ALA report: Fish4Info

I’m down in Anaheim, wrapping up a weekend of ALA attendance and trying to figure out how on earth I’m going to fit all the free posters and review copies I picked up into the little backpack I brought with me. It’s been an interesting few days. Highlights included meeting Sherman Alexie (who looks exactly as I imagined he would, based on his drawings in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian), hearing Barry Lyga, Kazu Kibuishi, and Holly Black speak in a panel about YA literature and graphic novels, and — best of all — attending a session on Fish4Ino.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had some qualms about Fish4Info, despite its glowing review in School Library Journal. Yesterday’s session definitely calmed those fears. The Fish folks have got me now, hook, line, and sinker. Yes, there’s still the little matter of Fish not yet being capable of displaying the shelf status of items, i.e. whether a particular book is available. But when I made my list of pros and cons for shifting our front-end catalog and website to a Drupal/Fish-powered site, that was really the only major downside I could come up with. Pros include:

- allows students to add book reviews and stars to individual items.
-seamless integration with library website
-allows for blog/website integration
-Amazon API displays book covers with search results
-open-source, thus highly customizable
-search interface is visually simple but functionally powerful

Here’s an example of a Fish4Info-powered library website. Pretty hot stuff, doncha think?

Should information always be free?

I like Wikipedia. I use it all the time. It’s where I go to look for fast facts on giant squid, or lists of all the songs Nick Cave has ever written. And I’m grateful to the squid and Nick Cave aficionados out there who contribute their knowledge to this resource. I also think it’s pretty neat that Britannica Online is planning on harnessing the power of an internet full of scholars and enthusiasts to enhance its own content (i.e. taking a page out of Wikipedia’s e-book).

And yet, Britannica’s new plan does raise some hackles for me. After all, Britannica — unlike Wikipedia– is a subscription site. Users pay for content; Britannica profits from their use. Thus allowing members of its “online community” to write and edit articles essentially amounts to Britannica’s earning money from unpaid experts. (Or at least, from self-proclaimed experts.) Shouldn’t users who contribute entire articles be entitled to at least some token form of remuneration beyond a mere byline?

tween books with GLBT characters, revisited

In a previous post I mentioned that I was looking for good books for the 8-12 age range that feature GLBT characters.  It’s been a tough hunt so far, since the vast majority of GLBT characters in children’s literature appear either in picture books (think And Tango Makes Three or King and King) or in young adult novels that are contain too much romantic or sexual content to be interesting or appropriate for the “tween” set.

I’ve found two so far.

In the first, Bruce Coville’s The Skull of Truth, Charlie Eggleston, somewhat of a compulsive liar, finds himself in the possession of a magical skull that compels those around it to tell only the truth.  While under the eponymous skull’s truth-telling spell, Charlie’s uncle Bennie, to whom he is very close, comes out to his family, explaining that his “roommate” Dave is actually his girlfriend.  Charlie is at first horrified, but as he digs himself out of some of the terrible quagmires both his lying and his truth-telling have caused him at school, he realizes that nothing has actually changed between himself and his uncle.

Nancy Garden’s The Case of the Stolen Scarab (the first book in the forthcoming Candlestone Inn series), features child-detectives Nikki and Travis, and their two moms, who Nikki cheerfully explains are life partners and adopted the siblings when they were babies.   While the word “lesbian” is never used, Garden makes the nature of Nikki and Travis’s moms’ relationship clear.   Through her down-to-earth descriptions of the family’s activities and interactions, Garden also makes clear that a two-mom family is no different than a mom-dad family.  The Taylor-Michaelson kids and their moms share stories, eat tuna sandwiches, argue about rules, and divide up chores just like pretty much any other happy family.

These are both great books.  But where are the others? Come on, publishers! Get to work!

