday, and was left with that deep dissatisfaction which occurs when you miss the opening weekend of a movie everyone else was buzzing about… and a reminder that there are other, more expedient ways to get those popular books, rather than online.

Intellectual freedom at issue in Humble, Texas

2010-08-18T20:37:00.003-05:00

The controversy surrounding Ellen Hopkins' being disinvited from the Humble,Texas literary festival hits a little close to home for me.

Last year, a mother complained to our assistant principal about the language in Burned. It was an exchange my administrator didn't mention to me, one I only heard about because he asked my paraprofessional to make sure the student hadn't accrued a fine when he returned the book. I have an administration who understand and even privilege the importance of access to books teens want to read. But we've already had six classes of freshmen in for orientation this week, and the Ellen Hopkins books were gone with the first group. I fought not to worry as the baby-faced ninth graders checked those books out. I'm sure they didn't have those at the middle schools.

And one thing is for certain, Hopkins' books are among my students' favorites, so much so that not one of our five copies of Burned made it back on the shelf this summer -- I definitely need to place an order there. No one who has read them could possibly think Hopkins' book glorify drugs or sex, and I have had students attest to their bibliotherapeutic qualities, either in reflecting the realities around them or warning them about pratfalls of reckless behavior.

Hopkins is among the fiercest teen advocates I know. Her posts surrounding the Texas incident, like those during the brouhaha in Oklahoma last year, are wonderful. The exclusion, and the subsequent author solidarity in reaction, is all over the biblioblogosphere, but I especially appreciated Harmony's take as a teen:

NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO TELL ME WHAT TO READ. NO ONE. My parents don't even tell me what I'm allowed to read yet ONE person whom most of the teens have probably never even met has the right to decide what ALL of them are allowed to read?

I enlarged Hopkins' 2009 Banned Books Week poem "Manifesto" to poster size. It hangs on our circulation desk, beneath whichever of books we happen to have just gotten back. We keep them there because they won't stay on the shelf for long.

Recent reading, and social networks

2010-08-08T20:16:00.002-05:00

After reading Lauren Barnholt's One Night that Changes Everything with its shrugged-off cyberbullying, I've been thinking a lot about depictions of social networking technology in YA lit. My favorite iterations are those where the author creates their own nuanced social networks. Over the weekend, I read Blue Plate Special by Michelle D. Kwasney, and was terribly bothered by the cycle of these women's frailty at the hands of men as perpetuated by the cell phone with tracking capabilities that Ariel's boyfriend urges her to take. She eventually discards the device, but it was such a negative and menacing symbol, I'm definitely going to track some of these appearance of social networks and mobile technologies and see how they track with larger trends. Somewhat ironically, my next read was Stephen Davies' fun parkour-and-cryptography lark Hacking Timbuktu, which presents facebook as the terrorism-abetting group-dynamic-riddled communication mechanism that could well be.

Speaking of social networks, there's nothing like the social experience of reading. When I opened up my browser, I was thrilled to see book bloggers discussing three of my favorite recent reads. Angie Manfredi takes on teen Kody Keplinger's debut, The DUFF, at her blog Fat Girl, Reading. At GuysLitWire, bookchic focuses on Martin Wilson's debut What They Always Tell Us. And at Becky's Book Reviews, Becky reviews the lyrical historical Leaving Gee's Bend by another first-time Alabama author, Irene Latham.

The great potential in our midst

2010-08-06T06:29:00.000-05:00

While librarians elsewhere will be moving from campus-to-campus, or even back into the classroom, we are lucky enough to have three new librarians in our district. One elementary, one middle, and one high school librarian, and, for two of them, this is a new career. The third has moved into the area. And while none of the rest of us have materials funding, one lucky first-year librarian even gets money to build a collection at the new middle school next door. I'll admit to being a little jealous, as I shelve my fifty-five year old books...

But it's interesting to see the processes of what we do through new eyes. I spent yesterday afternoon showing Infocentre, our so-called automation system, with our transplant. We hit an impasse over barcodes. I have never printed my own, that being one of the few aspects of processing I am willing to outsource. She didn't know you could purchase barcodes or generate them outside of the automation system... and she was the experienced school librarian. But it's good to think about these things again. I've had to opine on everything from district-level policies about fines and fees to the local intellectual freedom climate over the last few days.

