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July 23, 2008

Flat Stanley

We have had a lovely visit with Flat Stanley here at the Niles Public Library. Stanley is about 2 1/2 feet tall and, as expected, flat.

I think we all enjoyed participating in a collaborative project, and think it would be fun to work more with other libraries on things like this. We all work so hard on our programs and displays and materials that it’s a shame not to share them more!

Here are some of the adventures Flat Stanley got into:

Playing the Summer Reading Game

Digging in the sand and looking for I Spy objects

Stanley is ringing the gong for another Summer Reading finisher!

posted by Susan at 3:17 pm | Comments (0)

July 20, 2008

Dr. Horrible and the world today

It’s a funny thing to be a youth services librarian who’s been around awhile. On the one hand, you are in full-dinosaur mode, insisting that at least SOME portion of storytimes be devoted to actual, you know, stories. And on the other hand, it’s a thrilling time to be part of a transitional time where story is being conveyed in such a variety of ways, especially for older kids.

This past week, Joss Whedon of Buffy and Firefly fame notified people that his three-part online series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog would be released. I heard about it from several different sources, from Buffy fans and YA authors and people who get excited about seeing media used in different ways. And it was wonderfully original and fun, and of course one of the most fun things is being in on something at its inception. If you happen to spot this on Sunday, you can still watch, but after that, you’ll have to pay for it. Its blend of music and video, and the unexpectedly hilarious comic timing of Neil Patrick Harris made it something to remember.

And there’s the John and Hank Green vlogbrothers.com, where recently John was dared to go find one of his Young Adult novels in a store and sign it. He couldn’t find his own, so he signed his good friend Maureen Johnson’s book instead. This was followed by a video log of a young woman (Marion–how perfect is that?) ditching her teleconference to find that book and buy it, and recording her experience, followed by John’s brother Hank turning it into another video. It’s a very fun time to be in Youth Services! People are getting excited about books and story in a different way from before.

I hope that those of us working on the younger end of Youth Services as well can keep in mind how important books and stories are, so that when I am beyond middle-age and well into geezerdom, I will still be applauding the creative efforts of people working to communicate with people of all ages.

posted by Susan at 7:10 pm | Comments (0)

July 12, 2008

There was a little turtle…

He lived in a box. He swam in the river and he climbed on the rocks. He snapped at a mosquito, he snapped at a flea, he snapped at a … at a … at a … WHAT?

Ever have one of those brain freezes during storytime? You are doing a finger play you have been doing for, you know, 25 YEARS, and suddenly you lose one of the words completely. This is me at the Rise & Shine Storytime on Thursday, in front of some 40 people. I flag down another librarian who happens to be passing by and say “Hey, Ms. Shelley! What is the turtle snapping at?” Ms. Shelley has no idea but suggests throwing in “dragonfly” and we go with that. The parents are mildly amused by the whole thing, and the kids of course just think the snapping motion is funny so they don’t care.

And that’s both the good news and the bad news about getting older. In my early career, I would have DIED of mortification over this. Now that I have reached a certain age, it just made me laugh. So that’s the good news–I no longer lose sleep over looking ridiculous. I now realize that I probably look ridiculous a fair amount of the time to someone, and who cares? Not me.
The bad news is, I’m going to need to begin preparing for my storytimes more thoroughly again. As you get older, the part of your brain that goes off and retrieves information does lose brain cells, and it’s just going to get harder. Reading Martha Lear’s Where Did I Leave My Glasses? was both reassuring and sobering as it confirmed that Yes, you really don’t remember things nearly as well as you get older but No, that doesn’t mean you have Alzheimers. So I’m going to begin working on some techniques now to help me as I age and the facts take longer to bubble up.

A minnow, by the way, is what the turtle was snapping at. A minnow. Remember that!

posted by Susan at 1:56 pm | Comments (0)

July 9, 2008

ALA Part 2: It always comes down to the feet

Once again, I attempted to find the perfect conference shoes; once again, I learned the sad lesson that when you are lugging a bunch of ARCs and walking long distances, no shoes remain comfortable. It’s kind of ridiculous how much it ends up coloring your experience of your trip. It’s “Oh my gosh, that’s Mo Willems!” and “I wonder if putting another bandaid on will help,” and “Oh my gosh, it’s my hero Dr. Brazelton!”

Seeing Dr. T. Berry Brazelton in person was definitely a conference highlight, as he has been one of my heroes since my sons were little, along with Raffi and Mister Rogers. His Touchpoints series of books and videos are a tremendous contribution to the health and well-being of families in this country. It was a thrill to see him, and he offered these sage words of advice to librarians: “Never look a baby in the eye”. I like his approach because it is rooted in 50 plus years of working with children and using keen intelligence and observation to come to his conclusions. He really helped me change my outlook on how much small words of encouragement to a parent can mean even in our short library encounters.

