Reading for kids

What I've read recently [mostly notes for myself to remember these books later]:

Rex Zero and the End of the World, Tim Wynne-Jones [grades 5-8, ages 9-12]
a fifties Cold War kids in suburbia book, from the perspective of a new-to-the-neighborhood kid. A mystery "monster" is terrorizing kids and making them spend their summer in fear and solving the great mystery, at home the news is making their parents build bomb shelters or not talk about things. Some good kids get it and parents don't stuff, some good sibling it's ok to be friends but you don't have to be as long as you can get along and see your siblings as people stuff.

Babymouse, Queen of the World! [grades 4-6, ages 4-8]
fun, silly and not-so-silly graphic novel. Babymouse wants popularity over friends to start, but figures it out before the end. lots of great fairy tale and classic story references (cinderella, frankenstein)

Artemis Fowl the graphic novel [ages 9-12]
I haven't read this series yet, but the graphic novel makes me want to. Evil 12-year-old genius as the central character? Awesome. Not sure my long term patience for the high-tech fairy world, but we'll see.

Amulet, Kazu Kibuishi - Book 1, The Stonekeeper [ages 8-12]
brilliant illustrations, a story painfully similar to Spyderwick Chronicles, but still alluring - mom eaten by blobby thing in basement other world, kids rescue her with the help of the amulet. Cliff hanger.

The Time Travelers, Book 1 in The Gideon Trilogy, Linda Buckley-Archer [grades 5-8, ages 9-12]
Two modern kids that barely know each other get thrust back in time due to an experimental machine. They land in 1763, a time where the details of life (clothes and getting around) are very different, but so are cultural things like the criminal justice system. Engaging, with a riveting story that provides continuous reasons to keep reading till the end.

on the power of fandom

Over at The Movie Fanatic, they are running a series called THE TWILIGHT SAGA: and today's installment is The Twilight Fandom: Who they are and what they're capable of.

I was hoping for a little more from the title, ie "what they're capable of" but perhaps that is coming in the rest of the 4-part series. For now, though, it's just fun to read things like this and know that people can be really really really passionate about books:

Twilighters Around the World: Twilight sites are not limited to English speaking countries. If you think Harry Potter is the only ‘worldwide’ phenomenon, think again, here's our current alpha list:

Argentinean sites: http://www.twilightlatino.com/ and http://www.eclipse-la.com
Australian site: http://www.twilightaustralia.net/
Brazilian site: http://www.twilightteam.com.br/
Chilean site: http://www.twilightchile.com/
Colombian site: http://conexionvampirica.blogia.com/
Finnish site: http://www.vampirelove.net/
French site: http://the-meadow.fr/
Italian site: http://www.twilighters.it/
Mexican site: http://www.crepusculo-mx.com/
Philippine site: http://www.twilightsaga.multiply.com/
Portuguese site: http://www.twilightportugal.blogs.sapo.pt/
Spanish sites: http://www.crepusculomeyer.blogspot.com/ and http://www.crepusculo.com.es/
Swiss site: http://www.bellaswan.net/
Venezuelan site: http://twilight-fans-venezuela.blogspot.com/


According to the Twilight Top Sites, there are now 86 websites dedicated to Stephenie Meyer's book and soon-to-be movie, Twilight.

giving stuff away for free can mean making more money

From Neil Gaiman's blog (bold emphasis mine):

It's worth drawing people's attention to the fact that the free online reading copy of American Gods is now in its last six days online (it ends 31 March 08). I learned this from an email from Harper Collins, which also told me the latest batch of statistics.

For American Gods:

68,000 unique visitors to the book pages of American Gods

3,000,000 book pages viewed in aggregate

And that the weekly book sales of American Gods have apparently gone up by 300%, rather than tumbling into the abyss. (Which is -- the rise, not the tumble -- what I thought would happen. Or at least, what I devoutly hoped would happen.)

The book is up at This URL, if you're interested, or want to pass it along to a friend.

Hear that you sellers of books and music and journals and other content? This is how you make fans. Fans buy stuff. Simple as that.

libraries + video games in the new york times

I love the focus of this article, legitimizing video games as a medium that is worthy of its place in libraries, not only as program center but circulating material. Plus, the idea that the video games encourage young people to use the library, and that is something we actually want (v. trying to get rid of teens in libraries)

Taking Play Seriously At The Public Library With Young Video Gamers >

librarian, for realz

I'm a real librarian now. Job, already started two months ago - I'm a public ya + reference librarian. Done with my grad work, all but a pass/fail class finalized (and no worries on that front).

