Tag Archives: books

Books, General, Public, School Media Specialist

Books in the Spotlight: March

Sometimes CMLE will highlight several books that have some factor in common. We hope they will give you ideas for your collection, or influence an activity, lesson plan, or display!

This month, we are sharing several different books that have main characters that model good qualities for young readers. This book list began as a discussion from a librarian hoping to help one of her patrons. The patron was looking for suggestions of beginning chapter books for a nine-year-old that contained characters that modeled qualities such as dependability, good time management, etc but without being didactic.

Here are some of the suggestions other librarians came up with:

Continue reading Books in the Spotlight: March →

Books, Resources

Reader’s Advisory Tools

Reading is fun.

Reading is good for us.

Reading is one of our fundamental missions.

Basically, we are a profession of people who like to read, helping others to read!

And of course, that is more complex that it might sound. Because while we like books, professionally, and we hopefully(!) are in touch with the books in our collection – more exciting new books come out every day.

How do you know what to recommend? If someone comes to you for a book suggestion in an area you know nothing about, what do you say? Reader’s Advisory (RA) is your professional strategy.

Fortunately, we have a variety of tools to help you give great answers! Have you used other resources? Tell us in the comments, so we all get better at RA work! Continue reading Reader’s Advisory Tools →

Books, CMLE, Communication, General

Goodreads for March!

We are excited to continue our Goodreads book groups into the month of March! Nothing like some good books to help us look forward to spring. Join us in our Librarian Professionals group, our Librarians Enjoying Books group, or both! Feel free to read along with us and add your thoughts to the discussions.

For our professional development group, Librarian Professionals, we will be reading What If I Say the Wrong Thing?: 25 Habits for Culturally Effective People by Vernā Myers

Goodreads describes this book as featuring “innovative and surprising ways to keep your personal diversity journey moving and the diversity commitment of your organization. Written to make this information bite-size and accessible, you’ll find quick answers to typical What should I do? questions, like: What if I say the wrong thing, what should I do?”

For our fiction group, Librarians Enjoying Books, we will be reading Love Overdue by by Pamela Morsi. It’s the story of a shy book-loving woman that takes a job at the library in a small town only to run into someone from her past!

We hope you will read with us this month!

 

Books, CMLE

Another book stumper!

4 Comments

We had such a good response to the last call for help in identifying a book, that I’m sending this one out to the CMLE community to see if you can help another library person!

“I have a patron who is looking for a children’s chapter book, published in the ’60s or earlier. It featured a homeless family that broke into and lived in a vacation home during the winter. A thread throughout the plot was the pancakes they cooked. The pancake recipe was an old family recipe, and at the end of the book, the pancakes won a contest and earned the family prize money. Thank you for your help!”

If you have ideas, send them in and we will pass them on to the librarian.

Do you have any book stumpers? Send them in, and let’s put the CMLE team of library people to work for you too!

 

Resources

Protect Your Library the Medieval Way, With Horrifying Book Curses

Medieval scribes protected their work by threatening death, or worse.

By Sarah Laskow
A 15th century portrait of a scribe.

In the Middle Ages, creating a book could take years. A scribe would bend over his copy table, illuminated only by natural light—candles were too big a risk to the books—and spend hours each day forming letters, by hand, careful never to make an error. To be a copyist, wrote one scribe, was painful: “It extinguishes the light from the eyes, it bends the back, it crushes the viscera and the ribs, it brings forth pain to the kidneys, and weariness to the whole body.”

Continue reading Protect Your Library the Medieval Way, With Horrifying Book Curses →