LGBT books for tweens

This week I spent a lot of time trying to find some good chapter books for the “tween” set (i.e. ages 8 - 12) featuring LGBT characters. It’s not easy. There are plenty of great picture books with two-mommy families, gay dads, genderqueer dragons, etc., and there are oodles of fun but slightly too risqué YA novels that center on LGBT-related issues, but unfortunately, there’s still not much out there for younger kids. So far, the best we’ve been able to do in terms of LGBT fiction for kids who have moved beyond picture books is:

Boy Meets Boy, by David Levithan

So Hard to Say, by Alex Sanchez

Geography Club, by Brent Hartinger

The Order of the Poison Oak, by Brent Hartinger

Totally Joe, by James Howe

Not one of these books, however, is truly a tween read. They’re basically young adult novels without too much explicit sex. So while a 10-year old could read them without his parents throwing a fit, he probably wouldn’t get too much out of them, since they’re not really written for his age group.

I would love to purchase some books for younger students that include LGBT characters (and by include, I mean include prominently — not just incidentally or allusively), but I’m having a really tough time finding anything — anything at all. Help? Anyone?

on the hunt for a new ILS

Now that the school year’s winding down, I’m finally finding a little more time to worry about replacing Sagebrush, our current ILS (now owned by Follett), with software that actually does what we want it to do, and — ideally — doesn’t cost a bushel of money.

Some of the candidates thus far:

Library 4 Universal: Neither free nor open-source, and suffers from a really stupid name, but otherwise fairly impressive.  I like the suggested spelling feature (thank you for that, Google), and the search config option showing book covers is a big plus.  Big downside: no social features, like tagging, starring, or reviews.  Also no “similar books” feature.  So all things considered, not much of a step up from Sagebrush.  The only advantages, in fact, would be more reliable customer support (not overly important, actually, since my school has a few resident IT geniuses to help us out with software glitches) and a slightly improved OPAC.  And of course it doesn’t hurt that L4U will run on Windows Vista, since eventually the school is going to have to upgrade from XP.  Positive reviews from other school librarians currently using L4U are quite comforting, as well.

Koha and Evergreen are also possibilities.  The upside of both is that they’re open-source and free; the downside is that Koha like L4U, don’t offer the social or visual features I was looking for.  Evergreen does (I think), but I’m also concerned that implementing either one of these would be too complex and time-consuming for a small library with no dedicated IT department.

And then there’s Fish4Info, another open-source ILS and even more of an enigma than Koha or Evergreen.  Designed specifically for school libraries, Fish4Info is powering some really superb OPACS.  Unfortunately, the developers are hardly forthcoming with information on how to download and implement their software, and I hesitate to dive into a project that still has all the hallmarks of a beta.

So it looks like L4U may be our best bet.  I’m intrigued by the possibility of purchasing L4U and running it with a Scriblio overlay in order to achieve some of the social functions that Fish4Info handles so nicely.  This is definitely not something I have the tech-spertise to handle myself, but I’m hopeful that (ahem, hint, hint) some interested folks in the tech department might lend a hand with this job.

excellent intro to drupal

Damn, school vacation is good for my blog. It’s been a long time since I’ve had this much idle time to just sit around and read and write.

This morning, Ellyssa Kroski, who happens to work at one of my favorite university libraries, posted the answer to my geeky librarian prayers: a Slidecast of her Computers in Libraries presentation on Drupal.

So, now I’m one step closer to embarking upon my nefarious plan to kill my library’s crusty old OPAC and replace it with a truly integrated site complete with kid-friendly social features. I’m still pretty hazy on some key details (like, how exactly does the Marc record module work, on a practical level?), but I suspect that a couple days of futzing around with Drupal and Fish4Info — or something similar — should clarify most of those issues.

it’s as simple as one, two, three.

My 5 cents worth on the “guarding the borders” issue:

1) M.L.S. programs do not generate much in the way of prestige or alumni contributions for their universities, which in turn don’t fund their M.L.S. programs very heavily.

2) M.L.S. programs are consequently forced to accept as many tuition-paying students as they can in order to sustain their programs. Unfortunately, this means that many vastly underqualified students are accepted, just to make numbers. Believe me, I know this from personal experience: many of my colleagues in my supposedly graduate-level program at Queens could barely string a sentence together, let alone make heads or tails of something so simple as a MARC record. (As Caveat Lector writes, “I knew some people in library school who were, I’m sorry, dumb as a box of rocks. They couldn’t have managed my other master’s program, any substantive master’s program, in a million years.” Amen to that, David & Dorothea.)

