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Something Different Every Day

October 29, 2008

Benjamin Franklin visits Niles

As you can see, Ben Franklin paid a visit to the Niles Public Library recently, in honor of a traveling exhibit the library is hosting all about HIM.  Ben mostly stayed in character, though did occasionally show a disconcerting knowledge of the score of the Bears’ game. 

At the exhibit opening, we were privileged to hear a quite inflammatory speech by Library Journal’s longtime editor John Berry.  Librarians as a group tend to be very liberal politically; Niles as a community tends not to be so liberal, so the crowd reaction was mixed.  He spoke about the role of libraries in modern times, and how they were still extremely imortant in the role they began with of helping to create an educated electorate.  He maintains that a good deal of the information that comes to the public has been corrupted by big business and special interests, and that the massive distrust of government is purely to benefit those trying to manipulate public opinion.  He sees the libraries as helping people sort out the good information from the bad.

Some in the audience were squirming and annoyed, but who can imagine that Ben himself wasn’t sometimes politically inflammatory?  He was a revolutionary, after all.  It was a great night.

posted by Susan at 5:56 pm | Comments (1)

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)

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)

August 25, 2008

Facebook, YAs, and Adults

So yesterday I finally created a Facebook page.  I held off for a couple of years because it was initially something for students, and I felt like I would be horning in on something that was rightly the turf of my two sons.  But now, everyone has a Facebook page, and with the two of them heading off to college, I wanted to have access to the info they were sharing with everyone else.

But it does bring up the question we struggle with when we try to work with Young Adults, which is How do we reach out to them without intruding on them?  We sit in our meetings or write on our listservs about meeting them on their own turf, but the sad fact is that as soon as a library creates a page on whatever the hottest service is, it by definition is no longer that cool.

I think there are particular librarians who are sensitive and cool enough to be able to try to mix with YAs on their own territory without embarrassing anyone.  But I’m not sure about the rest of us…

posted by Susan at 7:16 am | Comments (0)

August 14, 2008

A small community with a great library

Every summer, we go off to the north woods of Michigan for a couple of weeks of reading, eating blueberries and cherries, and hiking around.  It is blissful, especially after six weeks of summer reading bedlam.  But every once in awhile, you still need to check in with the world, and these days, that means email.

We make a trek into the local public library and use their computers.  The staff is warm and courteous, and never make us feel like vacationers shouldn’t be taking up their resources.  It’s always a very pleasant trip to make.

While in another even smaller community on the Lake Michigan shore on a short trip this year, we visited another library, just because librarians on vacation find it really hard to pass up peeking at a library.  What a contrast it made!  When you enter the building after climbing the stairs to get to the library, you are greeted with a sign saying, “Please do not leave donations of books.  Our shelf space is very restricted.”  Friendly!

Those shelves?  It’s like taking a trip into my childhood (and maybe my mom’s, too).   Of course they have those Landmark and Childhood of Famous American books, as well as lots of old Bobbsey Twins and many other books the Baby Boomers remember fondly.  But far worse were the nonfiction children’s shelves:

Oh my gosh!  That Boys’ Book of Science and Construction was published in 1958, if I recall correctly.  I especially liked the chapters on atomic science.  Not every community has the money to support a great library, but come on…1958?  So I was especially happy to get back to this wonderful library:

At this library, the first science shelf looks like this:

I’m just so impressed because this is a beautiful, busy library in a community that is struggling with some economic issues and nothing like the wealth of the community with the library above.  It’s a great resource to the kids and the adults as well, and even their out-of-town visitors.  Kudos to you!

posted by Susan at 4:25 pm | Comments (0)

July 25, 2008

The prize dilemma

What’s the best summer reading prize? My answer to that used to be automatic: Of course you give them a book. Of COURSE! If you have a lot of money, you give them this:

If you have a more normal amount of money, you can only afford paperbacks so you give them this:

If you have superpowers, you give them this (and prepare for the stampede):

Those all look nice, don’t they? Especially the one that hasn’t even been published yet? But the bottom line is that while books make a wonderful reward for kids who like reading, they make a pretty bad reward for the kids for whom reading is a struggle. You know, the ones Summer Reading is trying to reach?

So libraries turn to things like t-shirts and bags, usually with the name of the theme and the library’s name on them, and they’re very cute!

But then, aren’t you sending the message with non-book prizes that now that they are done with that yucky old reading, they can have something they’ll like better?

Then there’s our other prize dilemma. Virtually everything we hand out as our daily prizes is small stuff made in China. After last year’s bendables painted with lead paint, that no longer looks as appealing. And one of our always favorite prizes, shiny satin sand animals, came this year with big tags stating “NOT A TOY”. Since the company listed it as a toy and didn’t mention their non-toy status on their website, that was a little annoying!

So for next year, I can’t decide. Do we get rid of concrete prizes for daily prizes and call it “Going Green”? What do you do with the little guys, who don’t understand the concept of coupons or working toward a bigger reward? I am just not sure, but I’d love to hear what other libraries are planning.

posted by Susan at 10:55 am | Comments (2)

April 24, 2008

No Child Left Behind @ your library?

