Fleeting connection

Usually, when we post to Instagram we get around 20-30 likes (less if it's a book-heavy post). A few have had more, like the post for last year's graduating class that got 47 likes. And then, yesterday, I had some time to fool around with Photoshop before the class I was working with started. And…

Racing towards Research Season

While teachers have been reworking their classes, adjusting things for hybrid learning and multiple time zones, we've been working on getting our (digital and print) collection ready and preparing to work with students virtually on their upcoming research projects. We know that many of the teachers who do the February project are concerned because they…

Rapid Response

Wednesday, after working on a semi-physically demanding project in the library I went home and took a nap. Then woke up to... well, we all know what was going on Wednesday afternoon. Scenes that reminded me of my vague memories of Chicago '68, with the fear that the Rodney King riots spread (I was in…

Finally, something normal

Last week I looked at this week’s forecast and saw snow was predicted. Fine... but it’s a week away. Over the next few days amounts of snow and arrival days kept changing: 5” Wednesday and 8” Thursday? no... 12” Wednesday and 3” Thursday? no... Tuesday it seemed to settle on 1-2” Wednesday night and 10+”…

Starting a revolution

Last week I met with my "book group". I'm using that term loosely to describe the amazing group of people I met during my time on book award committees; we miss talking about books with each other so we started a group that meets the last Sunday of the month (traditional Alex Award book talk…

Getting the news out

There's that old adage, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Since we can't effectively create displays for students or do in-person Readers Advisory, we've started an occasional newsletter. It's promoting our services as well as other websites and resources that we think our readers will find helpful/useful/interesting. This was what we started with: But that…

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…

Am I the last to know?

Luckily for me, last week I was working on campus and so missed much of the Amy Coney Barrett hearings commentary. One thing, however, did cross my radar and got me thinking. It was this exchange with Sen. Hirono: “I have no agenda,” Barrett replied. “I do want to be clear that I have never…

Go!

A short while ago I posted Ready? Set? and so now, clearly, it's time for "go"! "Go" started yesterday, the first day of classes (remote) for the Upper School. Our Middle and Lower Schools are still doing some orientation work, but those students are on campus, getting used to the new spaces and pathways and…