Gargoyles loose in the library

Time to recharge

2009-11-03T15:07:00.003-06:00

I really should start recording the RifRaf meetings. Unlike other book clubs, this one doesn't pick a single book to read and discuss. Instead, a (supposed) theme is picked each week, and tends to run along the lines of "Characters who shouldn't have (or should have) died" and other such speculation. Today, folks seemed to be fascinated by the idea of popes and the supernatural (involving zombies and their ilk). I have no idea why. So next week's theme will delve into this mystery - for a good five minutes, anyway. A more concrete proposal emerged, perhaps inspired by NaNoWriMo, which was to collectively write a novel in a brand new mashup genre: "zombie pirate robot vampire alien French Pope romance." Can't wait to read the ARC.

It's conference season for me right now. Last week I attended the Illinois School Library Media Association annual conference in Springfield. Tomorrow I leave for the American Association of School Librarians National Conference. I'll be blogging for them, so this little corner of the blogosphere will be quiet until I get back next week, recharged and ready for more zombies.

So, who's playing this year?

2009-11-02T10:43:00.002-06:00

The Online Gargoyle wonders if it can be called a "50K race in... writing?" Yes, it's time for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. We've had a pretty good record of participation in it, and this past September a few Uni students even garnered some nice mentions for their efforts in School Library Journal.

Here's the deal. Please let us know if you are participating this year and we'll put your name up on the "NaNoWriMo Hall of Fame" bulletin board outside the library. Easy.

We can't ever let them graduate

2009-10-28T15:42:00.001-05:00

Because this might be what they look like when they come back -

Jeremy muttered something about "for Halloween," but I'm not buying it.

The many moods of Maurice Sendak

2009-10-27T09:30:00.002-05:00

You'd have to be living under a rock not to be aware of the release of the movie version of Maurice Sendak's classic children's book, Where the Wild Things Are. So I was pleased to see the arrival of our copy of Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation, written by Gregory Maguire, author of New York Times bestseller Wicked. This lovely book is an ode to Sendak, almost a poem in and of itself. Maguire takes a look at Sendak's influences (from William Blake to Warner Brothers) and explores Sendak's deep understanding of children's emotions. There's lots of art in here I've never seen before, some quite "adult," all of it beautiful. The book closes with a riff on the last line of Wild Things, when Max returns to his room to find his dinner waiting: "And it was still hot." One illustration after another, each from a different book, each with that caption.

Here's Sendak's self-portrait with one of his influences:

Stuff librarians like

2009-10-23T15:25:00.002-05:00

Here is a top-ten list from "Travis," an elementary school librarian blogger. Each item is accompanied by a "Fast Fact!", the veracity of which might be hard to determine. One - sensible lunches in brown paper bags - really resonated with me. Yesssss, food you can eat right out of the refrigerator. And the fast fact: Librarian Abner Tweed went 43 years without using an oven or microwave (1961-2004). How cool is that?

Travis notes that librarians who like cardigan sweaters come in two flavors: ironic and irony-free. "The former is typically middle aged or older and enjoys the warmth that a well-made sweater provides in the chilly library setting. The latter resides in the 20-35 year old age range and is seeking to project the nerdy hipster image." I imagine you can guess which type I am.

New fashion

2009-10-22T14:38:00.002-05:00

Is fear of the H1N1 flu the new Y2K scare? Whether it's for real or not, we've got 87 students absent today, out of a student body of 300 or so. The latest "fad"? The always-chic disposable face mask.

Laura contemplates her new look.

Eleni just buckles down to business.

Game day

2009-10-20T12:58:00.002-05:00

In celebration of this year's Teen Read Week, RifRaf (book club) held a game day. With a theme like "Read Beyond Reality," games and food and library all-in-one-place seemed like the right thing to do.

Watch out, guys. This all-girl table is planning a club takeover.

Next week's theme: imagine your favorite characters in a different book. Harry Potter and friends in Twilight, the gossip girls in any Jane Austen novel, the Narnia siblings in Oz or Wonderland or...

When the manual makes mistakes

2009-10-14T17:20:00.002-05:00

I've been feeling pretty smug about the fact that Julia already has our Uni-flavored APA style guides updated to the new 6th edition. I do believe we were pretty fast out of the chute on this one. Come to find out, though, the 6th edition has errors in it. APA has posted a list of said errors, but won't replace consumers' already-purchased faulty books. What's a person to do when the manual that spells out the rules doesn't have them straight? For some students I see an excellent excuse brewing, much better than the homework-eating dog story.

