2011 Round-up, part two

This year was filled with highlights and a few lowlights – but why dwell on the latter? The most important thing for me this year was learning with, and from, my friends, peers and colleagues. Some are librarians, some administrators, others teachers or “civilians”: my professional life has been made richer by knowing them. Note that I’m not using the overused acronym PLN or PLE, because I think a less jargon-filled world is a good thing.

One place too many? or, I don’t communicate that way

As I was preparing for my upcoming YALSA Webinar on teens, social media and information literacy (what, you haven’t signed up yet?  I’ll wait while you do so) I thought about the places teens will go to get information for research.  I even asked a few teens about their experiences, and the “usual suspects” popped up – Twitter, FaceBook and blogs found through Google’s search.  What about Nings or Google+, I asked.  Their response was the equivalent of a blank face.

One had heard of a Ning, but didn’t see it as a place to gather information for school work.  It seems that Google+ hasn’t even crossed their radar.  As someone who has joined two or three Nings, I have to agree that it’s not my first stop for anything.   Even on the Ning I created, I feel that sometimes it’s difficult to find the time to go there to comment and participate.

I was also thinking about how we use social media, and how several of my friends won’t use it at all.  These are intelligent women, with accomplished careers, and they just don’t see the point of using Facebook or Twitter (much less the closed Ning I created for the class, or the web forum set up five years ago, or the Yahoo group discussion list…) One, a copyright lawyer (her motto is “making the world safe for logos”) even refused to participate in a special, one-time online-only edition of the alumnae newsletter.   Contrast that to a college friend who, I believe, has accounts on virtually every social media site out there, including a slew of them he never uses or goes to.  They’re there “just in case”.  One interesting trend I’ve seen among my students is that once they’ve left high school, their use of Facebook and other social tools dies down (until vacation, of course).  They seem to be busy living their lives, establishing themselves in their careers or growing their families.

It’s clear that younger generations are comfortable with being online, far more comfortable than my generation or those above mine.  And given my profession, I’ve had to become comfortable with it – but I’ve reached my limits I think.  Unless I can see a real value to joining a site, or learning a new online tool, I’m going to take a “wait and see” approach.  Yes, I have Google+ invitations, but thus far I haven’t responded: prove to me that the time spent there will be of more value than the time I spend elsewhere.  Nings?  Ditto.

Anyone else staring to have that “one place/tool too many” feeling?

 

Feeling Appreciated

One of Hackley’s traditions is that every early February the Parents Association throws an Appreciation Luncheon for the faculty (full- and part-time), staff and administration. It’s truly an amazing meal: this year we had mac and cheese with truffle oil, a chili bar, chicken with a shitake sauce, shrimp kabobs, and more desserts than any dessert table has a right to hold. Oh, and Mexican hot chocolate.

As nice as it is to have a meal (or, as another school I worked for did, an open bar one evening), that’s not what will stand out in my mind. Having parents tell me how much their children appreciated the time I took to work with them on a project, or found just the right book for them – that means a lot.

It also means something when a former student says, “it took me years to realize exactly how cool you were.” (I remembered to say “thanks”, but inside? “well, DUH!”). That students over the years have come to tell me their problems… share their successes… or even take a few moments out of their day to come by to say hello? That means everything.

Working in a school we often hear the thank-you from the students, and equally often we feel it’s just a polite phrase. Thing is, at least in that moment, they really do mean it and we should take that in and kvell a little. I don’t know that we, as a society, take the time to tell the people who have helped us (whether or not they draw a paycheck for it) how much we appreciate them. The book 365 Thank Yous has been resonating with me and one of my goals for 2011 is to spend time daily telling someone how much they’ve helped my life be a better one.

A Library Day in the Life

Thanks to Bobbi Newman for spearheading this adventure.  It’s always interesting to see how my colleagues spend their days.

So, what is a day in the life of the Hackley Library (and Head Librarian) like?  Let’s see… first of all, we haven’t had a full week of classes since mid-December, thanks to snow days.  Last week we had two, which meant that we had a two-day week (something I could get used to every bit as much as my students could!).

4:30: Alarm goes off, and I struggle downstairs to feed the cats.  Back upstairs I turn on the computer, start this post, and check my e-mail and RSS feeds.

5:40: Get dressed, remembering that NOAA has issued a Winter Chill Advisory for today.

6:05: Head to work

7:00: Breakfast with friends.  Conversation ranges from weather, Saranac Beer, Wilfred Sheed‘s dying, Jon Bon Jovi, The Who, the latest WikiLeaks release and Ariel Sharon.

The work day officially starts… throughout all of this, I’m helping students, parents and teachers find books, troubleshooting the computers and printer/copier, chatting with them about their (unintentionally) long weekends, etc..  I’m also working on strengthening the resource pages linked to off our new library website.

