Minor Musings

Books, Reading, Etc. More on E-Reading: A Midterm Progress Report  (I don't annotate, but I can see the appeal for many readers... and the loss.  What will we do when marginalia is completely lost? It's a great insight into the reader's mind.) Why social media isn't the magic bullet for self-epublished authors (and this article…

Don’t blame the students

I've mentioned before that I'm on this year's YALSA Excellence in Non-Fiction for Young Adults award committee and will be spending eight hours over this next weekend discussing the over 40 books we've read (ok, not all of them - we'll concentrate on the ones that have been nominated).  In other news, I've been asked…

Nothing new under the sun

I'm sure everyone's been reading about the recent plagiarism issue over on Story Siren (thanks to Liz Burns for the great round-up).  My friend Chuck talks about the "kitchen sinking" that often happens when something like this occurs. It's beyond the question of citation, though.  There's the question of consequences. When I was at Hamilton…

It’s not just about the awards

Perusing my twitter feed today, I saw this from @TheDaringLibrarian: My response was that J.K. Rowling isn't American, thus her work is excluded as per the Newbery rules, and that it was too bad that some parents see award-winning books as automatically being better reads than those that haven't won awards. @Sophiebiblio then added: And…

Cite nonsense

Last year a friend asked for my help with a paper she was writing for a class - how should she cite a YouTube video? Her professor didn't know the proper format, and my friend knew that "Go to YouTube and look for [title of video]" wasn't correct. At the LIRT session I attending during…

#AASL11 Reflections: HS – College Information Literacy

First of all, this wasn't really about the entire continuum, it was more about the 12-13 disconnect. In other words, what we HS librarians think our students leave knowing, and what first year professors actually see when our students get there. The caveats of the study are that the students were from Catholic schools that…

#AASL11 reflections: assessment/evaluation

Having worked in several NYSAIS evaluation committees (and written on the evaluation for accreditation process, I was interested in what my public school peers were doing vis-a-vis the NYS School Library Media Program Evaluation (SLMPE) Rubric. NYSAIS has recently updated its process and libraries aren't mentioned (why? this is a huge mistake, imvho) and looking…

Have I done my job?

This past year I've worked closely with our History 9 teachers to integrate skills into the curriculum, with a secondary goal of lessening the panic that sets in when a research project is announced.  We broke things up into several short pieces: a scavenger hunt in our print and electronic resources an annotated biography of…

Minor Musings

In which I attempt to clear my GoogleReader... Wish I had more time to implement these ideas for a more relevant library... getting some help with creating things like this would be a good start (and I think I know some students to ask!)  Another thing to integrate into our website: Book Trailers While this…

Community feeling

Yesterday I spent several hours with a group of women I'm proud to call classmates - we didn't all graduate at the same time, but we all feel connected to each other and to our school.  The reason for our gathering was to begin preparing for the bicentennial of the school, in 1814.  One of…