The Sassy Librarian: American Library Association

American Library Association

Showing posts with label American Library Association. Show all posts

A portion of our board games collection.

A few months ago I read the American Libraries Association announcement that Saturday, November 3rd was International Games Day, and it made a significant enough impression that I wrote it in my Google calendar and contacted the new (and very collaborative) Director of Student Activities to see what he thought. This just screamed "ready made library program" to me since, hey, I was prescient enough to have the Wii and a ton of board games. Would the kids go for it?

Heck, yeah, they did and I'm sure a big piece of the adolescent welcome those games received was due to the fact that my students are mentally fried - we have one more week of class prior to fall term exam week and this week was only three days long because of us being shut down for Hurricane Sandy. While most of our day student families escaped personal injury, there was still a ton of cleanup with some people having days without power. People who don't work at a school always think that it must be cushy to have days off, but I've got news for them - when it's not a planned vacation day, you end up doing five days of work in those three days of school (this is true for both students and faculty!).

Pictionary, and its high-octane sister, Cranium are popular.

So board games on a Friday afternoon were just what the doctor ordered for these overtaxed synapses; my kids leaped on the games like starving wolves when the final period concluded and they saw the boxes and the Wii all set up in one of my classrooms (playing until after 6 pm).

First to go was Monopoly, which ended up being an eight-person extravaganza complete with good-natured smack talk! Pictionary and Scrabble were next, my Wii controllers were snatched up for a waterboarding fiesta, and the noisy rustle of Boggle (with a lot of laughing) ensued in the corner. My new favorite game, Quelph, was purchased by the Activities Director (be sure you have a high embarrassment threshold prior to playing this one!

Over 45 kids ended up relaxing over games in one form or another, and it was one of the easiest programs I ever administered. No food, no direction on my part, just friendly encouragement to the kids and the occasional walk around to take a picture or two. Minor effort on my part and over 10% of my student population entertained.

One startling surprise was that the Activities Director, genius that he is, also picked up a 550-piece jigsaw puzzle and it was a HUGE hit. Kids were talking about having a puzzle club since they loved sitting and working together on different portions, high-fiving and cheering when one of them saw a way to fit sections together. I'm wondering if the best collaboration would be for libraries in a given county or consortium to each buy four or five puzzles (the 500+ pieces ones can be found for under $10 online and at places like Kmart or toy stores) and then rotate them around. Garage sale divas could probably find amazing bargains, but I'd always worry that there would be pieces missing - maybe if you could find unopened boxes?

In reflection, there is no way I won't be doing Games Day, and more frequently than once a year. This provided a relaxing, cheap way for my library to use resources it had already and de-stress my student population. A perfect ending to a rough week!

It's only appropriate that with Banned Books Week having begun today, that I should be blogging about "dangerous" books. Banned Books Week, which always happens in late September, is a joint effort of the American Library Association and other concerned organizations, which come together to heighten public awareness of the regular efforts of some individuals to take books they don't like off the shelf of libraries and bookstores everywhere. Young adult and children's librarians get particularly hopped up about this as most objections, which when formally filed are known as challenges, are aimed at the removal of books marketed to young people. I think the majority of librarians, like myself, feel that parents are welcome to choose materials that reflect their families beliefs and values and restrict what their children read (even though we cringe a little when they do it), but that no person has the right to restrict what someone else's child can read.

We should all be thanking our lucky stars that more book banning parents haven't read Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, because they would undoubtedly have given birth to several litters of kittens by page 40. The novel centers on its hip protagonist, Marcus, who cuts school and circumvents the electronic barriers in his way in order to play games and engage in playful hacks with his equally savvy friends. But one afternoon as he gallivants around San Francisco with his buddies, disaster hits in the form of a terrorist explosion. In the ensuing panic Marcus and his friends are picked up by Homeland Security and taken to an undisclosed location to be questioned. The kids are treated as dangerous criminals with three of the four released under the threat that they will be watched and are not to tell anyone what transpired.

Each of kids, mourning the loss of their missing friend who they assume has died, deals with the event differently, but Marcus is absolutely enraged at being treated this way and decides to highlight to the world exactly how Homeland Security isn't making anyone safer by the measures imposed after the attack in San Francisco. Hacking his giveaway Xbox, Marcus creates Xnet, a secure community of savvy technology users who are happy to disseminate and share the information he publishes about how to undermine and get around the government's tracking devices and information gathering programs.

This book totally kicked my butt. The characters are well-drawn and the technology discussed in the most knowledgeable way (if we don't have it already, it's in the works, like ParanoidLinux). The novel is a manifesto to what can happen when a government abuses the freedom of its citizens, hence the title which makes a direct reference to the "Big Brother" in George Orwell's 1984. There is a ton of technology details however so that even avid readers of technology-centered nonfiction would find enough to keep them thinking, whether its Bayesian probability to explain arrest methodology or RFID hacking.

