What is the title of that book about that thing?

In library school, they tell you that the easiest kinds of reference questions are “known item” questions. This means the patron knows the exact book (or whatever it is) that they want and they just need your help finding it. As it turns out, today we did a known-item search that was pretty hard. In fact, Lisa and I were both working on it for the better part of half an hour. This was the basic request: “It’s a book about a kid and no one can tell if she’s a boy or a girl, so she gets thrown in a river or something. And it’s got a scary-looking cover.” Well we tried googling lots of different search terms, but we got nowhere. I finally found the book by going to the KCLS catalog and searching “gender identity.” Some thoughtful reader had tagged it as such. Let’s all take a minute and be thankful for social tagging.

By the way, the book was What Happened to Lani Garver.

Today I also did the 5th grade booktalks again. To see what I recommended, you can click here. Or, if you ever find yourself in the Bush School library, you can check out the display under the sign “Award Winners” and all the books are right there. Actually, a couple of them got checked out pretty fast, so they won’t be there. But I made a copy of the list and left it on the table if you want to write titles down and find the books at the public library.

Since I’ll be doing these booktalks regularly, I started to work on my next set of booktalks, too. I’m currently reading The City of Ember by Jeanne DePrau to see if it makes the list.

I entered the grades for the 3rd grade worksheets, too. And I put up more trivia questions on the bulletin board. It was a good day!

Let’s Get Trivial

Today I devoted most of the day to taking down the old bulletin board display and putting up my new display: Let’s Get Trivial.Here’s a little explanation for the trivia theme: In my classes at UW, we’re taught to be guided by what patrons want and need. So, I did a little informal poll of students re what they’d like to see on the board. I got such a wide variety of answers (Animals! Star Wars! Theatre!) I decided to pick a general theme that would address lots of different areas. I also wanted the board to be interactive, so I picked a theme that would allow the students to participate by testing their knowledge. I also thought it would be a good board to have up for awhile because it’s easy to take questions down and put new ones up.In order that the display would support the collection, I got all my questions from facts in books in the collection and then made a display of those books. When I remember to bring a camera to school, I’ll post pictures of the bulletin board and my book displays. Here are some pictures:

I did some readers’ advisory today, too. More and more fifth graders are coming to the library for award winning books (because they have to read two during the month of February), so I pulled more books for the display and helped a few students pick something to try. Today I recommended:

• A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer
• Dicey’s Song by Cynthia Voigt
• Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli
• Everything on a Waffle by Polly Horvath

All excellent books!