Past their best by dates

As we've been doing a (I hope) final pass on the collection, we're noticing a lot of books that are just past their "best by" dates and having to determine if they should stay on the shelf until something new comes along, keep them anyway, or remove them and try to replace. This isn't the…

Almost there

Thanks to the library building construction project and another surprise project, we're not quite ready for the year to end. But thanks to a massive push last week, we did get our summer reading recommendations out! These recommendations are our suggestions, with little or no input from teachers. There is required reading in many classes…

What was I thinking (and what am I thinking now)??

Shortly after the fire at Hackley, I decided that I needed to seriously look at the amount of junk I'd accumulated in my house... a few months later, much of the "nope, don't need this" stuff was finding new homes courtesy of the Salvation Army. But then there was The Collection. I'd never really gotten…

My Year in Reading

Not bad, despite COVID and the stress.  There are just some times when a gal's gotta bingewatch junk tv, though...  And my choices for the best books of 2020?

Will our ebooks fly off the screen?

While at my last school, I was asked to present on ebooks and our school's experience. Porter's is a 1:1 iPad school and virtually all of the student's textbooks were digital, so when one third of the students responded saying they preferred print was not a surprise. Some of the answers why included that because…

Getting a little giddy

In March, just after we closed due to COVID, the library's focus was on supporting our history classes doing research (around 600 students, all researching away... just a little crazy, right?). So we added EBSCO's Academic and High School ebooks collection, entering 3500+ MARC records into our catalog while encouraging students to search the whole…

What really matters when reading

I've written before about why there's a problem with reading levels and lexiles.  We all know, sadly, that they're still a thing, despite authors and librarians pleas: https://twitter.com/kelleemoye/status/1199388647470043145 I've read so many books that are published with a recommended age, or grade, and I know that those are more a marketing thing from publishers and…

Minor Musings

It's been well over a year since my last one of these. Let's see what I've found since then.  For many schools in the Northeast, there's the approaching Spring Break in which to explore.  And yes, there's more to follow. Books, Reading, etc. This is so cool: an app for the Canterbury Tales, in part…

Not a fan

There are words that we, in polite society, don't say.  Some of those words have been claimed, or reclaimed, by the group intended to be insulted by that word (eg, queer).  And some are supposed to be used only "in group". I raise this because one of our popular databases here is the online OED. …

The art of “yes… but no”

One of the big project we've undertaken has been to go shelf by shelf, moving books to better fitting DDC numbers so our students can find what they need more easily.  Sometimes the error was a simple transposition of the numbers, with something belonging in 973 ending up with 937 on the spine label.  Some,…