Conference moments you should not miss if you get a chance to go next year include:

~The Annual Book Cart Drill Team Competition. It is always hilarious, with color commentary provided by Mo Willems and Jon Scieszka.

~The Newbery Caldecott Banquet. Come for the speeches even if you can’t afford the dinner. This year’s speeches by Brian Selznick and Laura Amy Schlitz have been thoroughly covered elsewhere, but if you missed them I highly recommend getting your hands on the current issue of Horn Book, so you can read their speeches and see Selznick’s amazing new drawings.

~The ALSC Awards. Much less well-known than the Newbery Banquet, this is still a festive, fun event where winners of the Sibert (non-fiction), Batchelder (translated book), Carnegie (video) and Geisel (easy reader) awards receive their honors. At this year’s Awards ceremony, Peter Sis gave a moving and funny speech in accepting his Sibert Award for The Wall, and Mo Willems delivered his speech accepting the Geisel Award for There Is a Bird on Your Head with a bird on his head, in the style of an easy reader.

Next year, Chicago!

posted by Susan at 11:01 am | Comments (0)

June 20, 2008

You know what I hate?

Okay, I realize that is a negative way to start a blog entry, but the fact is I got up from lounging on my bed and beginning to read Princess Ben (by Catherine Murdock) to write this entry, and that is a measure of how much I hate something.

I hate the trend in using photographs on fiction covers. I hadn’t realized how much until I looked once again at the cover on Princess Ben
and I thought two things: 1) I wouldn’t like her if I knew her and 2) That’s not what Princess Benevolence looks like. Obviously #1 is my problem, but #2 is more universal and it’s the point of this post: I like being able to imagine what a character looks like for myself. I see Princess Ben as stockier and maybe a bit plainer, too, and there are plenty of textual references to back up the stocky part. But I guess I should be happy that she has her head on at all, given the trend in covers where the girl’s head is completely cut off, right?

The other thing I hate: Great books where the publishers have cheaped out by putting significant information onto the endpapers. The worst offense is putting the info on the page that is glued to the covers. That’s what they did in the otherwise wonderful
What to do About Alice, the biography of the lively Alice Roosevelt. What were they thinking? Did they understand that if someone bought it in library binding, they would lose that information completely? Or if someone rebound the book, the same thing would happen? Or that many of us would have to make the quite annoying choice betwen jacket and information? I can only hope that having won a Boston Globe/Horn Book Award honor designation, they will spring for another pair of pages and let libraries have the back of the book information, too.

posted by Susan at 9:36 pm | Comments (0)

June 7, 2008

Age ranges on book covers

As the Daily Telegraph reports, British children’s book authors, led by Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass) are protesting a decision to publishers to begin putting suggested age ranges for children’s books on their covers. You’ll find their petition here.

On the one side, you have authors defending the rights of children to read whatever they feel ready for. Historically, children’s librarians have believed that children tend to put down the books they aren’t ready for, so it’s a self-sorting process. There’s also a sort of defence mechanism that kicks in and lets the material that they aren’t ready for go right over their heads.

Young Adult author Meg Rosoff (How I Live Now) writes on her blog why she thinks that’s unfair to the parents who have no idea what to choose for their children.

Sadly, both sides discuss the issue in terms of bookstore staff, and whether they will be able to help select books. Neither side highlights how helpful a good children’s librarian can be. It’s probably an opportunity for us to remind the world of why we’re here! We know better than anyone how overwhelming it can be to choose the right book out of not just the books currently available in a bookstore but also the books that were published over the past 50 years. The profession spends a lot of time these days helping get kids ready to read, but we need to not lose sight of making sure we provide a lot of help in helping with the tricky task of matching books to readers later on.

posted by Susan at 9:52 am | Comments (0)

December 3, 2007

What I believe part 2: You have to read!

Here’s my first entry on some of the things I am coming to realize that I believe in as a children’s librarian/supervisor.

I think it’s an absolute necessity for children’s librarians to read. Five years ago, it would never have crossed my mind to articulate that thought, but now we all have so many things competing for our time and attention that I suspect we all are reading a bit less than we were. A lot more of our work time is spent on programming at many libraries, and many of us have experienced the big bump you get in activity when your library finishes a building or remodeling project. There just isn’t the time on the desk that there used to be for reading.

I’ll take it a step further: I believe you have to do some of the reading at home. As a supervisor, I can’t tell my staff they have to do that. They’re being paid for 37.5 hours of their time, and how they spend their time when they aren’t at work however they like. And yet, I don’t believe you can be an excellent youth services librarian without reading when you’re away from work. I feel like even with my reviewing work and trying to keep on top of the books that are getting a lot of attention, I still barely scrape the surface of the great children’s books out there. That’s putting aside books written for adults almost completely!

