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July 31, 2006

Browsing the aisles of a toy store

Getting ready to do this morning's Babytime program reminds me of how hard it is becoming to find developmentally appropriate toys for little ones. Browse the aisles of a toy section and you may be shocked if it's been a few years since the last time you shopped. No longer will you find the toy where a child pushes a button and something pops up, or you shake a toy and it rattles. Now when the baby pushes a button, lights light up and buzzers buzz and things twirl. If you shake a toy gently, it might play an electronic song; shake it harder, and the sound doesn't change--there's very little cause and effect. Many of the toys are so wired that the gentlest of finger prods sets off a whole circus of response.

It wouldn't matter if those were a few choices amongst others, but unfortunately it's increasingly hard to come up with simple, appropriate toys to buy for the library or for home. This may sound like mere nostalgia, as we all believe whatever we experienced was in some way better. But I worry that all this disproportionate response and over-stimulation is going to create a generation of little guys that have a harder time sorting out the world, and maybe a harder time focusing on the kinds of quieter tasks where real learning takes place. That surely will have implications for libraries down the road.

What do you think? Am I needlessly concerned? Or is this an area where we should be trying hard to educate our parents? I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Posted by susan at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)

July 25, 2006

Difficult, or impossible? Fall planning during Summer Reading.

We're now in the time of year when somehow in the midst of Summer Reading chaos we're supposed to have planned our Fall programming, which amounts to planning our whole year's programming because of the programs that continue through the school year. How is that possible? How are you supposed to think coherently about how many storytimes and which kind of storytime and when are the school holidays and do you have time to add more reading patches and who can you book for your outside programs and oh yes....Children's Book Week is in November.

It's more than a little frustrating, isn't it? The solution is clear, though. All we need is one more month of summer. We can have two months of Summer Reading--June and July, say. Then we'll have another July where Summer Reading is over, and August to get everything ready, and voila! Prepared for Fall! So if anyone can let me know where to find a second July, I would really appreciate it.

Posted by susan at 9:13 PM | Comments (0)

July 20, 2006

Whoops, I forgot to mention

that I was going to be on vacation for two weeks!

Don't you love the way these days you can travel just about anywhere and go to the public library to check your email? It's become a universal thing where your patron can temporarily be my patron when they are visiting Niles, and my patron can be yours when they travel. On my vacation, I enjoyed being a patron of the Crawford County Public Library, a nicely designed, full service library for a community of 2,000.

Besides loving the open access for personal reasons, I love it as a librarian because to me, it represents part of the new identity of the public library as a "third place", somewhere people know they can go to get what they need. As people rely less on the library for information, we'll need to think in terms of filling their other needs in order to be able to continue offering the services they also need....like the information they can't find on their own.

Vacation is fun, but it'll be good to be back at my own library, congratulating kids on finishing the Summer Reading Game, and helping patrons wherever they are from.

Posted by susan at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)

July 4, 2006

Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's not

Most of the time, I feel very privileged to be a reviewer of children's and young adult books. It used to be a little more fun back before the advent of the Advance Reader Copy, which are handed out very freely at conferences now, and look very much like the finished book complete with cover and blurbs on the back. Before then, you'd get a galley, usually with no more information on the cover than the title and the author's name. So you'd wade on in with no idea of what to expect, and every once in awhile you would come across something amazing--What Jamie Saw, or Out of the Dust. Nowadays, with ARC's everywhere, by the time you are holding something wonderful in your hands, chances are someone has already posted about it on a listserv. But still, most of the time reviewing is a lot of fun, even if not quite as adventuresome as before.

Every once in awhile, though, you hit a string of books that make you wonder how it is possible that publishers reject so many books and still manage to publish so many mediocre ones. The past few days I have gotten to the point of wishing I could boil my reviews down to a single phrase:

"Biography of a big jerk"
"Has first-time novel written all over it"
"Beautiful book design, no content"
"There's such a thing as being too affirming"
"Making the characters dinosaurs doesn't make it a dinosaur book"

But then you pick up the new Alice Walker picture book There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me, and you remember that it really is a privilege to be a children's book reviewer.

Posted by susan at 3:12 PM | Comments (0)