Random Ideas

I was in downtown Lock Haven, PA last weekened while they were setting up for their Memorial Day celebrations. They had an interesting and moving display - there were banners on all of the streetlights and each banner had a different veteran's photo. The theme was "Hometown Heroes" and people or organizations sponsored each one. They just had a photo, the name, and which war they served in. Their newspaper had a series of stories about individuals shown in those photos.



Since Computers in Libraries, I have been keeping my eyes open for ways we can get students involved in our marketing, esp. things we could put up on our blog. This has me thinking about something like Hometown Heroes, like having students submit photos of vets who are special to them for Veteran's Day with a paragraph about what the person means to them. The problem is we can't say "hometown" since most won't be from Williamsport, and many won't have photos with them at school, and it will be just for Veteran's Day. Anyway, it doesn't really have anything to do with the library.



We're going to interview faculty about books that changed their lives. I'm hoping to record the interviews and post them as podcasts throughout the year. But I also want some good ideas for students. I'd like to think of something they can submit to me that I can post on the blog. Or any other online format, for that matter.



I'm also thinking about instruction ideas for next year. I'd like to introduce excercises on paraphrasing and note taking, and get them to review each others' work. I really need to improve the amount of active learning exercises I do, and these things go beyond just using the databases.

Interesting Story

Here is an interesting story involving Harry Potter and libraries. A part-time librarian was forced out of her job after objecting to dress up like a witch for an after-hours Harry Potter party. I personally feel that people who are against Harry Potter are usually ignorant, I still respect people's right to free speech. However, there are a lot of questions I'd like to have answered. Was she given the option of not dressing up but still working? I don't think it would go over well if I told them I wasn't coming in during one of our big events. I'm sure this was an event where all hands were needed on deck, and that some reasonable accomidation could have been made.

If I can find out more about what her options were, I'll post it here.

I return... finallly

I just got back from a 5-day weekend and then couldn't think of anything to write yesterday. I'm sure I'll come up with a few things today. Right now, it's about literature. I get a publisher's e-newsletter called Shelf Awareness each day, and occasionally they have a section called Book Brahmins where someone in the business gets interviewed about books. Here is what I would write:

On your nightstand now:
The Fingersmith

Favorite book when you were a child:
Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends. My mother used to read it to me and I can still recite a lot of it from memory. My favorite was The Worst, where the poem describes a big, hairy, bloody monster, and the last line is "he's standing right behind you!" I screamed every time. She read it to me again when I was a teenager and I still screamed.

I also loved a beautiful book called something like Mr. Pengachusa. I can't find it anymore, or even how to spell it. It was a collection of stories told by a pet hamster to a little girl who had scarlet fever and was isolated from her friends and toys. When she gets better, the hamster disappears.

Your top five authors:
Jane Austen, Amy Tan, Isabel Allende, C.S. Lewis, and Cornelia Funke

Book you've faked reading:
Lots of what I had to read in college since it was in foreign languages. Proust, Rousseau, Diderot, and I can't even remember the German books I faked. Somehow I got good grades anyway.

Book you are an evangelist for:
Oh, so many! Any of my top favorites, like The Great Divorce, Daughter of Fortune, My Sister's Keeper, Lovely Bones, Kite Runner, Inkheart, Count of Monte Cristo (though no one has taken me up on that one yet).

Book you've bought for the cover:
Inkheart. It has such a beautiful cover, and the book ended up being just as good. I also got Silverthorn for the cover because it was my favorite painting by Don Maitz, who does fantasy artwork.

Book that changed your life:
The Great Divorce. I was at a very confused part of my life and was just starting to put the pieces together. My Bible study leader gave me a xeroxed copy of one chapter, and I liked the first few paragraphs so much, I got it out of the school library and spent a Friday night reading it from cover to cover. It's an amazing story, almost haunting. I reread it a few weeks ago and it was just as powerful, esp. the parts about the nagging wife since I'm getting married soon and sometimes nag my fiance.

Favorite line from a book:
Roughly translated from The Little Prince: "It is only with the heart that one sees rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."

Book you most want to read again for the first time:
That's another hard one. Probably To Kill a Mockingbird. It's a classic I never had to read. Since it was a classic, I wasn't interested. But I was bored once, so I picked up the old paperback copy off my parents' shelf and started reading... I think it is the best book ever written since it transcends so many boundaries: age, gender, time period, life experience...

Best Environmental Awareness Ad Ever

I just ran into this on YouTube. My mind is racing on how I could use this concept in my online tutorials...

creepy treehouses

I ran into a blog that discusses the issue of the "creepy treehouse." What this term refers to is adults trying to lure children in by making something look like fun. In the technology world, this is being applied to adults trying to create stuff for young adults, such as librarians and educators getting involved in MySpace and Facebook. See Barbara's post for a more eloquent explanation.

I have heard reports that performed surveys of college students and very few wanted librarians involved in Facebook. They see that as their space, meant for socialization, and they don't want us stalking them there. So many librarians are talking about using social networking tools to "meet the students where they are." I haven't bought into that. I mean, I don't want anyone bothering me there unless I ask them to. I do use these to keep in touch with friends from grad school. Some students here have chosen to make me their friend and invite me to join groups, but only two students have ever contacted me that way and it wasn't for anything library-related.

I don't see anything wrong with making Facebook widgets available since you can do so much with the same widgets in other places. I definitely don't plan to stalk down our students through these means, and now I have a great term to back up my excuses!

Libel

I finished the book Atonement a few days ago and ran across an interesting information issue that I had discussed in my international information class in grad school. It is the issue of libel. I don't understand it in the U.S. as it's such a subjective issue. My example in class was, it's okay to run into your neighbor and say "I think the maintenance guy stole something out of my apartment," but you can't write it that same thing out and slip it in all of your neighbors' mailboxes. Or can you even say that casually without possible legal problems? Can you not say anything unless you can prove it's true? Where do you draw the line between gossip/free speech, and libel? How does the National Enquirer and Star magazine get away with their headlines (how many times have Brad and Angelina broken up?).

At least in the U.S. if you get sued, the other person has to prove you committed a crime. The issue is much crazier in Great Britain. If you're accused of libel, you have to prove you didn't do it. Proving something didn't happen is a lot more difficult to do than to prove it did. At the end of Atonement, the main character is going to publish the book the reader just read, but has to wait until all of the characters are dead. It made it seem like this is a law, and not just avoiding getting sued. And even if Europeans are probably less litigious than us, don't think that Brits aren't concerned with libel.

I find this difference in such a confusing issue absolutely fascinating.

Britannica & Free Blogger Access

So I got permission to use and link to Britannica a few weeks ago, but I foldered the e-mail and haven't gone back to it since. But I was reading the Liminal Librarian, who linked to the Wikipedia article in Britannica (to play with her new access) and I found that once you get in through a blog, you can move around to the links on the page. You can even use their search box to get to other articles that aren't related. This seems extremely generous... which makes me nervous! Call me skeptical!

Anyway, try it out: Web 2.0

I actually like the layout of this better than the main layout. I know the main layout has many more features, and some of these features are really cool (I was fascinated by the desktop feature I saw demonstrated in a Webinar a few months ago). However, I was playing around with it while working on my "game" and trying to get students looking at the articles and found that it wasn't obvious there were another 29 pages to the article. I thought those two paragraphs were the entire article, which was terribly incomplete. The table of contents is also much better and clearer in this bloggers' format (check out the article on "petroleum").

I do see how linking to this can be useful, and will try to remember this more often when I write!