But everything in youth services goes back to the books, and if it doesn’t, you aren’t doing it right. People doing storytimes need to be constantly refreshing their books so they read them enthusiastically; people out in the schools can’t just booktalk what they read in library school; librarians out on the desk may be asked their opinions of the award winners as they come out, and people will think the less of them if they haven’t even heard of the books, as we found out last year when the Newbery Committee picked books we had never heard of. You need to be able to offer Readers’ Advisory based on more than lexile numbers, and you need to sometimes be able to say to a child as you’re off to get the book they’ve asked for, “I’ve read that–it’s a great book!”

So that’s the second thing I believe about being a Children’s Librarian: You have to read children’s books.

posted by Susan at 1:32 pm | Comments (0)

September 27, 2007

Snowflakes and Dr. Seuss

I’m going to be participating in a cool project over the next couple of months. Together a group of children’s lit-related bloggers will be helping to publicize the Robert’s Snow benefit created by children’s author/illustrator Grace Lin. A large number of children’s illustrators painted and otherwise embellished snowflakes which will be auctioned off to benefit sarcoma research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Sadly, the auction this year will be in memory of her late husband Robert, who lost his battle in August, but that makes it all the more important to spread the word. The snowflakes are gorgeous and there will be lots more info to come!

I also got the very good news this week that I’ll be a member of the 2009 Theodor Geisel Award Committee. Translated, that means I get to look at a year’s worth of easy readers and picture books and help to pick the best of the year in honor of Dr. Seuss! Fun and (let’s face facts) short books in honor of the person who wrote one of the first books I ever read–what could be better than that? I still have my copy of The Cat in the Hat, and I still have the picture of myself on the couch in the 1960s with my two brothers, each of us holding up our new Christmas copy of a Dr. Seuss book. Don’t tell my brother Andrew, but I also have his copy of Fox in Sox. Possession is 9/10ths of the law, right?

posted by Susan at 9:10 pm | Comments (0)

June 29, 2007

Of missing buckets and lost penguins

My feet have now (mostly) recovered from ALA, which continued to be great fun. Two funny stories:

A friend who worked at an exhibit discovered that the bucket they were using to collect raffle slips was missing. Awhile later, the bucket mysteriously reappeared. The next day, a grandma stopped by the booth and explained that her granddaughter had suddenly felt sick and…well…you can probably guess the rest. She assured the exhibitors that she washed the bucket out really well in the bathroom. A couple of days later, the exhibitor across the way got around to mentioning that she’d seen a little girl throwing up into the bucket, and commented, “What a good thing you had two buckets!”

The other funny moment was at the Newbery banquet when in the break between dinner and dessert, a few of us went in search of a washroom. We hunted in vain, all drifting off further and further from the banquet hall in different directions, and it struck me that it was just like in the hilarious Youtube video made at Midwinter, narrated as if the librarians were penguins in March of the Penguins. We had become the penguins who get separated from the rest of the flock and are doomed. Happily, we did finally find our way back to the flock in time to hear Susan Patron’s Newbery Award speech as well as seeing her skillful use of the raised eyebrow as devastating punctuation.

posted by Susan at 3:08 pm | Comments (2)

December 8, 2006

Battling at the Library

I could write here about getting into fights at the library–with staff or patrons or dust–but although that might make for a juicy blog entry, of course I am writing here about Battle of the Books. There is enough human drama with Battle of the Books that I figured that could be pretty juicy, too!

Contrary to the website which claims ownership of Battle by slapping the word “America’s” in front of it, Battle of the Books has been around since the 1930s. It began as a radio show sponsored by Carson Pirie Scott and the Chicago Board of Education. Ever since then, kids have been reading off of a list of books and answering questions like “The spider wrote the words ’some pig’ in her web over Wilbur’s pigpen. Name the book.”

We have been running Battles here at the Niles Public Library for 28 years, and yet it still is an amazing thing to behold as the kids come in all pumped up and ready to compete. Our list has 60 books for grades 4-6 on it, a mix of classics, great books, and a little fun fluff too. We include some nonfiction to give the list variety, though it is pretty hard to disguise the identity of some of those books in the questions. But that’s okay–we like some of the questions to be easy.

It can be painful watching the younger teams struggle. For instance, last year’s champions, Nelson School, had to start from scratch this year with a completely new team. A row of fourth graders looks really little next to some of the other teams! But excellent coaches at each of the less experienced schools help the team members to realize that as long as they do a little better each week, and answer a few more questions, remember a few more author names, they are winning. Teams build gradually. And I think it’s great to have a program where kids who read (instead of the usual athletes) are the ones who get to represent their schools and make people proud of them!

Our last meet is Wed., Dec. 13, and if anyone wants to come observe, you are welcome! We are even happy to share our questions with you…as long as you don’t have a child in a school in the Niles district.

posted by Susan at 9:22 am | Comments (0)

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