Cataloging and Observing

Today Jody brought in one of my all-time favorite picture books: Toot & Puddle. She bought it for the library’s collection over the weekend and suggested this would be the perfect opportunity for me to see how new books are cataloged and added to the system at Bush. And she was right. I mean, who knows? I could be running a library all by myself in the future without a library technician’s help and expertise.

Thankfully, the Bush library has a wonderful library technician in Lindi Wood:

She gave me the rundown of everything she does and I was amazed. She touches every book in the collection! She organizes the parent volunteers! She provides AV support for the entire staff! In my School Library Media Management class we’ve been talking about making ourselves integral to the school and Lindi definitely has that down.

The Bush library has such a generous budget that new books are added to the collection all the time. Lindi buys MARC records that are seamlessly entered into the Bush catalog, but she also tweaks the subject headings to enhance findability. This is one of the great things about small libraries–you have the opportunity to really tailor your services to your users. For example, during my time with Lindi, Lisa Keller stopped in to ask for Lindi’s help in finding a hip hop video. Lindi discovered the video was cataloged only as “hip-hop” with a hyphen, so you couldn’t find it if you didn’t use a hyphen in your search term. So Lindy added “hip hop” no hyphen entry right on the spot. This may seem like a small thing, but coming from a huge system (UW Libraries) I’ve seen it take weeks for a catalog record to be corrected when it had serious errors. So it’s refreshing to see how painless things can be in a smaller system.

After observing the cataloging process, I worked with Jody to plan our Wednesday classes. I’d spent some time at home looking over the 3rd graders worksheets and it seemed like they were actually getting it, so we’ll just spend a little more time on it on Wednesday and then start our Reader’s Theatre project. I’m going to read Toot & Puddle to the 2nd graders and we’ll do a postcard project after that to tie in with the story.

At 11:00 Lisa invited me to observe her doing book talks for the 9th grade classes. It was a great opportunity for me to see a pro in action, and especially helpful considering I’m doing the 5th grade book talks on Fridays. Lisa promoted 10 books, of which the 9th graders have to choose one to read for a novel project. I was surprised a the difficulty of some of these books–the 14-year-olds at Bush are very strong readers, but I’d still expect to see a few YA novels offered. This seems to be an issue we run into from time to time: Adult Literature (the canon, etc.) vs. young adult literature (books written specifically for teens). Bush is an academically rigorous school, but it seems like there should still be a place for YA lit in the 6th through 10th grade curricula.

In other news, we found out that Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. In true Pratchett style, he called the ordeal “an embuggerance.” You can read about it here.

Visiting Grade Five

I got to Bush earlier than usual today so I could visit the Fifth Grade classes at 8:30 and tell them about those Batchelder books I’ve been reading. I was a little nervous, and I felt like I wasn’t really connecting with my audience. But afterwards I asked one of the teachers who observed me how she thought it went and she told me I did a great job. I still think I can improve, and I’m encouraged by the compliment. When I got back to the library I made a display of the Batchelder books so the kids will be able to find them if they want to check them out. We’ll see!

Now I’m working on my lesson for the Third Graders. I’ll point you to the documents I’m working on here and here.

It’s very quiet in the libray today.