web

I was so chagrined at having deleted the other week's American Libraries Direct newsletter that contained a link to my Spinal Exam post, I vowed never to delete AL Direct without reading it again. Here's the proof that, last week at last, I followed through! Some highlights:

• Librarians, let this be a lesson to you: niceness will get you nowhere. It's time to peer down your nose, draw your mouth into a sour puss, and brandish the shushing finger. ALA has the story: Mean Library Salary Up 2 Percent to $58,960 in 2008. (Thanks to my supervisor for pointing this out!)
   
  Silliness aside, the most surprising thing about this story is the salary figure. (Let's just put it this way: I'll be working quite a long time before I touch $59K, at which point inflation will have pushed the average even higher.) The survey was based on both public and academic librarians, and I have the feeling the academics were skewing it upward.
• Have you admired those celebrity READ posters hanging in your library? Have you ever wished that was you in the picture, holding your favorite book? Now you can make a mini READ poster of your own with this toy, thanks to the Shifted Librarian and fd's Flickr Toys (no Flickr account necessary). Here's my own READ poster, starring Mini Me (circa age 3):
  
  (The original photo is here. Yes, even then, I was quite the little reader. I wish I had a clue what those books were. The only one I recognize for sure is the Disney Winnie-the-Pooh and the Honey Tree at left, though I think I see the despised Scuffy the Tugboat lurking at the rear.)
• Kati at Alternative Teen Services has written an interesting article, My So-Called Picture Book, suggesting ways picture books can be used with people of all ages, especially teens. She focuses on picture books that speak to readers more mature than the preschool to second grade set, whether overtly or on an underlying level. Some examples: Samsara Dog (Manos and Vivos), Uncle Bobby's Wedding (Brannen), and Wolves (Gravett). Definitely worth a look, especially for teachers who work with teens.

I want to highlight a few blogs I've been enjoying lately. These blogs don't appear in this site's blogroll (which desperately needs to be updated again...sigh) because they aren't children's/YA book-related, but they're fun/interesting sites that might interest you, the reader, just the same!

• The Big Picture - This photo blog by The Boston Globe is a treasure. Three days a week, they post about 10-20ish high-res (for the web) photos on a given timely theme. One of my favorite entries was last week's Beating the Heat, 22 photos of people around the world cooling off this summer, from the claustrophobic throng in a Chinese swimming pool to Palestinian women bathing fully dressed to children playing in an Oklahoma water park. Some topics are sobering, others celebrate life, but all of them are a window to life around the world.
• Library Praxis - My associate (for lack of a better term) Emily and some of her cohorts write this blog on the politics and theory of librarianship. They're usually talking about academic libraries, but many of the principles apply to public and school libraries as well. I enjoy the discussions there.
• Ray the Singing Cab Driver - Ray is something of a fixture in Chicago. He's a singer-songwriter who literally takes his show on the road. He also has a stage band, for which my husband is the drummer. Ray is an eccentric character; his life philosophy is to lead the kind of life he'd like to read a book or see a movie about. He's had a boatload of interesting experiences and is also a damn fine storyteller. I greatly enjoyed his recent story about the one and only time he's been arrested.

My blog reading has improved about a hundred fold since I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader. Why did I never know how much better Google Reader is before? Posts don't vanish after I read them. I can "star" posts I want to read or return to later, making it SO much easier to track posts on which I've commented! I can search the contents of one, some, or all of the blogs I read, making it SO much easier to find that post that talked about X but I can't remember when or where I read it! Yay, Google Reader!

In fact, I'm going to use Google Reader's "starred item" feature RIGHT NOW and pull up the link to July's Carnival of Children's Literature, hosted by Read-Imagine-Talk. There are a lot of fun and interesting kidlit-related posts up there, and it's always fun to see what blogs I've been missing all this time.

Did I mention that Google Reader makes it easier to add a new feed than Bloglines does? It's true!

On a completely different note: for all I pick on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series (I'm on Team None-of-the-Above / Get-a-Life-Bella), I've placed my reserve at the library on Breaking Dawn. Like the Elephant's Child, I have insatiable curiosity. I shudder to think how many hundreds of people may be ahead of me.

As if we needed more ways to waste time: Spell with Flickr!

(Via The Reading Zone)

Some of the best things in life—the best online resources, anyway— really are free. For example, I don't know what my department would do without Mid-Continent Public Library's amazing Juvenile Series and Sequels resource.

Wondering the order of the Betsy-Tacy books? Getting Anthony Horowitz's series mixed up in your mind? Browse thousands of children's and YA series by author name, series title, book title, and series subject. You'll get a neat list in clean text of series in sequential order!

My department uses this resource just about every day, sometimes several times a day. Very rarely have I found errors or omissions.

Actually, I do know what we'd do without without this resource: we'd go to Amazon.com and deal with long load times and multiple edition/publication date confusion. But we don't have to, because MCPL has put this absolutely fantastic resource out on the web, free for all.

Looks like MCPL also has a weekly radio show, The Library Guys. Each week they interview an author and plug library programs. Many of their author interviews are available for download. I sense a definite bias toward mystery and suspense for adults, but still: cool!

Oh, my sweet lord... My friend C. just clued me in to 30 Is the New 13. Sada writes, "I am blogging my way through a suitcase full of stories—ahem, chapter books—and assorted other embarrassing relics from my childhood."

Sada's first subject for retrospective analysis is That's What Friends Are For, about the adventures of an exquisitely cool nine-year-old named Liz Craw. It's a thing of beauty. I'm crying, it's so beautiful.

(I have my own box of incriminating literary material from my youth, but at this time I don't quite have the guts to put it out for the whole world to see. Maybe some other day...)