An unexpected but very welcome bonus to this excellent novel is the fountain of informative afterwords that follow the end of the text. Bruce Schneier, a security systems expert, and Andrew Huang, the guy who literally wrote the book on Hacking Your Xbox, both put in their two cents about the technology in the book and encourage readers to experiment with technology and challenge themselves. If you didn't know any better, you'd swear the book was a brilliant plant for engineering and computer science programs all over the country. Doctorow offers in his addendum a diverse collection of books, websites, and white papers that bring together many of themes in his book, including copyright and digital rights management issues. I was so happy to see FreeCulture.org and Creative Commons since those are both resources we push hard in our information literacy curriculum. Big surprise Doctorow is always being featured at library conventions. I used this section to some serious collection development work in my 000s and 600s. Thanks, Cory!

I guess I'm not that worried about the book banners. I think the majority of adults would shut the book when Marcus starts in about LARPing and lapses into techspeak while a bunch of other people would totally agree with his message. After all, Doctorow's message is the same as this year's Banned Books Week - Think for Yourself and Let Others Do the Same. I'm going to be checking out his other science fiction books. I think I found myself a new favorite author.

Risky Business: Taking and Managing Risks in Library Services for Teens

Sometimes it's great to read a professional book and realize you don't need it. It's not to say that I didn't get plenty out of my recent read of Risky Business: Taking and Managing Risks in Library Services for Teens by Linda W. Braun, Hillias J. Martin, and Connie Urquhart, but I also spent a lot of time thanking my lucky stars that I work at a school that supports libraries and understands the role they play in the lives of teens.

I wish I could say I understood what people where so afraid of - I've often sat next to another librarian on the Gale bus at ALA Midwinter or Annual and when you get around to the "so, what kind of library do you work in?" one in a dozen will be some academic or reference librarian working with a more mature population who gasps upon the news that I work primarily with teens, "Oh! I could NEVER do that. I can barely handle one at home!"

My first thought is what fly wing-pulling, future serial killer do they have at home? It's rare I meet a teenager that I can't talk to or be willing to at least be in the same room assisting them for an extended period of time. Most of them I truly love and I want to create collections, give instruction, and do programming that makes them happy and healthy and more successful at what they try and do each day. But for those librarians who find there is a difference between what they know they should be doing versus what they are currently doing, this book will definitely help with strategies and ideas to align those two concepts together.

Covering a nice spectrum, chapters include general ones about risk taking and teens in general, collection development, author perspectives on risk (one of my favorite chapters), programming, technology, dealing with administrators and colleagues, career advice, and teen risky behavior (with a terrific focus on the SADD study from 2004 and positive risk taking). These chapters are written in a forthright, comfortable style and unlike so many professional books where you feel you might be give a pop quiz later because they are so academic and dense, I whipped through this volume in a couple of hours and enjoyed every minute.

Can I also give a shout out to the long neglected and never appreciated appendix? I find some of my favorite professional books are the ones where I drool a little over the supplemental material, whether it's a beefy bibliography or some great additional essay and Risky Business does not disappoint. The bibliography is good, but the real value added comes from the two questionnaires librarians can use to determine their library's risk history and also to figure out if a certain risk might be worth taking. My hands-down favorite section though was undoubtedly Appendix F which has the collection of YALSA white papers. Where have these been hiding? There are some really great manifestos on various topics, from YA Literature to LIS education, that have really got my brain cogs turning.

Teens, Technology, and Literacy; Or, Why Bad Grammar Isn't Always Bad

Last but not least, we can wallow in the credentials of our authors. Linda Braun, technology goddess and YALSA-past president, actually came and did a wonderful training at my high school despite cranky weather gods and I've always enjoyed many of her books - Teens, Technology, and Literacy; Or, Why Bad Grammar Isn't Always Bad, Introducing the Internet to Young Learners: Ready-To-Go Activities and Lesson Plans, Hooking Teens With the Net, and Listen Up! Podcasting for Schools and Libraries.

Serving Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Teens: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians

Hillias J. Martin, an adjunct professor at Queens College and Pratt Institute, wrote a recent "must-read" for every librarian - Serving Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning Teens: A How-to-Do-It Manual for Libraries. Obviously many librarians are in a position of feeling that promoting GLBTQ literature (which make great endcap displays - I'm just saying) is a road to a parent challenge or administrator heart attack so the chapter on collection development and risk taking might give a few much-needed strategies in this area. Librarians are currently dealing with the aftermath of the the librarian in New Jersey who ordered the removal of a queer youth anthology after calling it "porn". It's a good reminder for me that librarians aren't all the same in terms of our progressive and vigilant attitude toward serving all our patrons but that we are often as different in belief and perspective as the rest of America. It's doesn't make me less disappointed and angry, but it's quite a wake-up call. Kudos to the many teens and adults who have been vocal in their objection to this face slap to teen librarians everywhere who recognize that censorship is often the symptom of the disease of discrimination and should be fought whenever possible.

Connie Urquhart, teen services coordinator for the Fresno County Public Library System, is known to many active members of YALSA since she's been on lots of committees and crops up with happy regularity as an author on the YALSA blog. This is her first book, but hopefully not her last.

Any criticisms of the book? The only thing I wish I had seen (maybe in another wonderful appendix!) would have been a bibliography of more general books on risk, both from a psychological and a business perspective. I often think that as librarians we don't tap into literature from other disciplines that would help inform us of different lenses through which we can view (and hopefully solve) our challenges. But that's pretty nitpicky. I would recommend this book to any teen librarian and definitely for inclusion in the library science curricula - let's get the conversation about risk started BEFORE librarians have to face it!!