Day 4

OK, according to Linda, the Evergreen consortium is made up of 90 small/medium libraries. I checked out the website and it says it is made up of "public, school and institutional libraries located throughout Indiana" but I didn's see any schools or institutions (colleges?) on the list. Also "Patrons of member libraries can use their Evergreen Indiana library card to view the catalogs and borrow materials from the other member libraries."  I tried to post this as a comment under day one but couldn't get it to work.

Today I helped with another outreach program - this time to the Purdue Village Daycare.  I pulled books and went along for the read-aloud.  The rest of the day, I worked in Children's.  I finished ther NF project and the spider craft preparation, did some shelf reading, and worked the SRC table.  Got to sit & talk with the Children's director for a while- which was nice.  She told me about how far in advance she plans and preps for the craft programs and how she keeps a notebook with comments about what to change for the next year.  We also talked some about the teen reading program & how hard it is to get teens to come in and participate in programs.  They've had 3 Teen Librarians (only 10 hours/wk) over the last few years.  Apparently the last one didn't do much so when budget cuts had to be made, the position was  eliminated. 

I sign out at the information desk.  For some reason, there wasn't anyone working the desk and on my way out, a man walked up, so I asked if I could help.  He was looking for a "series of novels that came out fairly recently and were best sellers."  He didn't know titles or authors- I took a stab at the Stieg Larsson trilogy and that was it!  Well, didn't remember at the time how to spell Larsson and spelled it Larson; then tried the title -Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but figured out later that I spelled tattoo wrong (tatoo), so decided to take him to the mystery section and, thank goodness, we found an honor copy (paperback - no checkout); all the hardbacks were out.  Suggested he put holds on the others.  I was a little flustered about not being able to get the results I needed on the catalog......

A topic that's been on my mind-
I subscribe to the edWeb listserve and there was a lot of talk about filtering/censorship of Internet sites/tools at the ends of the school year- especially ones that have potential use in the classroom.  A comment was made by Rita Oates- a former tech ed director that we shouldn't be focusing on mass market tools but on what schools ARE using.  Here's the link to the post: http://www.edweb.net/.59bf7d40/0.  Anyway, she says we should use educational social networks instead of Facebook, GlogsterEDU instead of Glogster, etc.  Well, GLogster EDU costs money that schools don't have.  It seems to me the EDU versions should be free and the "mass market" versions should have the fee.  As for Facebook, she says that students don't want teachers coming into their social space with assignments but that isn't how most teachers would use it.  They create a course/library/guidance. etc. page and students join in.  Also, Facebook is where the students are.  They are not going to join some social learning network; that isn't cool.  I don't think it's good that Facebook captures data on users and resells it to advertisers though.  She mentions some networks that I wsan't aware of and plan to check out and definitely gives some food for thought.