8:00: Talk with Assistant to set up today; she’s going to process our boxes of new books and then set up the display.  We also need to create a display of the new books and one for “movies into books” (I am Number Four is coming out soon).

7:50: Learn that several trophies from Hackley’s past were put on a garbage bin; rescue them for the archives.

8:15: Meet with a Trustee looking into campus landscaping; head to the archives to pull what photos we know we have of the campus’ past.

8:30: Get photo taken for The Gatekeepers blog (a colleague took the photo) – stay tuned for more info on that!

8:58: Start my least favorite task: overdue notices.

9:18: Added today’s photo to the “60 books in 60 seconds” project

9:30: Conversation with Head of History regarding upcoming projects; thanks to snow days, the 9th and 10th grade projects are on a slight delay, and the new schedule (exams in March, not January/June) mans that the 11th grade project will be introduced in late Feb/early March.  Gives me more time to work on the appropriate Libguides and finding print resources.

11:05: Now on to the paying invoices part of my job.  Only slightly more exciting than the patrolling for illegal food and overstuffed study rooms part of my job.

11:11: Find out that the lock to our computer lab is broken (start hearing “the key in the lock goes round and round” in my head… I hate earworms!).  Sigh.

11:30: LUNCH!  Watercress and havarti salad, mixed veg, and hot chocolate.

12:14: My ARC of Before I Go to Sleep arrives: thank you Virginia Stanley @ HarperCollins!!

1:30: The Chair of our Parent Volunteers comes in for her stint – shelving, rearranging books, and generally keeping us running.

1:50: One of the students is practicing his songs in our upcoming production of 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee… I don’t think he realizes we can hear him upstairs!

2:27: Help a student print out the Old Word of the Day:

quat, v.²

Pronunciation: Brit. /kwat/ , U.S. /kwæt/ , Sc. /kwat/ , Irish English /kwat/

1. trans. To repay; to discharge by payment. Obs.

2. trans. To give up, relinquish; to leave, forsake; to cease, desist from. Also intr. with with.

The printing failed, but at least I have a new word to play!

3:15: Academic Committee meeting (mostly discussing our upcoming NYSAIS Evaluation for Accreditation; interesting side note: the word “library” or equivalent is not mentioned anywhere in the document… hmmm….)

4:30: finish a few short chores and get desk ready for tomorrow’s tasks.

4:55: Remind students we’re closing in five minutes.

5:00: Head home

6:55: Dinner while watching Downton Abbey and looking through the latest Booklist (yes, I’m multitasking!).

8:00: Time to curl up with my latest read and drift off to sleep… in a few short hours, it’ll be time to do it all over again.

Winter Breaking

Because my position is an administrative one, I work during part of our Winter Break.  I actually don’t mind it (much) because that’s concentrated time to work on something without interruption.

One of my projects has been to upgrade/update our Upper School Library website and – voila! – it’s now live.  There are some areas that need tweaking, and one area (Research Resources) that needs to be finished, but by and large I’m happy with it.  And before I forget, thanks to Joyce Valenza for the inspiration.  I know it’s not iPad friendly, and we’ll have to see how many people have a problem (yes, I’m working on a non-flash page for their benefit).

In testing out the template with our students, I got so many positive comments that I thought, well, go for it!  And if they find the interface and navigation easier (and visit more), that’s all I need to know it was a success.

 

Wednesday Wackiness

I read this in my daily Shelf Awareness e-mail:

Michele Filgate, events coordinator at RiverRun Bookstore, Portsmouth, N.H., was asked to relate the “strangest question a customer has ever asked.” Her answer: “When I worked at a college bookstore, a girl once asked me for The Apples of Happiness. I stared at her for a few lonnnnng seconds before asking, ‘Do you mean The Grapes of Wrath?’

And promptly sent it to a number of colleagues who came up with…

The Nectarines of Negativity
The Raisins of Rabidity
The Raspberries of Discontent (as in “now is the raspberry of our discontent…”)
The Gooseberries of Jollity
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
The Tangerines of Twiggery
The Boscs of Barretry (Lawyer joke)
The Watermelons of Wimpole St
The Bananas of Banality
The Persimmons of Perspicacity
The Mangoes of Myopia
The Pears of Petulance
The Kiwis of Kwaziness
The Coconuts of Constipation
The Kumquats of Irritation
The Pomegranates of Perdition
The Mangosteens of Magnanimity
The Peaches of Perversity
The Tangelos of Torment
The Quinces of Quiddity

and

The Oranges of Omphaloskepsis

Have fun adding to the list!

Extremes

Last week a colleague invited me to an event: her husband had created a robot orchestra, and the premier was today.  I told her I was otherwise engaged, and wished him luck.

