Category Archives: school libraries

someday you’ll be an oak tree!

When LIS texts are about 15 years old, they discuss the advent of movable type in the 1500s (p131), not the release of Movable Type in 2001. I guess I should have expected this. When I first read the title Taxonomies of the School Library Media Program I thought, “How about Folksonomies of the School Library Media Program?”

I know I can’t indict all of LIS education from one lousy textbook, especially when I know that there are interesting projects taking place elsewhere. However, I do think acorn line drawings are closer to the rule than the exception.

you must be joking

Slightly unsettling, don’t you think?

If you’re not familiar with “Thrasher,” it is a skateboarding magazine that has been around since 1981. In celebration of their 25th anniversary they’ve released some high res pdfs of their first 12 issues. You might not get the same kicks looking at them as I did, but they might come in handy for making a display in the teen section of your library.

Back issues of the magazine were one of the only reasons I went to the library in high school. Yeah, “Thrasher,” study hall, and occasionally using EBSCO on CD-ROM to look up articles about bands. I don’t think I’ve ever told this story here, so let me say it was a *proud* moment when I ran into my favorite librarians from high school and got to tell her that I turned out to be a librarian. She instantly knew my name after eight years had passed. Amazing!

The First 12 Mags.

the neatest looking stackThis afternoon I drove to Salem to meet with State Librarian Jim Scheppke, and some of the state library staff to talk about the future of the Oregon School Library Information System. OSLIS is, among other things, a resource sharing cooperative for school libraries across the state. We generated some great ideas for “OSLIS 2.0,” and if things come to fruition it has the potential to be BIG.

After lunch I got a tour of the library, which has reference service, internet stations, and a reading room open to the public. I snapped some pics of the neat stuff, including a huge card catalog, and it is all in a flickr set called visiting oregon state library.

This weekend at the conference I got to spend some quality time with Jessamyn. Not only did we share one of the best wifi experiences I’ve ever had, but she also turned me on to a Firefox extension I’m wild about: CustomizeGoogle. If you haven’t explored the world of extensions for Firefox (you *are* using Firefox, right?), they are little add-ons that can make the browser even more functional. Here’s a list of “The Firefox Hacks You Must Have” from Wired.

Back to CustomizeGoogle. This little guy removes Google ads from search results, gmail, gcal, and other apps in the Google suite. We’ve all become good at ignoring these ads, but the pages are much easier to look at without the extra clutter. One other nifty thing it can do (among a bunch of other stuff) is add links to other search tools to the top of a Google search.

CustomizeGoogle might be useful for school librarians and teachers that want to get students using these tools (because they are free, or to expose them to the latest and greatest) but don’t necessarily care for making those ads part of the curriculum. Then again, is preventing students from seeing real world ads not preparing them for real world web surfing? Is taking the google ads off of a public access computer in a public library censorship?

I don’t have the answers to those questions, but CustomizeGoogle is still a great way to filter your own internet experience!

One text for my Admin of the School Media Center class this quarter is Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning which is put out by ALA. The opening chapter forwards the idea of creating a “learning community” in schools:

“This new learning community is not limited by time, place, age, occupation, or disciplinary borders but instead is linked by interest, need, and a growing array of telecommunications technology” (p. 2)

Isn’t that a nice notion? Because there can’t be community without interaction, this concept provides a useful framework for thinking about school libraries in the age of the two-way web. It even expressly states that people are linked by technology. This should provide some evidence for school librarians trying to utilize social software to engage their students. It also presents a non-hierarchical view of student-teacher relationships. Inspiring!