Preparing for TLA

The past few weeks I have been preparing materials to take to conference. I am doing two presentations there, one that I don't feel very confident about and one that I think will blow the socks off of lots of people. Oddly, I have put the most work into the one that I am not very confident about.

What am I presenting on? First, I have a poster presentation that I am giving to show off my screencasts of the Tennessee Electronic Library (TEL). My partner, Alisa Breece, and I have been creating screencasts to help students navigate some of the databases supplied by TEL. These tutorials are aimed at students who may be working at home or just generally outside the supervision of the librarian. Students notoriously wait until the last moment to complete assignments and often find themselves at home trying to navigate resources that they do not understand. These screencasts are meant to guide them through the research process in these various databases. We have currently hosted them on another blog that I author - http://tutorialsbychristaandalisa.blogspot.com - so check them out if you get a chance.

My bigger presentation - and I say bigger only because it is a more dificult subject for me - is on design practices that can help libraries market themselves more effectively. Too often we focus on the methods of "marketing" - flyers, web advertisements, word of mouth - but we don't focus on the aesthetics of what we produce. The fact is, librarians often just don't have the time to study current trends in design or even to learn how to apply these designs to their productions. So this is what I and my partner, David Green, have attempted to do. We have simply gone through and identified what are the current graphic and web design trends. Yes, most of the librarians present at this conference will probably not be the web designers for their library website, but we hope that they will be able to take away things to suggest to their web designers, whoever those parties might be.

What am I learning from this process? Lots! To begin with, I knew absolutely nothing about graphic design when I began this process. But much research later, I sort of realized that I didn't have to be an experts. There were already lots of experts out there who already had an opinion. I simply needed to analyze and interpret the data that they had already made available. Sounds simple, right? WRONG! It was a very time consuming process to go around looking at millions of websites and determine, based upon what the experts were saying and what I was seeing with my own two eyes, what were the most popular design practices.

Questions that have popped up that I don't have time to research? Libraries don't seem to be doing a great job allowing users to share their content. This was one of the greatest webdesign trends from the corporate world that was just not present in the library world. At all. A handfull of libraries did link to their facebook or twitter pages - they do have them - but they didn't make a way to share actual content. You know that little share button that you see on millions of webpages? It is just not there on library websites. Why? I don't know. That would be the question of the century. I asked a couple of practicing librarians and one technology guru and the answer was simply I don' know - and that sometimes things take a long time to catch on in libraryland. Anyway, it is a question that I would be curious to find the answer to, if I had the time to actually research it and do something about it. Libraries, where are your social networking options?

Well, I have now rambled on about things most of my readers probably don't care anything about. But look for my response to the TLA conference soon because it is next week!

Girl in the Arena

I think I tweeted about this book not too long ago, but I am going to do a more in-depth review now. Girl in the Arena was an absolutely fabulous book. I picked it up, originally, because I had just finished reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, in which a girl and boy are selected to fight to the death in an arena in order to try to get food for their hometown. Girl in the Arena sounded very similar in that, there was a girl who was going to have to fight to the death in order to be able to live her life as she wanted. Sounds good, huh?



Well, it was! It ended up being this giant metaphor for society. The women in the "Glad" culture were completely dedicated to their men... to supporting their time in the arena, to raising their children to be gladiators, to subscribing to a completely restrictive lifestyle. It was rather sickening. Lyn, the main character, sees the phoniness of the situation. She sees that there is more to life than being a gladiator's wife... but there is one problem. Another gladiator takes Lyn's "dowry" bracelet from her dead father on the battlefield. And this means, according to Glad culture, that she must marry this man.

The solution? Fight to the death. She wins, there is no marriage. She loses? Well, she'll be dead, so it won't matter.

The suspense is riveting!

And I won't ruin the plot for you or tell you the ending, but suffice it to say that this was a very entertaining read with many levels of understanding. It is a story of the struggle for freedom and the absurdity of societal traditions that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Additional (Shorter) Book Review Source

As you have probably figured out by reading this blog, I review around 1-2 books per month (when I don't forget). Obviously, as an aspiring librarian, I read a lot more than that. I just don't have time to write full length articles on them all. For that, I apologize.