Engaged how?  This was my week to be Greeter at Amawalk Meeting.  In some Meetings (like Brooklyn, my first Meeting), there are enough people to divide the duties: there are Greeters, those responsible for ‘setting’ Meeting, others who oversee Social Hour, etc..  Not at Amawalk, where we’re so small that if it’s your week, you do it all.  In winter, there is the additional responsibility for lighting to stoves and warming the building; in darkest winter lighting the paraffin lamps will be added to the routine.  The building dates to 1831 and has no electricity (or plumbing, although there is a four-seater in a back room), so I got there at 8:30 to start the fires that would keep us warm from 10:30 through noon-ish.

As I carefully laid the newspaper and kindling and selected what I hoped were the driest logs, I reflected on the difference between the event I couldn’t attend and this one.  A robot orchestra would completely puzzle and perplex the founders of our Meeting, and the idea of sitting in silence in such an old-fashioned space puzzles and perplexes many of my F/friends.  My thoughts also drifted to the role of technology in schools and in our lives, and how we often turn to the Neat! New! Exciting! or run hurriedly away from it.  For example…

Having gone to school in a pre-computer era, I would hate to go back to the days of laboriously copying out – in longhand – passages from books (because I couldn’t copy everything needed), writing – again in longhand – the drafts, cutting and pasting paragraphs so that the whole made sense, measuring how far up the page I needed to stop to include footnotes, etc. while writing papers.  Yet my adoption of computers wasn’t immediate, and it took some time before I could compose fluidly at the keyboard.  That whole process seems in some ways as old-fashioned as what I did this morning.

Next week I’m going to attend a concert given by a string quartet, one that prides itself on updating the repertoire to include Radiohead and Led Zeppelin.  Traditionalists might be appalled by this, and even more so by robotic strings playing.  Yet it feels right when I sit there, letting the music take my thoughts to new places.

What does all this mean?  As I prepare to present at three conferences in 2011, I’m thinking about eBooks and other electronic resources as additions to our current collections rather than replacements for, or something to be afraid of.  I’m also thinking about how a container may change our opinion of context, and how content in one container can change radically from content in another.  Today, as I thought about the two extremes, I was reminded yet again that new is not necessarily evil, but neither is retaining the past.

The Sounds of Silence

 

Twitter / Buffy Hamilton: Teacher just walked and sa … via kwout

At the NEIT conference there were a number of people talking about their libraries as not just being a place for silent study, and when our Ambassadors take families on tours of the new space they’re usually quick to point out that you can actually talk in the Hackley library.  If we’re at all honest with ourselves, we remember how difficult it was for us to remain absolutely silent in the school library of our youth – why should we assume that today’s students have it any easier?

However…

As a Quaker, I appreciate silence and am saddened by our society’s constant need for noise and fuss.  Silence is something we have to intentionally carve into our days, and into our spaces; noise is the norm. (NB: I mean extra silence, not the quiet noises one hears naturally in life – I highly recommend Into Great Silence as an example of noisy silence).  Our students often block out noise with more noise, using earphones to create their own soundtracks.  We do try to keep the noise level down to a dull roar, and occasionally students police the space, asking peers and neighbors to lower their voices (just this past week, two younger students were loudly talking and someone a number of computers away said “you’re sitting next to each other: you don’t need to yell”).

So if there’s talking allowed in the library, where do our students find silence?  Where is the place that they can escape to to center, or to reflect, or to simply read without distractions? How do we, as adults in the community and as a society, teach students that silence is valuable  and that listening to the sounds of silence is not to be feared?

Back to the basics

Because so many of our 9th grade students are new this year (over half the class) and because even those that came from our Middle School have managed to forget anything they knew about library research over the summer, the 9th grade History Team and I have created a series of assignments that will get them looking at books, thinking about resources and using the library.

As always, I created a Libguide to help. This one is a little special: there’s a tutorial there that is based on a great tutorial I found. The wonderful librarians at SWITCH said I could download the files (they’d based their tutorials on WMU’s original!) and customize away – it’s been a long time since I hard-coded HTML, and my Photoshop skills aren’t great, but after a few days hard work, it’s done! As time allows, I’m modify it even further…

I’m excited to see how (if?!) this helps our students get comfortable with the research process.

A tale of two Augusts

A little over three years ago, in August 2007, I was awakened with the news that Goodhue Memorial Hall, home to the Kaskel Library where I worked, had been destroyed by fire (thanks to a lightning strike).

This past August I, and an incredible crew of workers (some paid, some volunteer) moved from our “permanent temporary” home in the Chapel back into Goodhue!  We’re nearly 11,000 volumes strong, with many other resources to offer the Hackley community.  The students love the space (particularly since we’re the only air conditioned building on the Hilltop).

We’ve put together a little video about the rebuilding: http://www.hackleyschool.org/GoodhueLibrary

Watch, enjoy and pay those insurance premiums!