Today I taught a kid how to tie his shoes.

a press release from my favorite online community doing good stuff . . .

LibriVox makes it to 1,000!

LibriVox, the free audio book project has just cataloged it's 1,000th book: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," by Edgar Allan Poe (read by Reynard T. Fox).

LibriVox.org started in August 2005 with a simple objective: "to make all public domain books available as free audio books." Thirteen people collaborated to make the first recording, Joseph Conrad's "Secret Agent."

Two years later, LibriVox has become the most prolific audiobook publisher in the world - we are now putting out 60-70 books a month, we have a catalog of 1,000 works, which represents a little over 6 months of *continuous* audio; we have some 1,500 volunteers who have contributed audio to the project; and a catalog that includes Jane Austin's "Pride and Prejudice," "Moby Dick," Darwin's "Origin of the Species," "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," Einstein's "Relativity: The Special and General Theory," Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," and other less well-known gems such as "Romance of Rubber" edited by John Martin. We have recordings in 21 languages, and about half of our recordings are solo efforts by one
reader, while the other half are collaborations among many readers.

We are always looking for new volunteers! Come join us.

young Librarians in the Chronicle of Higher Education

What I like most about this article, which is largely a response to the New York Times article from the not so distant past on Hip Librarians, is the thoughtfulness of the process and the simplicity of bringing together a bunch of very very smart folks and allowing them to speak for themselves. Instead of manipulating quotes and sound bites into a pre-formed article, author Scott Carlson provides the forum, some good, open questions, and lets the words and formed thoughts roll. And, bonus, some audio as well.

(and don't it feel good to be able to link to the NYT?)

A vision of students today

from the Kansas State University Digital Ethnography folks, another brilliantly conceived, planned, and executed video.

a little more spresent testing

that last thing went well, and for bloggy size the built in size is well and good, but i'd like to go bigger. Can I?

testing spresent.com

(which thus far is wicked awesome, btw)

What book are you?

Only a very few quickly answered questions . . .

You're Catch-22!

by Joseph Heller

Incredibly witty and funny, you have a taste for irony in all that you
see. It seems that life has put you in perpetually untenable situations, and your sense
of humor is all that gets you through them. These experiences have also made you an
ardent pacifist, though you present your message with tongue sewn into cheek. You
could coin a phrase that replaces the word "paradox" for millions of
people.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

copyright and fair use

brilliant video "explaining" copyright law and the need to exercise our fair use rights so we don't lose 'em:




synopsis: Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University provides this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms.

more info here.

Firedoodle - Fun with demonstrations

Firedoodle - Turn the web into a whiteboard

free fun Firefox add-on - what a great little thing to use when giving demonstrations on using a database or website - you can circle or highlight to really make sure your viewers are seeing what you want them to see. Good for screencasts, too.

TeacherTube - "Teach the World."

TeacherTube - "Teach the World."

TeacherTube! What a fabulous idea - a great collection of videos created by educators, with all the commenting/favoriting/flash-love goodness of YouTube. How much you wanna bet this is blocked by my work?

some thoughts from Karen Schneider

these are quotes from a piece Karen wrote on the ALA TechSource blog as an open letter to the LOC regarding a meeting they were holding at Google headquarters - no comments from me, just using this space as mental storage backup.

It is both ironic and poignant that librarians are still worrying about “bibliographic control,” after ceding so much of the same to the companies that now rent them journal access per annum at usurious rates, digitize their book collections into DRM obscurity, or sell them ponderous, antiquated “management” systems that on close inspection do little more than serve as storehouses for the metadata specific to the formats of bygone eras, bold days when we saw our central roles as defenders and curators of our cultural heritage.

We have moved from the librarian as information artisan—a professional creating and using tools to manage information—to the librarian as surrogate vendor, facilitating what is essentially the offshoring of thousands of years of information into private hands.

However, I would caution the committee that tinkering around the edges of how we as a profession do our old-world business—buy a book, create a record—is to miss the point. Small upward bumps in traditional book circulation, coaxed by major redesigns of traditional tools—however important these redesigns--are no more comforting than brisk sales at a masking-tape store in a mall going out of business (to invoke an old Saturday Night Live skit).