And on an unrelated note, did you know that a majority of all newspaper sales can now be attributed to kidnappers seeking to prove the day's date in filmed ransom demands? As if that weren't enough of a gift to this struggling industry, there's more.

In addition to buoying the failing newspapers, criminals are also providing a revenue stream to struggling magazines and other weekly periodicals, the report said. While most Americans have cut back on specialty publications, kidnappers still find them useful for making cut-and-paste ransom letters and death threats.

Bless 'em (and the Onion).

In the mood for Halloween

2009-10-08T14:00:00.008-05:00

I've been waiting for the perfect opportunity to do this:

Thanks ever so much to Mr. Rayburn, Mr. Sutton (the first-ever bearded Dracula), Mr. Garvey, Mr. Beesley, and Ms. Kovacs.

Hey, follow us on Twitter now! http://twitter.com/UniHighLibrary

Doesn't adapt well to change

2009-10-06T14:35:00.002-05:00

I'm thinking that statement might apply to me right about now. For starters, certain things happened at school this fall I thought I'd never see. First, I have a student who is [*choke*] the child of a former student. Second, the school now has an intercom. Okay, so it's only to be used in the case of catastrophic-level emergencies (and so far, so good - haven't heard a peep since the first day), but still. It's the principle of the thing. Today's change is putting me right over the top. The Library of Congress Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate Policies and Standards Division (got that?) has decided to modernize the subject heading for "cooking" from the 200-years-in-use "Cookery" to (wait, drum roll...) "Cooking." Next week I'll start teaching catalog use to the Computer Literacy 1 class. For years (okay, decades), I've used the "Cookery" example to demonstrate the whole cross reference business in the online catalog. I just checked and it's still there:

But can I, in good conscience, still use it? Wanted: new example, plz.

More bad behavior

2009-10-05T16:34:00.002-05:00

Pretty striking headline from the Chicagoist:

"Oak Brook Man Hates Libraries, Children, Puppies"

I don't know about the puppies part, but Constantine "Connie" Xinos castigated an 11-year-old girl for being a "whiner" after she spoke in defense of the local library at a meeting of the Oak Brook Village Board. Oak Brook, a suburb of Chicago, relies heavily on sales taxes for revenue, and with local shopping down, the town had to eliminate five library staff positions (including the library director and the children's librarian). Xinos is quoted as saying "I wanted that kid to lose sleep that night."

Hmm, I wonder if he thinks this kid was just a whiner too.

Ewwwwwwww

2009-10-01T13:59:00.002-05:00

Apparently, erstwhile Denver Public Library patron Roger Goffeney, a retired poet and minister, is not entirely clear on the concept of book preservation. Though he volunteers for the digital collection Project Gutenberg, he's a bit cavalier when it comes to preserving the physical counterparts of this classic literature. He borrowed 31 rare books through interlibrary loan so he could compare the print editions to the digital versions and ensure that the works had been scanned accurately. However, he returned some of the books with additional "content" picked up from his apartment - bed bugs, their larvae, and their droppings. DPL banned him from the library and asked him to bag the rest of his books and return them separately rather than in the book drop. But he put them in the book drop a week later, causing a reinfestation. Goffeney told the local media he didn't think it was a big deal. "I thought that they [the books] could easily be cleaned if they had discovered that to be the problem." But a simple cleaning won't make these persistent creatures even lose a beat on their path to total world domination. The Library is asking Goffeney to pay the $12,000 it will cost to replace the books that had to be destroyed and $6,000 in fumigation costs. In his turn, Goffeney refuses to pay a dime and plans to sue to get his library privileges reinstated.

Take a look at this specimen and let me know if you think that's a good idea -

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lou_bugs_pix/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This and that

2009-09-30T10:39:00.002-05:00

This year's RifRaf (book club) has had a boost by moving to Tuesdays and merging with the Tolkein Club. We're still a little heavy on the testosterone side of things (c'mon girls, come and keep me company!), but we're having a good time and many heated debates. In fact, there's so much witty repartee that I must remember to take a notepad so I can capture more of what comes out of the mouths of the Charlies and their buddies. Here's one I do remember: "There's a special circle of hell reserved for people who cheat on Choose Your Own Adventure books." So, so true. Some of us nearly came to blows during a discussion of one of my all-time favorite titles, Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Don't know if I was closer to tears or to murder during that one.

Tonight I'll be participating in an online "webinar" called Librarians and Truth Detection with two of my heroes, school library queen Joyce Valenza and professor and prolific author Howard Rheingold. Much nervousness. Note to self: remember you are speaking with a guy who hand-paints his shoes. What could be scary about that?

