A Look at My Shelves

Okay. Things may be getting out of hand.

About 10 down, 80ish to go.

This is a look of a few of the things I currently have checked out from the library. It’s the beginning of a new semester, so free time is at a premium. The DVDs and CDs have gone back to the library, (hopefully there will be some time for them again soon!) and now, my shelves are filled with a near endless amount of teen literature and material on Library 2.0 and participatory service.

This semester, I am entering the brave new world of Young Adult Materials–something I’m in great need of exploring and can’t wait to add to my repertoire–and diving back into the world of technology in Library 2.0 with my Introduction to LIS professor Michael Stephens.

It’ll be an adventure, that’s for sure.  Here’s to a great semester!

Oh, and because it is just so darn cool, you can take a look here at my Library 2.0 class website

 

Banned Books Week

It’s Banned Books Week!  Each year, in the last week of September, libraries sponsor this event to celebrate our freedom to read and access information.  In the face of efforts to censor information, it is the library’s duty to provide equitable access to materials–so let’s take advantage of it!  Ask your local library about any events they might have going on.

Catcher in the Rye

ALA has a lot of great lists and statistics, and I just wanted to take the time to highlight a few things.   I had always wondered if there was a definitive list of the most challenged books out there, and how many I had read.  Since the ALA has only been tracking these statistics since 1990, there is no complete “all-time” list.  One list that is considered quite definitive is The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books 1990-1999.  I was actually surprised that I’d only read 15 of these.  Shirking my reading responsibilities!  Since many books’ histories are so entwined with censorship, the ALA has also highlighted the 42 books which appear on the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century that have been challenged.  That’s almost half of the books that are considered to be the greatest of our time!  (The complete list is here, for those who are interested.)

How many of these books have you read?  How many do you want to read?  Ever wonder what all the fuss is about?  In honor of Banned Books Week, pick one up!  I’ve got a few of these sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read, and I think this might be the perfect opportunity to get one started.

Also, in my Readers Advisory class over the summer, I wrote a paper on the social history of The Catcher in the Rye.  You can check that out here or in my portfolio.

 

Viewers Advisory

I find Audio/Visual Services in public libraries fascinating.  A few posts back, I was talking about different ways libraries could use You Tube to its advantage.  An idea crossed my mind, but knowing my own experience, I quickly dismissed it.  The idea was possibly using You Tube to search for a film using keywords, much like many readers advisory services out there.  Searching on You Tube, however, is difficult, unwieldy, and many times, completely futile.

Enter Anyclip.

Anyclip is a new service that was introduced at the TechCrunch50 conference a few weeks ago.  Basically, these developers have created a movie clip search engine, which will allow users to “find any moment from any film, instantly.”  Imagine the possibilities.  A library patron approaches the desk and is trying to find a movie.  She can’t remember the title, but she thinks she remembers an actor’s name and can describe a scene.  I get these kinds of questions from friends all the time:  “You know that movie?  A surfer kid has a pizza delivered to class, and the guy from My Favorite Martian is the teacher.  What is that movie?”  If you didn’t know off hand, you could simply enter a few of these keywords into Anyclip, and voila–Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Right now, the site seems to be targeting movie lovers, studios, and the online film community, but this is a service that could really prove its value for libraries.  The site is in testing right now, and I am currently in the queue to try it out.  I for one, can’t wait.  Read more over at Slashfilm here, and watch their demo here.

 

And for my first trick….

I’m hoping that this blog can also act as a sort of portfolio of my work during my time at Dominican.  In the Summer of 2009, I took LIS 763 Readers Advisory with Joyce Saricks–she literally wrote the book on the subject (a lot of them actually!).  Over the course of the semester, we discussed countless resources used for exploring both fiction and non-fiction, but my favorite kind of tool was one that  we were actually able to create on our own.

Reading maps are a fantastic tool for delving into and opening up a single particular work.  By creating a reading map, we can turn the experience of reading a book into something much more–a whole-library, multimedia, interactive experience.  For my reading map, I chose Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel The Hours.  I tried to think of everything about this book that one would want to investigate, and from those ideas, I built a website filled with links, images, audio, and video.

You can take a look at my reading map here.

To read more about reading maps, see Neal Wyatt’s Library Journal article here.