To paraphrase Andrew Abbott's point in The System of Professions, we are behaving like the train companies, who thought they were in the train business, not the transportation business, and like them, there are already signs that the “train business” we do is on artificial life support. We are not even close to being the first service of choice for information seekers; we are pretty much down there with asking one's mother. Libraries across the country are increasingly asked to justify their existence in order to receive continued funding, and some have been unable to do so.

Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing US Entrepreneurship Act of 2007

via THOMAS (Library of Congress)

well, the details look good to me. Decriminalizes hacking DRM to make mixes and mashups for personal and educational use, and re-asserts that just because a device can break copyright, as long as it has legal uses, the device and the device makers cannot be held responsible for criminal uses.

I say it looks good to me, but I don't have a whole lot of experience reading these things, and really wish there was a ready made plain language translation.

I read about this due to one of my newer rss feeds - the US Copyright office's copyright legislation page. The copyright office, a division of the LOC, has really sexed up their website - slick, clean, and useful.

Cyber School Day

Queen Anne's School, a prep school in Maryland has a system in place so that if school is cancelled because of inclement weather, every student and teacher logs on to the internet and they have Cyber School. The headmaster talked about IM, and they seem to have a really serious and involved Virtual School system. And they've been doing this for 7 years.

There has been some talk of late amongst state level administrators about trying to plan for the possibilities of epidemics - bird flu being the inspiration behind these conversations - and trying to deal with what can be done if school needs to shut down for months at a time. This *could* be done, but there are about a gazillion steps between us and Queen Anne's School's readiness.

Heard on NPR (only 3 minutes)

my favorite quote - "As headmaster, I can tell you that I know more about what goes on and can really validate the worthwhile nature of it on a cyber school day than I can when they're on campus."

Library Ninjas

I love the short sweetness (and mad styling) of this video - books aren't always better, but really, with questions like this, they are often faster. It's about choosing the right source for the right time - info literacy, yo.

Hillary Clinton in Dover, NH

I'm a YouTuber now - I went to see Hillary speak at a nearby high school and it suddenly occurred to me I could do this with the digital camera I was carrying.

Some disparate thoughts: I think these came out pretty well for a little digital camera, and I suddenly am understanding where a lot of the YouTube videos are coming from. Sorry I was slow on the recording, and I was very sad when the sd card ran out of memory when Hillary was talking about her gay rights stance. Living in NH means I get to be a spoiled voter for the next year (after primaries the two candidates won't come back) and now that I've realized I can do this, I hope to do this more. Not being originally from NH means I appreciate how spoiled I am and how not normal it is to be able to see all of the candidates multiple times. This is blasphemy up here and I may be drawn and quartered for it, but I do think it is ridiculous that this little white NE state has so much say.

And on Hillary: I am excited for her to be running. I think Obama is enormously appealing, but has some experience to put on - like a lot of other people, I'd love to see him as her vp candidate. What impressed me most about her talk yesterday was the way she engaged the audience in complexities. When asked about how she views universal health care coverage actually happening, she talked about several options and talked about needing to decide as a nation. She took several audience polls (informal hand-raising) about what the audience wanted to see - and then, and this was really amazing - pointed out that what the audience said they wanted from one question to the next was contradictory - in other words, she is willing to say that it is going to take dialog, and there are no easy answers. Another questioner asked her why she wouldn't apologize for previously voting for the war in Iraq. To which she responded (paraphrasing here) that she takes responsibility for her vote, and that she voted to the best of her ability and knowledge at the time, and if it was that important to a voter to have someone reneg on their vote, there were other candidates. Other candidates!!! It takes a gutsy politician to basically say, look, if you don't get it, go vote for someone else. I was stunned, and I really respect her for not pandering.

This choppy video was Hillary's response to a question on DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) and might she consider repealing it. Her answer didn't address repealing it, and I have no indication that she would try - she is fairly conservative and middle of the road on gay issues. This at times very much bothers me - but there aren't any viable candidates with better positions on this issue, so I hope people keep asking the question, I hope we can change the mainstream mind.



This was in response to a question about why Hillary is choosing to vote for funding for the war, when she is against the war and other politicians are saying we shouldn't fund it:

training

I seem to gave gone all YouTube happy, and mad apologies for those who read at work and are blocked from the content



Although this is a joke, the underlying message is very real - all new things, as simple as they seem to ITpeople/the implementers/whomever, require some explanation or training - sometimes they require intensive explanation and intensive training, and that depends more on the user than on the new thing.