My Yearly Summer Break

Hi friends! My yearly summer break from blogging came early this year. Due to family reasons, I am on a hiatus from my blogging life. I will return during ALA at the end of the month. I hope you will return with me!

Not Writing, but Lots Happening

Usually when the school year ends the activity in the library winds down too. This year, however, the activity just kept coming. Research projects ended later, we are planning for some curricular changes next year, we are packing for a mini remodel (new shelves, carpet, and paint), and we are working on next year's accreditation process. This was a busy spring! Life was busy too, so my poor blog was neglected.
I also found out this month that I will be on a panel at ALA. I will be the lone school librarian with 15 mostly university librarians on a panel called "What are You Doing about Emerging Technologies?" These librarians have titles like Emerging Technology Librarian, Digital Access Librarian, and Vice Chancellor for Information Services, but through collaborating with them online I see that we have similar issues. I will learn so much just by being at this 2 hour session, and I hope you will be there too! Please let me know if you plan on being there.

Summer Reading List on LibGuides

My summer reading lists are moving to LibGuides. Last year I tagged books in LibraryThing to complement the traditional list, but since my students know how to use LibGuides, I decided to try that platform this time.  It is so easy to transfer an already made list of books and annotations to LibGuides! It takes just a minute per book - or less.
On the 7th-8th grade reading list home page I put the required reading, and since the seventh graders have a choice of three books, I put book trailers I found on YouTube so the kids could watch a bit of what each book is about. Then I challenged them to make better book trailers this summer - we'll see if any do. Also, since I haven't yet met our incoming seventh graders, I made my profile box a "Meet Your Librarian" box. The other tabs are named after genres, and feature 8-12 books each.

The book covers are links to Amazon, a feature of  LibGuides. Each page also has a "user submission" box where students can submit links to their favorite books, allowing a place for them to contribute and potentially make the guide more relevant to their interests.

I am having fun making these slightly more dynamic lists for the older readers too, and each LibGuide has a down-loadable Word version of the summer reading choices, for those who like to have printed copies. I am adding required reading for Honors and AP classes as well. This could really revolutionize summer reading for us - I hope the students like it!
Do you use LibGuides for summer reading? Or do you use a different method for sharing books? please share!

Speaking (Reflecting) at UCLA

Last week I had the wonderful experience of speaking about being a school librarian in the very room where I took most of my classes at UCLA when I received my MLS there in 1994. Loretta Gaffney invited me to speak to her Young Adult Services class, and I was thrilled to do so. It was a unique chance to reflect about why and how I became a school librarian, what I like about working at an independent school, and why I enjoy what I do.

This opportunity came at a very busy time in my life. In April I had two major events happen in my extended family, both of which will take much time to process. Keeping up with my children, husband, and work has been hard, let alone preparing a thirty minute discussion for the students at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Science. I debated canceling, but I found I was enjoying the process of deciding what to say and how best to say it. It took my mind off of my stress, instead of making life more stressful. It gave me time to ponder why I like being a school librarian, and gave me a focus for my free time.

Preparing to speak helped me understand the importance of reflection not only in our work, but also for our students. Reflection can be a powerful tool in deciphering the meaningful aspects of an activity, the parts to savor, the moments to remember. Do you reflect about your work? in what way? what have you learned from it?

Ms. Gaffney said I would be visiting during their  section on teens and research, so I spoke of collaboration, integration of skills, LibGuides, and our consortium's shared catalog.  I spoke of my experience, of my impressions of the innovative independent school library world, and the students responded well. They asked questions, and seemed engaged. But at the end I was surprised at how much fun I had, and I remarked to them that I didn't realize how much I would get out of speaking with them.  Visiting UCLA was a great experience, and I hope I get to do it again!

Diigo presentation for CAIS, Southern California

This is the Diigo presentation I gave at CAIS last month. Or, I gave most of it, but then the projector broke.. oh well! I enjoy using Diigo, and I am modeling using it for a 3 week mini-class I am teaching to seniors this week about ethical decision making about food. All the short YouTube videos and websites I want to show them are in my Diigo list. Enjoy! And feel free to ask any questions or give your Diigo/social bookmarking suggestions in the comments.