I think some of the success of my school comes from an almost anthropological sense of having been inducted and complying with the larger group norms. Our county librarians' group is also a strong one. In what can be an isolating position as a school librarian, you need that constant counsel at the ready. I have found so many like-minded individuals in the biblioblogosphere, I can forget that my local colleagues appreciate community, too. I'm thinking helping these new librarians achieve enculturation into this most fundamental group of allies and advocates is about the most important way I can spend my time as school begins.

22.2%

2010-07-29T14:27:00.000-05:00

...that's just how much of the coursework I've managed for this administrative credential. The first month was a good one. We went to campus and met with some other groups of students there. We took a Foundations course and a Technology one. There's a practicum up next.

Our instructor brought in guest speakers from our system to describe the use of technology in their specialty areas. Those conversations with department heads really did help us see aspects of the school other than the narrowly instructional. The administrative details of the Child Nutrition Program (including the process of evaluating families for federal support) were fascinating, and I really appreciate the central and remote control of the school plant which Dan Evans described. The certificate database with search capabilities which Ken Kubik demonstrated should be showcased, as it assures parents that our teachers are well-qualified, and I can see where it would be helpful when screening candidates.

I probably use technology in my work more than do many of my classmates, but I was quite impressed by how quickly my cohort picked up the read/write web technologies. It really demonstrated to me what our teachers are capable of, given exposure and support, in learning digital tools. I am heartened by the prospects for teaching and learning, given their obvious understanding of using technology for communication and leadership as well as instruction.

Inciting Inquiry with Library of Congress Primary Sources

2010-07-28T18:13:00.002-05:00

I spent most of last week with an amazing group of teachers and school librarians, at a meeting of the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Mentor group. We met some of the specialists who get to engage with amazing resources full-time.

My big thrill the last time I was at the Library was a peek into the Adams building stacks; this time we got to visit the main reading room after hours, mug for pictures, and even check out the card catalogs.

One of my favorite discoveries this time: this amazing colonial map (1763). I think you could throw the Silverlight version up on a digital projector and spend hours pouring over it...

I've got a couple of related presentations coming up, and this is what I'm putting together:

Into the Past...Inciting Inquiry with Digitized Primary Sources from the Library of Congress

These collection represent our nation’s cultural heritage. Help your students remix, mash up and make that their own. This webinar will feature navigation techniques appropriate to the Library of Congress’s extensive electronic collections, highlights from flagship online exhibitions, and fresh ideas for integrating primary sources in read/write web projects across the curriculum.

Whether you’re in a classroom with a single workstation or a one-to-one computing environment, the Library’s curated collection of themed resources, lesson planning tools, and professional development modules can support the successful integration of this unequaled collection of documents, images, texts, and film. Come and explore the resources that will transport your students into the past...

Cell phones, ereaders, and NATC

2010-07-16T11:08:00.003-05:00

This week, more than 500 educators from 9 systems and 5 private schools came to Sparkman High School for the North Alabama Technology Conference, expertly coordinated by Vickey Sullivan for the sixth year.

My first session Wednesday introduced iNow, the new student information system. I sat with two members of my school faculty, which made the workshop more useful.

I found the keynote, delivered by retired detective and FBI consultant Richard Love and entitled "Child Sexual Exploitation via Media and Technology," to be designed to manipulate his audience in the worst possible way. I think using a clip from Saturday Night Live (which was itself terrible dated, as were Love's references to AOL chatrooms) really brought down the tone of his whole presentation. His caveat never to post a picture of yourself online seemed to somewhat contradict his proviso that we set up a facebook account to experience what younger people are doing. I found it quite telling that his own wife had ignored his expert advice. I think Love is a Luddite and a reactionary. Sexual offenders have always existed, and I have seen studies that instances of child sexual abuse have actually decreased over the last few decades because of awareness campaigns. I resent the implication that technology has facilitated this sort of predation, when it has simply recast it. I am disappointed that the conference chose to begin on a fear-mongering note rather than focus on constructive and innovative uses of technology. I think media awareness and literacy can largely mitigate the uninformed and reactionary anxieties that Love has evidently made his career feeding.

I gave a 3-hour workshop Wednesday afternoon on the Instructional Uses of Cell Phones (slides below, but the website may be more useful). Ironically enough, we didn't have cell phone reception in the classroom, so chose to make a series of field trips in search of a signal. There was palpable excitement as the participants practiced SMS-ing Google queries, responding to polleverywhere surveys, and writing to wifitti walls. Again, twitter let us down, only a handful were able to create new accounts, but I think they got the idea of backchanneling.

I won a 500GB hard drive in Wednesday afternoon's door prizes. It only seems to work with the Mac, but I guess it will be my new Time Machine device.

