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Here’s an article from the LA Times about adults enjoying reading YA literature. Those of us closely associated with YA literature have always known how wonderful it is, and how we are now in an era of unprecedentedly good YA books, so it’s wonderful that the rest of the world is discovering the joys of crossover literature!

Cheryl and Rebecca attended the PNAIS Librarians conference on Friday at the beautiful Annie Wright School in Tacoma. (Annie Wright was founded in 1884, making it one of (maybe the) oldest independent school in the area, and its main building is neoclassical brick with Tudor-style panelling and beams.) Cheryl helped to plan and organize the conference, and deserves many kudos for how well it went and how interesting the speakers were!

We started off with a keynote address by Dr. David Loertscher, a giant in the field of library science and author of many standard textbooks in the field. His talk was entitled “From School Library to Learning Commons: Evolution or Revolution?” He presented an emerging vision for school libraries in both physical and virtual space. Physically he argued for the library to become a place for active learning, experimentation, construction, exhibiting, and discovery. All furniture should be on wheels so the space could be configured to suit every activity. I think not everyone in the room was on board with this suggestion, though it would certainly make for a dynamic space!

In virtual space, Loertscher advocates that libraries become more like Web 2.0—the contributory web—with lots of input and participation from the school community. Many of us have already taken steps along this road, and will continue to do so. Overlake, for example, has the Destiny catalog system, which allows students to make personal lists of books, to review books, and to recommend books to friends. I also run a wiki with a book group in which the main activity is to contribute to the wiki, and other club activities that involve web participation. Overlake teachers also do many, many Web 2.0 based activities, so I think we are well on that road!

Following the keynote address, the group broke into two sessions, and I attended the session on “Transforming Boys Into Lifelong Readers” with John Martin. Martin founded boysread.org, whose mission reflects the title of his presentation. Martin talked about how to get boys more excited about reading by creating book “tribes” instead of clubs. On the website, tribes are described as: “informal reading circles for pleasure and non-deterministic learning. They’re very similar to book clubs. Tribes are a great opportunity to bond with boys.  A Tribe Leader acts as a mentor and facilitator for the Tribe. Parents, teachers, librarians, booksellers, coaches, and other community outreach programs and services organize Tribes.” Martin also offered lots of book recommendations, and while you’ll be glad to hear that Overlake had many of them, I did write down several new ones to add to our collection. We are always interested in having boys read more, and do have reading activities specifically geared to boys. (Feel free to contact me, Rebecca Moore rmoore@overlake.org, for more information!)

For our second breakout session I attended “The New Attention Economy: Implications for Libraries of the Future” presented by our very own Tom Frizelle, the Tech Director at Overlake. Tom is doctoral candidate in Education with a specialization in Educational Communication & Technology at the University of Washington, and part of his dissertation concerns the attention economy. In today’s world, with our glut of information, what’s really at a premium is our attention, and we need to know how to spend our own, how to help students learn to spend theirs, and how to attract students’ attention to library programs. Building on some of Dr. Loertscher’s topics, Tom focused on how libraries can use Web 2.0 applications and concepts to create more user interaction with libraries. He also facilitated a discussion of some of the efforts we were already making, such as the (very amateur!) podcasts I’ve been working on for a student book group and the Faculty Favorites list, and the wiki I’m working on with some students.

(I would link the wiki, but it’s a work in progress and we’re not ready for public viewing yet! If you want to see a great student wiki, check out the one David Bennett’s students created for their study of Africa. The link takes you to the wiki for one of the five sections; go to David’s main website and look at the bottom of the lefthand frame for links to the other sections.).

Following lunch, we had a session featuring a series of speed-round-table-discussions. Six discussion topics were available, and attendees chose three to attend for fifteen minutes each. I attended  the round tables on “Book Promotion Ideas” (and shared our experience with Battle of the Books), “Wikipedia: Friend or Foe?”, and “Learning Commons Follow-Up: How Does This/Could This Look in Our Schools?” I’m not sure how much I learned in the short time, but it was an interesting experiment!

We finished up the day with an inspirational talk from local author Nancy Rawles entitled: “At Home in a World of Ideas: The Library as Sanctuary.” Librarians love to hear stories of how libraries and books have made peoples’ lives better, so Rawles was a perfect presenter for us and the perfect ending to a day full of challenging and intriguing ideas about school libraries.

Ever seen those Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbooks? Well, we wrote one for Overlake!

Check out the ‘Extreme Edition’ if you want to find out what to do if a flying elephant lands on the Fifth Grade Center, or if the storm water drainage pond turns into a bubbling pool of liquid hydrogen, threatening the local animal population. Check out the regular edition if you realize you went to school in slippers and you don’t have other shoes or you forget where your backpack is.

Here’s an interesting article in a blog all about ebooks; this entry explains the drawbacks of the ebook licensing-rather-than-owning model.

Check out the new materials received in the Library in February.

This amazing TED lecture about manipulatable computer blocks called ’siftables’ demonstrates how computer use continues to change as ideas of what a computer is and how it should function change.

A great author line up continues for Seattle Arts & Lectures 2009/2010 Season: Michael Chabon (3/9), Linda Gregg (3/25), Arundhati Roy (3/29) and Benefit Dinner with Timothy Egan (3/24).

Also, Links to Seattle Public Library’s listing of author events and King County Library’s author events.

This is a great, short article including seven valuable tips for students writing research papers. Although aimed at college students, considering the work our students do and the resources available through our library, this article has lots of useful information for them as well.

Thanks again to Joyce Valenza’s blog for locating this article!

This new search directory looks very useful. It consists of human-evaluated sites organized by subject. Of particular interest to our students and teachers will probably be the subject-oriented web guides. One of the biggest problems of using Internet sources is reliability, so it’s great to have access to pre-evaluated websites!

This is just fun; a middle school in Florida made this video to encourage reading, inspired by a flash mob dance on Oprah.