Tag Archives: Summer Fun Library Tour

Books

Day Sixty Four of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

Pictograms-nps-misc-bookstoreHow are your books organized? Are you setting them up to make them readily available? Are you thinking about strategies to encourage people to discover all your good stuff?

Bookstores organize materials in this way, and in libraries we can also organize and display material to encourage use and to show off the best things you have in your collection!

School libraries take cues from bookstores to foster browsing, stimulate learning

“If it seems that Corcoran Library at Boston College High School is set up more like a bookstore than a typical school library, that’s because it is.

Students are greeted at the front by the latest additions to the collection, which is frequently updated, and at the back entrance by books on sports, the most popular subject at the all-boys school. Before last fall, those books would have been tucked away in different areas, difficult to find for anyone who didn’t know exactly what he wanted and how to locate it.

Likewise, strolling the aisles in hopes of just happening upon something of interest often proved to be fruitless, but now the Corcoran has abandoned the fusty Dewey Decimal System for an arrangement intended to be simple and intuitive, based on how books are arranged in bookstores.

“It empowers people to be able to browse,” said Diane Costagliola, the Corcoran’s director. “People see things more than they did when it was just on the shelf by Dewey.”

The changes at BC High reflect a shift long visible in public libraries and now spreading to schools. By embracing a consumer-focused model, they become more relevant and interesting to 21st-century readers. But whereas public libraries have turned themselves into community centers with a more general focus on patrons’ evolving needs, schools hope to inspire.

“Libraries are moving away from spaces that just store ideas to [places] that facilitate ideas,” said Mike Barker, director of academy research, information, and library services at Phillips Academy Andover.

One simple way of doing that is by clearing space for additional large tables to allow more students to use the library simultaneously and to make it easier for them to study together or work on group projects. And how are schools doing this? It might seem surprising, but many are getting rid of books.”

(Read the rest of this article here!)

Books

Day Sixty Three of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

Simple Unknown

Does your library have a comic book collection? Trinity College in Connecticut does! And thanks to a generous donor they are able to share them with the world.

“For more than 150 years, Hartford’s Watkinson Library has been a research hub. Today, the collection housed at Trinity College includes 200,000 volumes dating back 10 centuries, including an 11th-century Greek Bible, a first edition of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” a book about Egypt commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte, John James Audubon’s “Birds of America.”

Now a few more legendary characters fill the shelves at Watkinson: the Silver Surfer, the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The library recently received a donation of about 10,000 comic books, 200 graphic novels and several comics reference books from a Minnesota collector. Richard Ring, Watkinson’s head curator and librarian, said these are the first comic books in the library’s collection.

“This is a nice starter set for us. It’s exciting. We hope it’s the tip of the iceberg,” Ring said. “I hope they inspire people connected to the college to think, if they have a collection, what they are going to do with it. … If they don’t, it’s still a nice thing to dig into.”

Ring said another promised gift, of several thousand science-fiction novels from a Connecticut collector, will enhance the comic-book collection. “Comic books and science fiction have similar reading cultures,” he said. “I view these as documents of the pop culture of its time.”

Other universities have noteworthy comic-book collections, including the University of Iowa, Indiana University, the University of Georgia, Brigham Young University, Duke, Brown, the University of Tulsa, Drew University, Southern Methodist University, Bowling Green University and Texas A&M.”

(Read the rest of this article here!)

Children's services, Programs

Day Sixty Two of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

Monoclonius dinosaur
It is always fun to see what other libraries are doing, and the different programs going on in libraries.  The public library in Liberty, NY has a fun program for kids: digging up dinosaur bones! Hands up: how many of us spent our childhoods being interested in dinosaurs? Me too!

Add together digging, some education, and dinosaurs, and you have all the makings of a fun program!

Dig for dinosaur bones at
Liberty Public Library

“LIBERTY — On Aug. 3 at 6:30 p.m., the Liberty Public Library at 189 N Main Street in Liberty will be hosting a real, hands-on Dinosaur Dig inside the library. To get the children ready for the dig, the program will start off with a 30-minute interactive fossil talk presented by Field Paleontologist, Mike Straka. During the talk Mr. Straka will cover how and where we find fossils and will show some amazing fossil discoveries from the time of the dinosaurs to the time of the ice age.