Thursday morning, I decided to forgo the Moodle session in lieu of some shorter concurrent session. The first I'd chosen was cancelled, and I ended up in another on Moodle after all, this time for language arts. It discussed some really interesting elements of Moodle design. When I mentioned these capabilities to two of my Moodle-using colleagues, they told me that they aren't able to upload a picture to the Madison County district Moodle server. That is the only disadvantage I see in having so many practice-based workshops with teachers from different districts -- the local policies and technologies do vary radically.

Then the next session I'd planned to go to was cancelled as well, so I ended up in one on Glogster... I had used a glogster for the splash page for my afternoon workshop. The presenter was a librarian who had seen the poster technology at AIMA (now ASLA) in June.

There was a small but enthusiastic crowd for my concurrent session on ereading (slides below). I had a petting zoo, too, so they could experiment with Kindle, Stanza on iPod Touch, iBooks, and Tablet ereader applications.

I ended the day as the only participant in a session on VoiceThread, so it became a private tutorial. The presenter put together a VoiceThread where second graders talked about their favorite books. Instead of a series of photos with a single voice or two voices in tandem, which is how my students have always used VoiceThread, these students all spoke over a single piece of clipart. It was interesting to contrast those different uses. She helped me figure out that you can only use the doodle tool when in recording mode with a live mic, and I had an educator account, which allowed me more VoiceThreads, which was something she had only just learned about at AETC.

It was a good conference, full of sharing and rather practical tips. I was really gratified to see so many teachers from my school faculty there as well as many librarians I knew. It seems to bode well for our district.

A new adventure

2010-07-09T14:16:00.001-05:00

Last week, I started classes towards an administrative certificate with a cohort of teachers from my district. The program is offered through Samford University, a small Christian school in Homewood. There are seven of us altogether.

A couple of years ago, I wouldn't have envisioned moving in this direction professionally. I love the library and I love technology, neither of which requires this sort of experience. And I've still got that dissertation thing hanging out there, after all, with no foreseeable end in sight (if you know a good freelance statistician willing to take on an interesting project....you know where to find me)

But in the ed tech world, I started seeing some amazing young administrators who were leading who faculties in these really creative ways using technologies. Two standouts are Chris Lehmann from the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, who I met at the Google Teacher Academy, and Kipp Rogers, a middle school principal who uses cell phones in all sorts of transformational ways. I began to see a potential for a realm of influence far larger than my current one in the library. And some really bright women emphasized the gender imbalance in secondary administration, appealing to my feminist bent.

An additional factor is the impending retirement of my exceptional administrators, Tommy Ledbetter and Sarah Fanning, from Buckhorn High School. I'm hoping we will have them on campus for another two years, but I may overestimate. I realize a lot of my role as the school librarian is really at the liberty of the administrators, and I have been shown a considerable amount of support. The main impetus for me in taking the educational leadership classes is in maximizing my opportunities in the advent their successors don't support the library in the same palpable way.

The ARC & the agony...

2010-07-09T09:57:00.003-05:00

Another post-ALA note. My friend Laura was surprised I didn't mention our whirl around the exhibits Friday night. Cathy Nelson writes about learning about the seats at the back of the Newbery Caldecott banquet... Laura taught me that Friday night is the definitive time to visit the exhibits, in terms of ARC aquisition.

I probably didn't mention it because I feel quite ambivalently about ARCs, the advance reader copies that publishers use to promote upcoming titles and distribute to review outlets. Thanks to the work of Liz Burns, I know they are more expensive to produce than trade editions. I first started running across them as a book review writer for the newspaper, in another era. But I do think they are an important tool for librarians as well as reviewers. I do think we need to know about the new books to help generate buzz. But I am NOT about getting ARCS of every title, especially when I can tell at a glance I would never read them. It's hard to plan what you get at the exhibits, and while I scored The Duff by Kody Keplinger, I left without Matched, the Ally Condie dystopian, and Forget-Her-Nots, on the language of flowers by the delightful Amy Brencount White. I have found ARCs seem most abundant for sophmore efforts.

But it seems like there are some better options to carrying these weird, unsellable, uncollectable volumes across the country evolving. I think NetGalley is the most brilliant concept ever. Even though I have to read them as .pdfs on my Kindle, it's still well work the dollar or two to convert a book for your own hardware. It was through NetGalley I found Sources of Light by Margaret McMullan, my favorite YA read of the year. But with eGalleys, I won't have a parent chase me down a year later to tell me how terrific her daughter thought it was that I brought her the Pendragon prequel, "a book that wasn't even published yet." And that will be a parent who will always support the libraries.