Photo by Joi Ito
CC BY 2.0

Cozy-itis

2009-09-25T13:35:00.003-05:00

Laura and Erika enjoy one of the most popular books on our Banned Book Week display, Deal With It: A Whole New Approach to Your Body, Brain, and Life as a Gurl, from the creators of gurl.com.

A pile 'o freshmen ponder Book Club, from our favorite library comic, Unshelved.

Old and new geekiness

2009-09-24T13:37:00.002-05:00

From my Twitter Feed:

What would Leonardo da Vinci's schematics for the iPhone have looked like? For a Mac? Maybe like this:

Now you can get them on t-shirts.

The next generation snuggie provides built-in privacy while lap-top-ing:

Thanks @mkeagle and @lbraun2000 :-)

I've had to turn on comment moderation because I've been unable to delete spam comments. I've followed every piece of advice on the help forums, but have been unable to restore the little trash cans that used to sit by each comment. And it is apparently impossible to contact a live human being at Blogger.com. So my apologies for sending comments through moderation, but please do keep them coming!

Banning books

2009-09-23T17:25:00.002-05:00

Chad, Rustle, and Mooch are deeply confused:

(Pssssst - hands off Everyone Poops, or ain't no one gonna be happy)

Immortality

2009-09-21T08:51:00.002-05:00

The Online Gargoyle has posted a great story about Aaron's manga donation to the library. Thanks, Danny and Aaron!

News of the weird

2009-09-17T15:35:00.004-05:00

From Library Land -

Gail Borden Public Library Trustee Randolph "Randy" Hopp, already banned from the library except for board meetings, got into yet another physical altercation with a library staff member when he refused his required escort to the board meeting. Would someone tell me how this guy got elected?

My next item isn't really news of the weird, but more like news of the incredibly sad. Could it possibly be true that the Free Library of Philadelphia might have to close at the end of the business on October 2? Yes, if the state Legislature does not act on the city's budget request. Say it ain't so.
* Ooooh, oooh, update edit! It ain't so after all!*

And finally, in anticipation of Banned Books Week, I'm proud to note that the San Francisco Public Library does not ban anything. Except in one case, as noted in the local press:

"The library's collection development director, Laura Lent, says she can recall only one instance in the past decade in which the library opted to pull a book off the shelves as a result of patron insistence. And this patron happened to be the book's author. It was a fictional account of telepathic surveillance of the mind -- and the author felt the book's continued presence in the Main Branch would lead to the government invading his brain. We are not making this up."

I guess it was okay to relax the standards for this guy (though shouldn't he have seen it coming?)

15 minutes of fame

2009-09-15T14:52:00.002-05:00

Well, in Library Land, anyway. Two current Uni students and one former student are featured in this School Library Journal article about NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Charlie, Maia, and Kathleen amazed me with their dedication to the cause of pounding out a 50,000 word novel in a month.

We have a growing tradition of participating in NaNoWriMo around these parts. I see that I blogged about it in both 2008 and 2007. I look forward to finding out about this year's participants.

Serious about manga

2009-09-14T14:56:00.004-05:00

The bulletin board in the hall now asks for input on the expanded manga collection - lists of favorites and suggestions for even more titles. It drew a big crowd during fifth period.

They were a little tentative at first.

Then the crowd got a little wild.

No complaints from this department :-)

Buffy vs. Edward

2009-09-10T14:58:00.003-05:00

For all our Twilight fans (or anti-fans, more like):

This remix also appeals to me for its unabashed exercise of fair use rights, though the critique vocab is slathered on a bit thick for my tastes.

Out of the gate

2009-09-09T13:04:00.002-05:00

The lovely new manga donated by Aaron Kelter is starting to hit the shelves. Julia put up a display, and several titles got checked out right away.

The Manga Club has moved into the library but won't be official until next week. Even so, "The Jacks" started meeting today.

Pssst, notice that for Manga Club and RifRaf (book club), you get to eat lunch in the library.

Change of the guard

2009-09-03T16:19:00.002-05:00

This year we lost Natalie to student teaching (she's at Jefferson Middle School right now) and Julia has joined us. Aren't they cute?

The revolution has begun

2009-09-01T12:40:00.001-05:00

Sign hanging in the hall today:

I love my job.

Share time

2009-08-28T14:46:00.002-05:00

Guess I'm feeling nostalgic this week, which may be an odd way to start the year. But I couldn't help feeling awwwww during 5th period, surrounded as I was by a new crop of chair buddies and earbud buddies. Hm, should find a new meme for this year.

James, Conrad, and Ryosuke are fascinated by Seventeen.

Chris and Simeon bond.