He will then assist children in digging for real dinosaur bones, identifying the bones and placing them on top of a Triceratops cut out. Please note that while this program is free, the hands-on “dig” workshop is limited to 50 participants, ages 5-11. Weather permitting; the dig will be set up outside the library so children should come dressed in play clothes. After the dig, children will have an opportunity to spend time looking at the expanded fossil “museum” set up in the library.”

Communication

Day Sixty One of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

Now I Know

I like to know things.

Okay, that’s not surprising; I’m a librarian and it’s pretty much in the job description.

So it makes me happy to get nice pieces of information emailed to me on are regular basis! And one of my favorites arrives Monday thru Friday (sometimes with a bonus selection of reading recommendations on Friday!): Now I Know.

“You’ll learn things like:

The creator is Dan (spoiler: he works for Sesame Street, one of my favorite kid shows of all time!) This is his “About” page; I think you will get a good idea of how fun his daily newsletter would be to receive. Sign up yourself!

“Hi. I’m Dan. I’m a dad. And a husband.

And a Mets fan.

I can tell you how to get to Sesame Street. (Kind of.)

I have an email newsletter with more than 100,000 subscribers. It’s about trivia. Pee-Wee Herman once tweeted about it.

In 2013, I wrote a book.

My forehead is in a YouTube video with more than 20 million views.

I once had a startup, but I sold it to the founder of Wikipedia. I didn’t make nearly as much money as the press reported.

I’ve made important public statements concerning Big Bird’s bedtime.

I’ve read all of the Harry Potter books at least twice.

I can vibrate my eyes.

I’ve never eaten bacon.

I’ve tweeted over 50,000 times.

I was not in Gangs of New York.

I’ve gotten 4096 in 2048.

I’ve fed cookies to Cookie Monster.

I once started a petition which ended up with more than 150,000 signatures.

I’m a recovering lawyer.

I created a legal argument which went to the Supreme Court (and the Court rejected).

I taught a five-year-old about square roots.

I went to Tufts. And Cardozo.

I curate under-$20 gift ideas to make Secret Santa easier for people.

I’ve been the New York Mets Designated Driver of the Game three times.

In 2014, I wrote another book.

I am the Connecticut State Magic the Gathering Champion (1997) in both Limited and Standard formats. I am somewhat embarrassed by this.

 

Nice to meet you.

Say hi.”

Materials

Day Sixty of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

Vintage shawl

Connecting with our users is always a key thing for any type of library. Figuring out what they need, and how we can provide it, will always be the right way to go in providing great service. And the Folger Shakespeare Library is not only providing some great materials – but also great service!

The Folger Shakespeare Library Will Lend Chilly Readers a Handmade Shawl

“In the reading room of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., researchers might spend hours carefully paging through a 16th-century pamphlet or the only surviving quarto edition of Titus Andronicus. (“If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul.”) But they also have access to another unusual—if more informal—collection. Behind the reading room desk there is a vault where the staff keeps a small lending library of handmade shawls.

Three of the shoulder coverings are knitted and two crocheted. The blue one is longer and lighter; the brown one, the newest addition, has pockets. One circular shawl has rings of different colors, and another with light, spring colors is a little bit thicker and larger. The original shawl, the one that started the collection, is a sandy brown. All five are the work of Rosalind Larry, the room’s head of circulation, who made them, often on her lunch hour, during her many years at the library.

Larry started knitting the first shawl in the 1980s, after the library was remodeled and the reading room expanded. Not long before, she had seen a colleague making baby booties and thought she might like to learn to knit. “She showed me how, and at first I was terrible at it,” Larry says. But soon she grew more ambitious, and when she had some yarn she wanted to use up, she thought she might make herself a shawl, since it always felt cold in the reading room.”

(read the rest of this article here!)