Posts on librarianship

I've been a little lazy with the book displays the past few weeks. Or maybe I should say I've been very busy with other important things at work. That sounds better, doesn't it? And it's true, I swear.

Anyway, I had a realistic fiction display in our Junior High Fiction area all of November. High time for something different! We're getting out our Christmas (and Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, in much smaller numbers) books today, so to complement them I pulled out some wintry fiction.

Currently on display:
- Northlander, by Meg Burden
- The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper
- The Dreaming Place, by Charles DeLint
- Spud in Winter, by Brian Doyle
- The Winter War, by William Durbin
- Julie of the Wolves, by Jean Craighead George
- Girl Overboard, by Justina Chen Headley
- Far North, by Will Hobbs
- The Winter Road, by Terry Hokenson
- Miracle on 49th Street, by Mike Lupica
- Brian's Winter, by Gary Paulsen
- The Winter When Time Was Frozen, by Els Pelgrom
- Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett
- The Trap, by John Smelcer
- Feathers, by Jacqueline Woodson

Not a bad combination of adventure, fantasy, realistic fiction, and even a little historical fiction, if I do say so myself.

Any suggestions of books to add when the supply is depleted? They need to be upper middle grade and/or tamer teen fiction. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe does not qualify in our library, alas!

In storytime this morning, I asked the children what they were doing for Thanksgiving.

Me: There's a special holiday later this week. What is it?

Kids: Thanksgiving!

Me: Right! What are you going to do to celebrate Thanksgiving?

Kid 1: I'm going to be a skunk!

Kid 2: I'm going to be a fireman!

Kid 3: I'm going to be a fairy princess!

Me: OK, let me tell you what *I'm* going to do on Thanksgiving. My parents and some good friends are coming over, and we're going to eat a nice dinner together and celebrate the things that make us happy. What about you?

Kid 4: I'm going to be Bob the Builder!

Kid 5: I'm going to be a ladybug!

Kid 6: I'm going to be a skunk, too!

Clearly I've been going about this Thankgiving thing all wrong. I need a costume for Thursday, stat.

I just got to pet an opossum, a baby alligator, an armadillo, and a baby ostrich. I also got a close-up look at a tarantula and helped carry a 9 foot, 80 pound (baby) Burmese python around the auditorium.

My job rocks.

We hired zoologist Dr. Robert James to do his Animal Encounters program for a packed auditorium (about 85 people, and there were people who went disappointed). He brings a half dozen animals with him and walks the aisles with each as he talks about them.

You're allowed to touch all of them except for the tarantula—which made the stroll upon a little girl's hand. You're allowed to take pictures and video (I did not, sorry to say). The only rule is no talking.

All the animals are rescues who will be rehabilitated and released to the wild or orphans who have imprinted on humans and cannot be released. The animals are attuned to Dr. James's voice, to the point where they expect it. When he's on the other side of the world, back home his animals listen to recordings of his voice.

Dr. James said that after he spent time as a POW he vowed he would never cage an animal again, so he's very anti-cage, anti-leash. He guided the ostrich through the aisles with verbal commands in Spanish.

He also talked about appreciating diversity, not making judgments about an animal or person without having met them first, not making generalizations about a whole species/ethnicity/whatever based on your experience with an individual. Nevertheless, there were still people (adults, need I say?) who shrank back in fear/disgust when certain animals came their way. Sad.

More take-home points:
- Armadillos are hairy in spite of their leathery skin.
- Some possums have very pretty, clever faces.
- Alligators are dumb, have no saliva (so they don't eat unless they're in water to lubricate their meals), and bear a glassy-eyed expression similar to my dog when she's blissed out.
- Pythons feel like one really long, intense, chilly muscle and get freakin' heavy after 10 minutes. Also, they have two three-inch-long vestigial legs that retract into their bodies near the tail.
- My job, again, rocks.

Yesterday I wrote about how lack of Internet affects library functions. Today we continued that experiment, until we finally regained connectivity at 7:15 PM, 48.5 hours after we lost it. Conclusion: it's bad.

I think my department was one of the least impaired. Yeah, we didn't know whether books were checked in or out, or where they were supposed to be shelved. But we muddled through with the help of each other, Children's Books in Print, and other libraries who actually had access to the catalog. I couldn't work on our Web 2.0 staff development program, so I weeded the juvenile paperbacks and prepared our bookmark contest entries for display. Tomorrow, everything will be back to normal.

On the other hand, circulation, shelving, and interlibrary loan will have two days' backlog to deal with: thousands of items to check in, route, sort, and shelve, all in one fell swoop. There's no way around it. I don't envy them.

People often ask librarians how technology, especially the Internet, has changed libraries. Often it seems to be with the expectation that we'll say, "Terribly! No one reads books anymore! They play Yahoo checkers all day and write their papers from Wikipedia!" I should specify that people who ask this questions are people who don't spend a lot of time in libraries themselves—or they'd see that libraries (my library, anyway) are still happening places.

Today, though, we got a taste of what libraries would be without the Internet. My library and several other area libraries lost all connectivity-related functions yesterday evening and hadn't regained it by the time I left work today. What this meant, in practical terms:

- No library catalog, so no way to locate an item except by knowing where it ought to be and hoping it was checked in.
- Items could be checked out manually (by writing down patron and item IDs) but could not be checked back in...
- ...which meant books could not be shelved, either.
- No Internet for staff or patrons.
- No computer access for patrons, period, because we use a network-based reservation system.

In other words, we were almost, but not totally, crippled.