3) Of necessity, academic standards slip dramatically to accommodate these ill-prepared students.  And thus library schools churn out “professionals” whose credentials speak in no more than a whisper to their abilities to perform their jobs competently.  These so-called professionals, mind you, will squawk and holler to no end about the de-professionalization of librarianship and the horrors that this bodes every time they stumble across a PhD working as an academic librarian, a digital librarian who knows boatloads about technology but never bothered to get an M.L.S. or (the horror! the horror!) a non-M.L.S. librarian who holds a degree from one of those dens of iniquity known as ischools.

/rant

In other news, good things do seem to come in threes, too. Today’s big three: I cleaned the apartment (kinda), paid some bills (not enough), and bought blue paint for the Great Table Redesign Project of 2008 (henceforth known as GTRP8, just cause librarians love to give simple things complicated acronyms.  It makes us sound more professional, wethinks).

things I’d like to accomplish if I ever have the time

1. Build a wiki containing booklists for teachers, students, and parents. Whenever we purchase new books that fall into one of the frequently-requested areas (books about tolerance, diversity, friendship, community, specific holidays, hi-lo adventures, etc.), add the titles to the relevant lists.

2. Create and maintain a “recommended podcasts” page somewhere within our library homepage. This, of course, would entail me sitting around and listening to eight zillion podcasts first — not exactly a burdensome task, but definitely a time-consuming one.

3. Speaking of podcasts, I think I need to listen more religiously to Uncontrolled Vocabulary, and not just because it has a terrific name. (Big shout-out to Librarian In Black for bringing this to my attention.) Futzing around with TalkShoe may be on the horizon, too, even though I can pretty much guarantee you I won’t be using it in the classroom anytime soon.

4.  Beat my sisters at Scrabulous.

Off-topic: Remembering Anna

Yesterday evening I received the devastating news that my friend Anna Woodiwiss had passed away suddenly after a horseback riding accident in Afghanistan, where she had been working for the Turquoise Mountain Foundation for the past year. She was 27 years old.

Anna was a person of deep faith — deep faith in God and humanity alike. She trusted that God had a plan for her, and she knew that part of this plan was for her to become a peacemaker, someone who would bring to people “whatever it most needed and wanted,” as she herself put it.

Words are sort of failing me right now. I want to write down everything I remember and love about Anna, but I don’t even know where to begin. So as an attempt at some kind of tribute, here are some pictures that I think convey a sense of the joyful, creative, and caring person that Anna was.

Cantatrix, the a cappella group that Anna and I sang in together at Swarthmore. Anna is standing at the far left.

In August, 2004 Anna, Greg, Catherine and I took a trip to Istanbul, where we spent a beautiful week exploring Byzantine and Ottoman architecture, drinking tea, visiting a hammam, and cruising up and down the Bosphorus.  Here’s Anna, posing in front of the Blue Mosque.

Just a couple of summers ago, a bunch of us rented a cabin in Vermont for a week of swimming, canoeing, drinking wine, and playing Trivial Pursuit.  Here’s a picture of Anna at one of our more memorable dinners.

in which i criticize the stupidity of others without offering any coherent suggestions for improvement.

Seriously, EBSCO, what the hellz? Why on God’s good earth would you design a database that spits back search results like this one here:

Now come on, folks, let’s think about this. How is Average Joe Library Patron going to try to access this article? Most likely by clicking on the most easily comprehensible portion of the search result, namely the highlighted, italicized word “Caffeine,” which, incidentally, is also the first hyperlink within the results.

Well, if Average Joe did this, he’d be rewarded with a brief summary of the article…and nothing more. Yup, to access the article itself, he would have to click on “PDF Full Text” at the very end of the result. Given that most adult library-users (many of whom have no idea what a pdf file is) wouldn’t think to do that, it seems hardly likely that the third- through eighth-grade user for whom this particular database is designed would, either. In fact, what most kids do — as I’ve learned from watching my third-graders struggle with EBSCO — is click on the article title, see the one or two-line article summary, and assume that they’ve hit a dead link, and that the article doesn’t actually exist.

Sigh.

Can’t we just hire the minds behind the International Children’s Digital Library to build all our children’s library databases? Those people really get how kids go about searching for information!