Tag Archives: pop culture

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Coming Soon: Bonus Podcast Episodes of Reading With Libraries!

Last week we celebrated our 100th episode of of our library skills and training podcast, Linking Our Libraries (check it out here!)

And this week, we’re starting to drop some new bonus episodes of our book group and reader’s advisory podcast: Reading With Libraries!

We’re focusing on some of the pop culture happening around us, and suggesting related books! You can get a feel for these episodes by checking out the ones we released last winter: Bridgerton, Soul, The Mandalorian, and Nomadland.

Starting tomorrow, we’ll drop four NEW episodes in our Reading With Libraries feed (if you’re subscribed to the podcast, you’ll get them automatically!) Otherwise, you can always listen to them right from our website!

We had so much fun finding books to go along with some of the summer’s upcoming movies and other entertainment! We hope you enjoy these episodes and get inspired to recommend books to your library community!

Programs

UPDATE! ‘Stranger Things’ at the Library programs

After we published our Spotlight Program article this week, we received a great update.

Syrena Maranell, from nearby Pioneerland libraries shared some pictures from the Stranger Things program her library held this week! She reports that everyone had a good time, and the Eggos were a big hit. Check out their awesome flyer!! Stranger Things party flyer

It’s not too late everyone: Season Two comes out tomorrow (Oct 27), but you can still do some fun programming! (Invite us over – we’re fans of the series!)

Check out this artwork of Eleven:

And Dustin is instantly recognizable here, with his hat!

Communication, Conference, Research

Day Twenty Seven of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

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Batgirl was a librarian!

Looking at the Socialization of LIS Students
Through a Pop Culture Lens

This is a little bit of self-promotion, but the fun kind! A few years ago my research partner and I wanted to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns; but we had very demanding jobs that required us to be working all the time. So we had to work out a way to make watching Buffy into work.

Reader, we did it.

We both like pop culture, and as professors we frequently used pop culture images and ideas to illustrate points in library work. Students would identify with pop culture material, and use it to help incorporate the ideas we were discussing in class into their own professional images they were developing.

We wanted to find out how common this was, so we did a survey of library students across the country to find out what kinds of pop culture images they like, that they shared with others, and were using in their professional development. You can flip through our article to see what all we found; one of the biggies was how very cool students are, and how much pop culture they knew!

Libraries, as well as archives and museums and other information-focused professions, are very well represented across all sorts of pop culture images and ideas. So be proud, and seize your own professional identity ideas from the wide range of pop culture images out there!

Books, CMLE

Day Four of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

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If you, like me, are old enough to remember the days when we wrote our names in library books to borrow them, you remember how fun it was to find someone’s name you knew. (Older kids were so cool!)

In this book, someone found a name we ALL know:
Elvis Presley!

“The library card, which Presley, then 13 years old, signed to check out a copy of “The Courageous Heart: A Life of Andrew Jackson For Young Readers” from Humes High School in Memphis in 1948, is expected to sell for more than $3,500 when it is sold on August 14.”

This is a couple of years old, but check out the entire Huffington Post article about the card!

CMLE, General

Libraries and Pop Culture: A Natural Partnership!

https://www.pinterest.com/kayedacus/architecture-libraries-studies-offices/

We have already established that library people are extremely cool, and naturally other people have taken notice of that! Libraries and library people are represented prolifically in popular culture. Last week we talked about libraries in the comics. And we are also well represented across all types of pop culture: books, movies, games, TV shows.

Pop culture is not just for fun (though, of course that would be fine!); there are many academic areas of study looking at aspects of pop culture. The Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association holds annual conferences for people involved in pop culture scholarship from across the country, as well as smaller regional conferences.

Of course, they have a section just for Libraries, Archives, and Museums! (Disclaimer: I have presented twice at their annual conferences. And it was fantastic!!)

One of my studies looked at the images of library people in pop culture, to see what kind of images people in our profession were identifying with as part of their own professional image. If you would like to build up your own reference collection of library pop culture images, here are some of their suggestions (not in any order): Continue reading Libraries and Pop Culture: A Natural Partnership! →