Fortunately, I didn't need computers to do my storytime! And most of the questions I got at the desk were answerable from memory or with the help of reference books and my colleagues. I also spent several hours helping a coworker with a major shift of our nonfiction books (moving them to give all shelves more or less equal breathing space), which is hard, dirty, but rewarding work. Plus it's fun to be active instead of sitting at a computer all day, which... is most days, for me.

I hope the Internet's "fixed" by the time I come to work tomorrow, though! It's tough—tougher than I really like to admit—to have the world no longer at your fingertips.

Here's the promised book display to highlight our new GLBTQ list. "Different Families / Same Love"—that goopy enough for you?

The lit holder has copies of our Gay and Lesbian, Adoption, and Celebrate Diversity lists. And the books are a selection of picture books from those lists!

Sorry for the crummy (as usual) photos. I'd blame the camera, but—no, actually, I'll just blame the camera.

Progress report on what my library has done since the ILA conference session on library service to GLBTQ teens:

• We have ordered (but not yet received) Serving Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Teens: A How-to-Do-It Manual for Librarians, by Martin and Murdock (Neal-Schuman, 2006).
• As of today, our list of recommended Gay and Lesbian Books for Young People is available on our website and in the library.
• Modernizing/streamlining catalog headings hasn't happened yet, and I don't think it will for at least another month what with various other things happening. But it's still on my agenda.

So, more about the list. "Gay and Lesbian" is not a very inclusive title, I know. But we were going for transparency, and it was the best title we could think of that wasn't too long, clever, obscure, general, or clinical. We figure that people looking for a GLBTQ list will recognize this as such, and that people serendipitously finding the list will have a good idea of what it includes. The list description spells out the contents further.

As for what's on the list, it's got books about queer youth, children and teens with queer family members and friends, various other queer issues, different types of families, and some other gender identity issues. The books have an intended audience of preschool through high school. All the books are owned by the library at present. It's not comprehensive, but I squeezed in as many titles as I could within our one-sheet, double-sided constraints.

I'm very appreciative of my boss (Hi, boss! Yes, my boss reads my blog), my uber-boss, and my fellow youth librarians, who have been very supportive of this list. (So far, no one has asked why we need this list.) My boss has even suggested we do a display to highlight the list, after our Day of the Dead display comes down. That's really gutsy, but what is a good librarian, if not gutsy? Let's do it!

You know how some rock music videos have apparently absolutely nothing to do with the song lyrics? Well, a clever fellow by the name of Dustin McLean is doing his part to set things right with his "literal video" series, redubbing music videos with lyrics that match the action, with hilarious results.

McLean started with A-ha's "Take On Me" and has since followed up with Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels"—which, as you may know, takes place in a library! View it and weep (with laughter).

(Warning... some mildly NSFW language near the end.)

In case the video has erased your memory of the original song lyrics, you can read them here.

Ooo, some parents make me so mad!

Tonight I was walking through the junior high section when I overheard an exchange between a mom and her daughter, who appeared to be about twelve years old. The girl had picked out a book from the S.A.S.S. series.

Mom said, "That looks a little too snacky. Let's look for something else. Let's see, have you ever read any Virginia Woolf?"

Alternate-Universe Me snatched the S.A.S.S. book from Mom's disapproving fingers and whacked her over the head with it. Respect-Patrons'-Privacy Me walked away seething.

What is it about free reading that some parents don't understand? What's wrong with "snacky"? Why must reading be a chore?

Author Shannon Hale has a nice article in the October School Library Journal about how assigned reading (including Virginia Woolf) temporarily destroyed her love of reading, though she didn't realize it at the time. Alternate-Universe Me would have strapped this mom to a chair and made her read the article.

This story has a slightly more satisfying conclusion than I would have expected, however. A few minutes after my eavesdropping, the girl and her mother came to the desk asking for diary/memoir recommendations (Mom's idea again). The girl had, of course, returned the S.A.S.S. book to the shelf, but at least she'd replaced it with some other good books actually written for people her age. Still, Alternate-Universe Me couldn't help manifesting for a second.

Me: Oh! You decided not to take the S.A.S.S. book?
Girl: Um, no. I changed my mind.
Mom, to girl: Why was that?
Girl: Um, that was the book you said looked like a 'TV book.'
Mom: It did look like a 'TV book.'
Me: They're definitely not 'TV books.' In fact, those books are really interesting and fun. They're all written by authors who have special knowledge of the countries they take place in. They're a window into another culture.
[That's right, spread it on thick...]
Mom: Do you want to go back and get it, honey?
Girl: Um, no, that's OK.

I console myself that maybe next time they're here, when the girl picks up an S.A.S.S. book, Mom will say OK. If only the same could be said for any book that girl picks out.

ETA, 10/23/08:
For the record, I can only guess at what "TV Book" was supposed to mean. Did they mean a book based on a TV show? Did they mean a book that "rots the brain"? Regardless: HMMMPH!

As of this week, American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association, has opened its online content to nonmembers. This means, among other things, anyone can sign up for AL Direct, their weekly e-newsletter which includes news on libraries, books, technology, intellectual freedom challenges, and other library-related issues, from ALA, major media outlets, and the blogosphere.

What's the happy occasion? Open Access Day, first celebrated October 14 (news to me, I'm afraid). From AL's press release:

Open Access Day is sponsored by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and Students for Free Culture. Building on the worldwide momentum toward open access to publicly funded research, Open Access Day was established to create an opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access to and use of content.

In addition, AL has opened access to its PDF archives going back to 2003, and as of 2009 issues will be available online in HTML format. I'm wondering if these are steps not only toward open access but toward going greener. I like reading AL and all, but I—and most of the other 65,000+ ALA members—could probably just as easily read it online and save a lot of paper and production costs.