HOWEVER, I have come up with a GREAT solution to this problem. I have begun reviewing books on my twitter account. For those of you who are not familiar with twitter, you have to post your "status" in 140 characters or less. This isn't a great resource for book reviews but I think it is going to be a very valuable way to document my opinions about books (for those who want to know it) in a brief format that takes me almost no time to spit out.

So if you are interested in all that I read, follow me at twitter.com/ChristaC1. You never know when you might find a great read through twitter. :-)

P.S. - Over the Christmas break, I had put up an opinion about a book on twitter. I will admit that it wasn't a great opinion, because I was confused over many aspects of the plot, but I posted my opinion anyway. The author of this book almost immediately responded to my tweet (because I have a public profile there) and wanted to know why I was confused. He posted links to help me get over it and, overall, we had a great little discussion about his book. It is amazing what technology can do for you sometimes!

Mobile Libraries

If you don't mind (and since I have very few readers, I don't think that you will) I am going to veer away from my usual book reviews for a moment.

A week or so ago, I needed to go to the library to gather some research materials. Normally I would use my teaching privileges to have the library pull the books for me and hold them at the desk, but they had postponed that service for the winter holidays. Thus, I used the library catalog to create a list of items that I wanted and then prepared to go to the library to do the work myself. I was going to print this list, but could not find a way to do this without printing summaries, images, and such that would equal about 20 pages. Because that was not very cost efficient or environmentally friendly, I really did not want to do this. No worries, though. I have a fancy new iPhone that will allow me to access this list on the go... so I saved these items to my e-shelf for future access and waltzed off to the library thinking that I would look at the list from my cell phone and pull the books off the shelf based upon that list. Sounds like a simple plan, right? Wrong.

I arrived at the library as planned. I accessed my e-shelf as planned. I even saw the list of books as planned. But, what I didn't notice before I planned this expedition was that the list did not include call numbers and you could only see the details of one book at a time, which took a long time to download on a mobile device. I thought to myself, "This is ridiculous. There has to be an easier way." So I promptly walked down to the 2nd floor and visited the reference librarian. Fortunately, since the university was not in session, I didn't have to wait in line to visit her. And I asked: "IS there a better way to do this?"

"Of course there is," she said. "There has to be."

So we sat down together and looked at the list of books I had gathered on my account, trying to find a way to view the list online, with call numbers, which seemed to be the only piece of information that any list didn't include. After about 20 minutes of sitting at that desk with no success, we both admitted (temporary) defeat. I needed to find my books before it got too dark to walk home, so we just decided to call it quits. I ended up just jotting down the call numbers of the books on a scrap piece of paper and using that to track down my books.

A few days later, I received an email from a reference staff member. The reference librarian that I had spoken to (and I wish I could remember her name so that I could give her credit) had not stopped working on my problem after I left. She had continued searching for a method of printing a list of call numbers long after I had left the building. I don't know if it was just a slow night or if she really cared that much but I do give her a big kudos for continuing to try to solve the problem even when the patron in question would probably not be back to find out the results.

Anyway... I received an email from the reference desk that provided me some detailed instructions for creating a list with call numbers. It was a 10-step process that would ultimately send the results list to my email. However, my big problem with that is that I saved all of my searches on the new "catalog" screen that the library has adopted. Technically, Primo is not a catalog, but is just a shiny new user interface that looks like it actually came from this century. I was using this catalog when I found my results and, thus, any results that I found were saved on my e-shelf there... which apparently is not the same as the e-shelf on the "classic catalog"... the only place where you can save a simple list with title, author, and call number.

Now, I know that all catalogs are different and all libraries are different, but I still think there has to be a better way to do this. The world we live in is becoming increasingly dependent on mobile devices and we libraries should adapt our technologies to fit the needs of the community at large. And instead of the responsibility of this being placed on individual libraries, maybe we could create a consortium (of sorts) that would allow us to pool our catalog records (oh, wait, we all ready have one of those!) into one program that would work on a mobile device. We could create an app that would allow you to specify your location and search the available materials at that location. You could star your selections and it would automatically tell you the title, author and location of that book in the collection. We could even make it so that our app could sync with our personal library accounts on the web so that we could load the information from our computers and have it automatically appear on our phones and vise versa. Wouldn't that be grand?

