Making My Library Friendly for Animal Books, part 2

Of course, this series of posts should really be called “Making the Animal Section Useful”!  My students are wondering if this is a lesson in how you have to “tear up” the library to put it back together in a new way. (yes)

Books everywhere during the move!

Pulling the animal shelving range out meant switching two shelving ranges, re-shelving the whole nonfiction section (Pollyanna Librarian – yay, a weeding opportunity!) and going home aching each day.

Getting ready to shift all the books.

4th and 5th grade helpers were a huge help. This is the time of year when my adult volunteers start to dry up, so it was great to have students pitch in. Books got new labels, clear label covers and then colored indicator label covers.

Habitat books waiting for green label covers. My collection is so small that it’s easy to spot and pull the habitats you need.

I did have a few moments of doubt about a few species. I put hippos in land animals even though my childhood safety lessons from Kenya included “Stay away from the vicious river-dwellers!”. The final arrangement will turn my whole animal section into a barely-classified browsing section, but that’s what I want.

Another example of a book about more than one animal. The + is the symbol for >1 species.

 

Making My Library Friendly for Animal Books, part 1

Books about animals are super popular at my library, but finding them has been hard and putting them back has been a pain. I decided to plan for a new shelving approach, in order to help my users.

Badgers and Marten books in between Seal books.

I’m leaving the Dewey number codes on the spines and will continue to add them to new books. Did you notice I don’t say “call numbers”? I’ve switched to saying “location codes”, because trying to tell a 2nd grader that “sometimes call numbers don’t have any numbers in them” makes me feel like the Sisyphean librarian!

My new plan is to add extra labels and colored label protectors to each book. I decided to have 3 main divisions: Land (green label covers), Water (blue label covers) and Birds (purple label covers). Within Land, I will also have a category called ALL – to hold books which contain many different species, as well as a category called HABITATS, and a category labeled BEHAVIORS. Within these categories, books can be put back on the shelf in any order (thanks to having a small collection).

Within LAND, the species will be in alphabetical order and now 4th and 5th graders (heck even some 2nd graders) will be able to re-shelve books. Any book which has more than one species will have the animal name and a big bold + to indicate more species. So, for example, books on big cats will either be labeled LIONS + or TIGERS +, according to which big cat predominates.

After all the labeling is finished, I’ll be ready to relocate and move the shelving range. The animal section will be perpendicular to the rest of the nonfiction, very close to the popular graphic novel shelving and with lots of space around it for browsers.

This picture was taken soon after I started – now the table is covered with piles!

Buying Craft Books – keep an eye on great adult titles!

Craft a Day by Sarah Goldschadt

 

My students are always looking for fun new craft books, and so am I! I’ve started noticing that the titles I find in the adult craft section are often just right for upper elementary and more rich and enticing than the standard 32 page juvenile fare.

For example, look at this sweet book from Sarah Goldschadt. Each week has a theme and the image is used in several different crafts: felt fox finger puppet, fox card, fox cupcake topper – you get the idea. Nothing looked too hard for my crafty crew and I bet it will inspire them to take some of their own drawings and try them out in different crafts : )

Check out the index. I’m seeing visual indexes like this a lot lately in craft books. It makes for a fun and easy finding tool. My students roll their eyes when I call the index their BFF = best finding friend, but they have to agree it’s a big help in any nonfiction book!

From an email conversation about public domain books, BYOD and more

Ongoing conversations in email with several librarians, admin…. One email mentioned a speaker who emphasized the need to make sure a teacher’s knowledge base doesn’t limit a child’s futures….Also, the suggestion comes up that we need to offer more public domain titles (nothing wrong with that, we’re lucky to have public domain titles!) but it’s complicated when you’re talking about young readers, hence my reply. PS Donate to the Internet Archive, they’re saving some real treasures!

Jack and the Giant Killer, courtesy Internet Archive

Public domain offers very little to most K-5 readers. In elementary, we all have a few fans of old and classic (and old and not classic), but for the most part, the public domain titles come from the era before books for young readers exploded in availability, diversity and popularity….

Here is where I get most of mine, to recommend to students, because the Internet Archive has some of the better illustration and format choices:
http://archive.org/details/iacl
Hey, elementary librarians, notice the top 5 recent downloads and ask yourself how your fairy tales and Wizard of Oz titles are circulating compared to titles published in the last 5 years?
I love the Wizard of Oz series and enjoy a lot of the books in public domain, but when it comes to free choice reading and the interests of the MAJORITY of K-5 readers, classics and old titles will never be more than a small (if not tiny) part of our collections.

In secondary, any amount of choice will end up looking good, since many teachers’ ideas of  canonical lit titles is limited. That’s probably more true in HS – but please, sec lib’s, chime in! If you’re seeing the English teachers offer more choice in reading, I’d love to hear : )

As for what the speaker you heard said (…re not wanting his child’s learning to be limited to what the teacher already knows…), if my child’s teachers are reading widely and especially in current professional literature, they know a LOT! And have an eye on what’s changing, where the reader’s and publisher’s activities are headed… keyword IF. The more we as librarians can help teachers with information on many fronts, the better. The speaker you heard clearly has a stereotypical view of teachers, and his notion of someone whose knowledge base is frozen in the past insults the kind of teachers and librarians I admire.

The “which device” talk is rapidly going away, since so many offerings are aimed at every possible platform, but the need is to give our students lots of chances to read on a variety of devices and learn the key skills:
Finding what appeals to them,
Knowing where to look,
Evaluating informational text,
Maximizing their time and money…

So what hold us up from BYOD in K-5? Permission slips for parents? Getting clear with teachers about what it will look like? The equity issue? Or maybe I should say BYOD in gr 3 –5, since they’ve got more self-control and ability to keep up with their stuff? Anybody planning for BYOD this fall?

SXSWedu Presentation

Manager Meredith of Gordon Ave Branch Library Made a Classic Display

Tara Books and Simms Taback

Tara Books is an independent publisher in South India. You know how you find things and then re-find them? I remember reading about this publisher a few years ago, and then today I was admiring this octopus image and it led me back to Tara Books.

Octopus from Waterlife

This octopus is in BibliOdyssey’s Flickr stream. The BibliOdyssey blog is a treasure trove of ephemera and digitized visual delights from antiquity. The octopus is from one of Tara’s books called Waterlife and this post describes both Waterlife and I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tale. Both look absolutely wonderful, the kind of folk art books that appeal to children and make their parents (and librarians!) linger.

From Tara’s site, here is an article about Waterlife: Waterlife: A Fluid Tradition.

Waterlife by Rambharos Jha

The author, Rambharos Jha: “….Tara showed me various aquatic animals on the computer, animals I had never seen in nature such as whales and lobsters.  They asked me how I would draw them.  I said I would draw them as I draw everything else:  by making it part of my imagination.”

Tara made a video of the other book I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail and it is a lovely look at a book I can’t wait to order for my library:

Click to watch on youtube

I could see helping students make their own versions. We’d start with a short poem, then storyboard the placement of words, pictures and cut-outs. What would it be like to approach this as an ebook template? Perhaps 5th graders could plan for links and reveals?

  I couldn’t help but remember that Simms Taback died this year. His book Joseph Had a Little Overcoat won the Caldecott Medal in 1977 and it takes a Yiddish folk song and makes it into a richly detailed story of thrift and community. Children love the holes in the pages that get smaller as each coat remnant is cut. And the message, “You can always make something out of nothing!” is a good one.

My favorite video made from his book is this one by Anya Medvid, an award-winning graphic designer:

Video by Anya Medvid