ALA Annual, 2010

2010-06-28T11:27:00.001-05:00

I've been in Washington since Thursday, attending the American Library Association's annual conference. It's been a working meeting for me for the most part, rather indistinguishable from Midwinter. I chaired a preconference for YALSA on Friday, and have spent much of the subsequent time recovering from the anxiety that coordinating those 14 speakers induced. Here's the introduction I prepared for that event, in case you are interested in what all transpired:

My name is Wendy Stephens, and on behalf of YALSA and the preconference committee, I am happy to welcome you here today.

When then-YALSA President-Elect Linda Braun approached me about chairing this preconference, she had come up with the title “WTF? They ARE Reading?” Many of my files related to the conference still contain that acronym, but someone at YALSA thought “Promoting Teen Reading with Web 2.0 Tools” might be a little less questionable in case your library board was picking up your preconference registration expenses.

When talking about the changing nature of both books and the reading experience, I thought of course of Dr. Eliza Dresang whose ground-breaking theory of Radical Change has informed an entire generation of youth services librarians who recognize the truth in her exploration of how contemporary text has begun to mimic hypertext and web conventions.

I know I look to the Pew Internet and American Life project regularly for the up-to-the-minute statistics about young people are using technology. The group’s assistant director, Dr. Kristen Purcell, will give us the hard facts about what young people are doing in terms of content consumption and generation.

We know that texts are changing as are teen media consumption habits, but what about the production of texts and how those producers are interacting with their readers? We as librarians usually remember the first time we met an author whose work we cherished, realizing that they ate and breathed, but many young people today will never have had that experience, because they are interacting with their favorite writers almost daily through social networks including facebook, livejournal, YouTube, and twitter, as well as closed social networks like nings. I am curious to know if whatever authors might forfeit in terms of mystique is more than compensated by the deep and reiterative relationships with readers.

The author who has most conspicuously harnessed his readership using the power of social media for forces of good is John Green, whose nerdfighters are a testament to the community that literature can generate. Joining him is his collaborator, David Levithan, who almost dialogic collaborations also hint at a changing model of authorship. David is also well-known as an editorial director responsible for the Push imprint at Scholastic, the publisher responsible for some of the more interesting multimodal books, so perhaps he will give us an inkling about the editorial process for books involving web or video content.

We will be hearing from Malinda Lo and Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, three first-time authors who used social media to create buzz well ahead of their publication dates, eventually earning the Morris award for 1^st time authors, and from Melissa Walker, a young adult author and journalist will speak about using online forums as incubators to create a range of online conversations around the work of new and established writers alike as well as pioneering online projects like her teen consumer blog I Heart Daily and her latest venture, Before You Were Hot.

After hearing how reading, writing, and authorship are all changing in the digital landscape, our panel of all-star practitioners will give some practical extensions for teen readers as well as mechanisms for the facilitation of author-reader interactivity. Among other topics, we will hear about fan fiction, digital book trailers, virtual author visits, and author guides which highlight user-generated content. For teens who can’t get enough of a particular fictitious world, bringing the considerable amount of associated media into your library is a way of expanding your collection and offering them new literacy opportunities.

We hope that you will enjoy the afternoon thinking about the changing nature of reading and writing, much of it technologically facilitated, and that you will discover opportunities for your teens to experience the social side of reading.

I was absolutely thrilled to have some of the most amazing practitioners around share their work: Angie Manfredi, Bobbi Newman, Buffy Hamilton, Kelly Czarnecki (who was also on the preconference committee), Liz Burns, and Tiff Emmerick. I owe them all tremendously for their time and generosity.

I've had some other fun, too -- a tea for Katherine Paterson Saturday afternoon was a real highlight. I actually got to have a conversation with her, about Jacob Have I Loved, and Vermont, and Read for Your Life, the electronic collections of her speeches I had read to bone up. She said she didn't know anyone else who had bought them!

At last night's Newbery/Caldecott, I sat with the DC Kidlit Group, spearheaded by the amazing Susan Kusel. She started an ambitious project to gather original art from everyone in the room, and brought the creative supplied to facilitate that.

This morning, I went to the first meeting of a new committee charge, as an "intern," no doubt the world's oldest individual in that capacity, but it's with the ALA Web Advisory Committee, so it's giving me all sorts of new insights into our professional organization, which can seem so monolithic and bureaucratic. It's a new world for me.