I don't know. I am not a web designer by any stretch of the imagination, but it feels like this template is already out there in some form or another, so somebody should be able to adapt it for libraries.

Or is there something like this already out there? Food for thought.

The Name of this Book is Secret

I recently read a young adult mystery titled The Name of this Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch.

My first instinct is to tell you that this was a fabulous book and then suggest that you read it if you enjoy mysteries. It was a highly entertaining book, and I do recommend it. However, I do have to warn you that this book has a rather complicated plot. Let me tell you a bit about it so that you can see what I mean (fyi- the rest of this post may contain spoilers):

Two middle-schoolers, Cass and Max-Ernest, discover a secret code hidden in a box of smells. (The box of smells is literally a box full of liquids that smell like different things.) They discover that an old man had developed a secret code by combining those smells in certain combinations. They follow this code, and a mysterious journal left in the old man's house, and discover that there is apparently a whole group of people in the world who have synesthesia, which means that their senses are mixed up (i.e. they see smells). Apparently, these people have been trying for centuries to discover a formula for immortality, something that will cause them to stay young forever.

The scientists who have been trying to discover this formula are so close. All they need is that box of smells ("The Symphony of Smells"). The only problem is that Cass and Max-Ernest have hidden that box away and they are determined to stop these wicked scientists from having their way.

Thus, Cass and Max-Ernest launch a big investigation into these ancient scientists and end up in more danger than they could imagine.

The whole story is told by a third-person narrator who frequently steps out of his role as storyteller. The narrator, in fact, spends the first few pages of the book warning people away from it. This book is too dangerous, he says. Once you know the secrets it contains, the "bad guys" might come after you as well... which, of course, only made me want to read it more. There are several more interruptions in the story line in which the narrator gives similar warnings, which I think is a good way to keep the reader interested, in this instance.

Anyway, I have now droned on about this book for a while. I repeat that this is an excellent mystery for young readers, but be forewarned about it's complicated plot.

The Best?

I hadn't planned to post anything this week, but after reading this book, I just thought I had to make a comment. And, as you know, I usually only comment on the good books that I read, but I am making an exception in this instance

I just finished reading In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. I decided to read this book because it was on a list of the Top 100 Picture Books from School Library Journal. Why it was on this list (#18!!!), I may never know. Because I read it and I just don't agree.

The book, for those of you who don't know, is about this little boy named Mickey, which I guess reminds the author of the word "milk." Mickey is sound asleep in his bed when he hears some loud noises. Somehow he falls out of his bed... falls down, down, down... coming out of his clothes... and falling into the hand of the cooks in the night kitchen. These cooks place the naked child in a cake batter and start mixing him in because they need milk. The still naked child escapes into the bread batter and rises to the Milky Way to get milk for the cake. He gets the milk, everyone celebrates that we will have cake in the morning, and Mickey goes home and back to bed.

Does nobody else find this story more than a little disturbing? First, why did the boy have to lose his clothes in the story? Was that at all necessary to the plot? Second, doesn't anybody else care that the cake these people would be eating had come into contact with naked skin? Maybe my germophobe tendencies are just a little too strong because that grosses me out. And, yes, I know it is just a kids story and it was a dream sequence and I am probably taking this too seriously, but I do believe that this was the most disturbing picture book I have read in a while.

And let me just be clear here: It is not the nakedness that bothers me. Not at all. It is the nakedness next to food that creeps me out. In my mind, these two things should not be mixed... in fact, they should never come into contact with each other, even in theory.

What made people nominate this book for the top 100 picture books? I just don't understand.

The House on the Gulf

Want a good mystery? One that leaves out the sex, drugs, and rock, and roll? Well, look no further! The House on the Gulf (2004) by Margaret Haddix is the book for you!

Britt’s brother, Bran, has scored them the deal of a lifetime. He has arranged for his family to stay at someone’s house over the summer… and get paid for it. It’s called house-sitting. They stay in the house for this family and keep thieves from breaking in while they are gone. Pretty sweet deal, right? Mom is going to get to finish school, they won’t have rent to pay, they will actually be making money. It couldn’t get any better.

Except, of course, that something doesn't seem quite right about the deal. Bran is very secretive about the whole thing and he won’t let either Brit or their mom talk to the owners of the house. Is there something strange about this situation, or is it just Brit’s imagination?