NSLS Blogs

Home » Blogs » Something Different Every Day

RSS

Something Different Every Day

September 22, 2008

Learn from my mistakes

You know, when I started this blog, I thought of it as a way to share some of my experiences in 25 years as a children’s librarian.  I sort of forgot how often my experiences could be filed under the category “dumb mistake”.  Here’s another storytime one!

Everyone knows better than to get in front of a storytime group with a book you haven’t read before.  If you ever did, it would likely be a mistake you’d only make once.  But what you might forget is, you have to look at the actual copy of the book that you are going to read in front of a group.  It’s not enough to be familiar with the story–you have to have looked at the book’s physical pages.  Otherwise you end up with:

“Hey, Ms. Susan!!!!  There are scribbles on that book!”  “Oh, no!”  “Somebody scribbled on it?”  “Why did they do that?”

I valiantly continue:  “Leonardo snuck up on the poor, unsuspecting boy.  And the mon…”

“Oh, no!  More scribbling!”  “It’s blue!”  “They scribbled some more?”

“‘Oh yeah?’ replied Leonardo. ‘Then why are you crying?’  ‘My big brother stole my action fig…’”

Collective groan:  “Ohhhhhhhh, noooooo!”

Sorry, Mo Willems.  I feel this may not have been the most effective rendition of Leonardo the Terrible Monster ever.

On the bright side, at storytime the week before, The Hello, Goodbye Window was a huge hit!  So maybe next week will go more smoothly.  One thing is certain:  I will have checked every page of every book I am reading.

posted by Susan at 3:52 pm | Comments (0)

September 17, 2008

Biting my tongue

So far there’s only one drawback to being on the Geisel Award Committee.  Mostly, it is great.  You get to intensively study a particular area of children’s literature for a year, and how children interract with it.  Fun stuff for someone like me.

There is a drawback, though, and that is, when I get a really wretchedly awful horrible no excuse for its existence book that fits into the potential Geisel Award category, I can’t blog about it.  Sad.

posted by Susan at 8:20 pm | Comments (0)

Drowning in listservs

My listservs are going crazy right now.  Child_lit, CCBC, adbooks, and yalsa-bk have been dropping an amazing number of emails into my box, to the point where I can’t begin to keep up.  What kicked off the frenzy of posts?  The answer to that would be who rather than what:  Sarah Palin.

First came the intense round of discussion on whether or not one should use a listserv with 501(c)3 status to discuss politics.  Once it was officially barred on yalsa-bk, the discussion turned toward how perplexing it was for an organization that dedicates itself to protecting free speech to be telling its listserv members what they can’t discuss.  Then came the dozens of messages beginning “I know we’re not supposed to be discussing this, but…”  Interesting, but yalsa-bk is a busy listserv already.  Those YA librarians have a lot to say about books, programming, teenagers, and most especially about graphic novels.  Add politics on top, and a deluge of email results.

Child_Lit has always come in waves, where one day the only message will be “Is anyone there?” and the next someone will post a provocative comment and the members write back in force.  Ever since the announcement of Sarah Palin, one discussion flows into the next and the number of messages is just tremendous.  Interesting, again, but…I’m drowning!

I salute the moderators of adbooks and CCBC for keeping their discussions focused, though even they have had a hard time reining in some of the discussions.

What do you do when your listservs go crazy?  Delete without reading?  Unsubscribe temporarily?  Or do you just try to keep up with the volume and figure that it’ll die down eventually and you’d better enjoy it while you can?  That’s what I’m doing, but if it keeps up like it’s been the past couple of days, I’m not sure I can continue all the way till November.

Edited to add:  So far today, I have deleted 400 messages!  Sure hope none of those were from my coworkers that got mixed into the listserv tsunami.

posted by Susan at 8:13 am | Comments (3)

September 8, 2008

National Library Week on Easter?

Okay, I get the idea of trying to stay neutral where religion is concerned, but it makes no sense at all to me to kick off National Library Week on a day when virtually all of the public libraries in the United States are closed.  We always have our annual Bookmark Contest Awards Ceremony that day, where we invite a guest illustrator to speak, and that makes a lovely way to get NLW started.  Not this year.

Why?

posted by Susan at 4:30 pm | Comments (0)