Diigo presentation for CAIS, Southern California

View more presentations from elisabeth abarbanel.

Huffington Post Censors Comments by School Librarians?

James Tracy: Coming of Age with Information Overload via kwout

The above article by James Tracy of Cushing Academy fame (yes, the one who tossed thousands of books in favor of buying several Kindles) is about information overload, bias, and the importance of teaching kids how to find reliable information on the Internet. The Huffington Post allowed some comments by a few independent school librarians (including me), then took them down within 24 hours. Our comments weren't mean or offensive. They fell on the right side of the rules for commenting on The Huffington Post. I don't know why they were taken down. So, I am posting my comment on his article here. Feel free to do the same - post your comment to his post here. I will give you more than The HP allotted words!

 Mr. Tracy gives us nothing new in this article. School librarians teach students how to wade through information in any format to find the best, most reliable sources. We teach about books, databases, videos, e-books, radio transcripts, and more, depending upon the information needs of the student or the guidelines of the project. We also teach about books, sites, and databases that not only have great secondary sources but primary sources as well. We have experimented with and sometimes taught meta-search engines and federated searching (what is macro-searching, anyway? It sounds like meta-searching, which has been around for quite some time).

For years we have taught web-site evaluation, and now that discussion is increasingly more interesting as Wikipedia grows and the concept of authority is questioned. We talk with our researchers about what type of blog is used for what types of research. We teach how (and why) to investigate the author of the information gathered. We are now struggling with how and when to cite a post from Twitter. Our lessons change and grow with the information formats, as our goal is to help the students learn, discover, create, and succeed. An article about teaching how to evaluate information found on the Internet that doesn't mention the necessity of a professional school librarian is missing the point.

The above isn't exactly the comment I submitted (I don't have a copy of it). The one I submitted was shorter, and nicer. It was published, then later retracted. If it was moderated and deemed suitable, who then read it and decided it wasn't? Maybe the people at The Huffington Post or Mr. Tracy thought my comment was argumentative (I tried not to be). It did slightly refer back to other disagreements the school librarian community has had with Mr. Tracy regarding book collections used for research purposes. But, as Laura Pearle pointed out to me, why would The HP delete comments that disagree with the blogger? Who really took the comments by school librarains down? Could Mr. Tracy have made that request? Isn't starting a conversation one of the points of blogging? Don't school librarians need to speak up for ourselves and what we do?

I'd like to encourage Mr. Tracy to attend ALA, AISL (next week!) or an upcoming conference for school librarians in his state. Or perhaps browse our literature from time to time. He just might be pleasantly surprised by what he learns.

Bookstores are Easier to Navigate? Really?

I was quite the spy today at my local Barnes and Noble store. I went looking for Food Rules by Michael Pollan. I was by myself and took my time looking around. I checked the paperback display areas, the nonfiction display areas, and the sections about nutrition, cooking, and food. I even looked in Social Sciences. I found some interesting books, and grabbed a few, but not the one I wanted. So I went to wait in line at the information counter. There were two people working there, a line of people and a ringing phone. One of the workers went off to help a customer and a man was left to answer phones and the people waiting in line. He was nice and helpful, and people had mostly questions about the location of particular books, like I did. He disappeared to get me the book, came back and was ready to answer more questions (I never did find out what section Food Rules is in).

Next, I lingered by the information desk browsing my load of books. As I stood watching and listening, new people were constatnly coming up to the counter and asking for titles. It made me wonder about all they hype the bookstore shelving idea gets in the library world. Does it really decrease the amount of questions and increase self service? I'll bet that nice young man at the information desk goes home exhausted at the end of every day - and this was a 3:00 on a Thursday! Imagine what a Saturday must be like.



Image: Shakespeare & Co., Paris

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tommorris/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0