I am back on my early literacy soapbox, thanks to the checklist someone passed to me of how library staff in one library system are being rated on their storytimes. The checklist is entirely based on Every Child Ready to Read standards. It includes things like: “Presenter makes connections between letters in children’s names and in alphabet book or book title”.

Reading is important. Building reading skills is important. Getting young children ready to read using the six skills of early literacy is important. But the most important thing is story.

Schools have to implement No Child Left Behind styles of teaching reading to get funded. But I think many of us in Youth Services would agree that focusing too much on the mechanics of reading is a huge mistake. Are we falling into that same trap in libraries?

It’s the stories that count the most. Story is fundamental iin humankind–it’s why we pass them along for hundreds of years. It’s why we tell them to our children over and over. Stories help children become loving, connected, ethical human beings by what they tell about how people relate to each other. (Often the “people” are animals in picture books, but it means the same thing.) Stories are also how children can broaden their experience out of their own family into the whole big world out there of the past and the present and the potential future.

I love building early literacy elements into the library space. And any good storytime provider is going to work the six early literacy skills into their story programs naturally, because books are made out of words and words are made out of letters and leading children into talking about the stories and predicting what’s going to happen are just the sorts of things you do while reading with children.

But you have to start with good stories. In my Storytime for Big Kids program this week (ages 4-K) these kids, like so many others I have worked with over the years, were amazed and delighted by Keiko Kasza’s The Wolf’s Chicken Stew. I could have spent a lot of time talking about how the wolf was making 100 of each food to feed the chicken to fatten her up; we could have speculated on whether the foods were nutritious or discussed if one of the children in the room had a name that began with W, same as Wolf….but all of that would have sidetracked the surprise that makes children burst out laughing, when the Chicken introduces “Uncle Wolf” to the 100 chicks he’s been inadvertently feeding.

It’s the story that counts. It’s the story that provides the foundation, and the phonological awareness, letter knowledge, print motivation and so on get swept in with that great belly laugh and the longing to read the story again and again. So please, put “Did the presenter use some great stories” on your storytime checklists. Otherwise, all we are providing is No Child Left Behind @ Your Library.

posted by Susan at 12:58 pm | Comments (5)

March 7, 2008

Desk blogs

I know it’s kind of annoyingly navel-gazing to blog about blogging, but I’ve been wrestling with our department’s blog so it’s on my mind.

I’d read before about the benefits of having a departmental desk blog, but it wasn’t until Kate Hall at Park Ridge generously opened hers up to the YLA Managers to see that I realized just how useful it could be. With a staff of eleven, we generate a fair amount of email traffic, and at Summer Reading time the volume becomes unbearable. Just one program can generate 5 emails as details get straightened out. You must make a decision with each email of Do I save it? Do I file it? Do I print it out? Do I delete it? Lots of times you don’t feel like making that decision at the moment, so the email stacks up and eventually you get the polite but threatening email from Computer Services that your emailing privileges may be cut off if you don’t whittle your mailbox down to a manageable size.

With the blog, it’s all kept, but it’s all searchable. You can give things categories and tags so you can turn up everything on a particular subject. You can add comments to the original post rather than writing a whole new one. And you can have a sidebar with all those pesky wiki URLs and the other info that becomes so hard to track.

The hardest part is going to be getting everyone to check it routinely. An aggregator is only helpful if people remember to check THAT. So if anyone has a brilliant idea for how to build that into everyone’s memory, I’d love to hear it, and I’d love to hear about how you are using your desk blog!

posted by Susan at 3:13 pm | Comments (0)

February 13, 2008

The little things in life

As I overheard a mother talking to her toddler the other day, I was struck by something important. She was saying, “Are you ready to go say goodbye to the bunny?” The bunny is a puppet I bought on an expedition to Milwaukee some 20+ years ago. It’s always been a particularly endearing puppet. Its home for the past 5 or so years has been in a hole in the tree at the entryway to the Youth Services Department. Kids love to come and see the bunny, and families have incorporated it into their library visits (and smart parents have learned to use it as a way to get their little ones back out of the library). It’s just a bunny puppet in a pretend hole! But they love it.

They also love this:

It’s the line that some wise person incorporated into the carpet that leads from the front of the department past the desk and toward the books. Often you can sit at the desk and watch as a small child walks in a relatively normal way into the department, and suddenly they take a sharp turn, and then another turn. When they do that, you know they are walking on the blue line. It seems to bring them a lot of joy.

And that’s my point. We are spending lots of time and effort to prepare our Youth Services departments to welcome young visitors and their families, but we need to never forget that for little ones just as it is for us, it is the little things in life that make a difference. We may think they’ll remember the giant summer reading club game or the amazing magician who came or the fantastic prize they got, but I suspect that for many kids, the memories they will carry from the library will be those little details that someone got right, whether on purpose or by a lucky accident.

posted by Susan at 5:27 pm | Comments (1)

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