TwentySevenLetters / B

Because all the cool librarians are doing it

Everyone who reads any library-related blog in America has already seen this. But I love it and we all need to see it again. Praise be to Dorothy Gambrell and her brilliant Cat and Girl.

I'm still partial to her New Adventures of Death strip, Research Time, but that's behind the subscription wall at ModernTales.com, so I'll just have to taunt everyone with rumors of the Best Library Comic Ever.

Aftermath of the Summer Reading Program

One of my “regulars” stopped in yesterday. She’s 15 and frequently considered to be… well, difficult is a nice way to put it. The first time I met her, our conversation was a little weird—she would say something really snotty, and then look remorseful and be sweet again. And she alternated like that for the whole conversation. As I’ve gotten to know her, I’ve decided that her general personality is similar to how I was at 15—trying for jokingly bitter but coming off as a snotbucket. I figure someone had probably called her on it recently and she was trying to change her behavior. Since then, nearly everyone else in the library still finds her to be a pill, but she and I get along really well. Maybe because I was her, a dozen or so years ago. I don’t know.

Anyway, she stopped in yesterday for the first time in a couple of weeks to say hi. I asked what she’d been up to, since it obviously wasn’t the summer reading program she’d signed up for.

“I kept forgetting! I was here during a lot of the things and I just forgot to come down! And there were signs! But I was waiting for a computer and getting my books for school and then I just forgot. So… who won the $50 gift certificate to the mall?”

“Well,” I told her, “it could have been you, if you’d just turned in your forms.”

She was aghast. “You mean… nobody won? And I could have had fifty dollars to the mall?”

“That’s about the size of it, yeah. Other people signed up, but nobody turned in any forms.”

“I’m such an idiot!”

“Nah… but next year you’ll actually fill out your forms, right?”

“Oh yeah! I can’t believe I was so dumb!”

I don’t know if this is groundwork for next year’s program or not, but boy, was she annoyed with herself for skipping it. I guess we’ll see how it goes next summer.

Lengthy collection development update

We’ve officially hit 100 titles in our Graphic Novel collection. There’s a lot of manga in there—Fruits Basket, GTO, BananaFish, CLAMP School Detectives—that I didn’t pick out, but was ordered for us. With multiple copies of each, you can usually find one of them on the shelf.

The Western comics, with only one copy of each, generally rotate pretty well. Some titles (like Orbiter) still sit on the shelf, no matter how often I move it around to more prominent places on the face-out display. Since it keeps moving, though, I’m assuming it sees a fair amount of in-house use, so I’m not complaining. Much.

However, in addition to our usual collection budget, the Friends group is giving us $1,000 to spend on teen books. This is a lot more money than it sounds like. I’m ordering a bunch of things teens are requesting, even though it’s a lot of junk—Gossip Girls, The A-List, and similar titles, in addition to several “gangsta”-type books (mostly from Triple Crown Publications) and the novels based on “That’s So Raven.” I’m also getting a bunch of graphic novels—more Owly, more Amelia Rules!, more Batman, some X-Men, the second Flight anthology, True Story Swear to God, a couple of Ariel Schrag books, Mother Come Home… and some others I can’t think of offhand. I still have $250 left to spend, though I’m hoping I can get the Friends group to advance me some of the money so that I can buy a lot of this at SPX next month.

Because I’m upstairs in the Children’s Room 98% of the time, I don’t get as many requests for teen books as the Reference staff downstairs gets, but they feed me the information when I’m looking to do orders. Most recently they mentioned the That’s So Raven books, anything gangsta (I don't really know what this means, so I just picked some titles at random from Triple Crown—the recommended publisher), and erotica.

I’m no prude. I fully support the idea of having erotica in the library. But. We have a pretty wide age range that browses the YA collection—some adults, some 15–18-year-olds, mostly 12-15, and some 10-12. Knowing how many middle school (and late elementary school!) readers the collection has, I’m not comfortable putting explicit material in the collection. My solution was just to throw it back on reference and tell them I’m fine having it in the adult collection, so if they want to buy it and circulate it to teens, that’s fine—I just don’t want it in a collection that I know goes out to fifth-graders. And now I sound like some kind of knee-jerk censor, restricting a collection based on the fact that kids who are NOT the target audience can still find it, but… I’m just not comfortable with it. I mean, I know the graphic novel collection goes out to adults all the time, but I’m still not putting True Porn in there. (If we manage to break off into separate Adult and YA GN collection, then I’ll buy it.)

On a semi-related note, since the GN collection has grown so significantly (as in, become an actual collection, instead of six books mixed in with the paperbacks), we’ve had an increase in the number of patrons in the children’s room asking if we have comics here. So far, we’ve been directing them back downstairs, with some recommendations if they’re looking for something for the kids (Owly, Amelia Rules!, Ultimate Spider-Man, or others, depending on the age of the kid). It’s got us thinking, though. We have a little bit of extra shelf space up here, so why not create a separate kids’ GN section? Once my coworker/supervisor is back from vacation, I’m going to find out if I can start building this collection from scratch, and see where it gets us. We have some Tintin and Asterix books already, and I’ll buy duplicate copies of some of the all-ages material that’s downstairs. I’m fantasizing a bit, but the children’s department has $2,000 of the Friends’ money to spend, so I don’t think it’s that distant a dream.

My library is starting a monthly GN discussion group (see TSL / A for more details) in September, and while we don’t have flyers yet, the word is already getting out. A couple of patrons have already marked it on their calendars, and told me how much they’re enjoying the collection. A third patron told me that she’d been browsing the YA collection this summer, and was so impressed at the new books that were coming in, and then noticed the graphic novels. “I’d never read comics before, but the rest of the YA collection was so great that I picked up a couple, and now I’m hooked. There are so many different genres and styles! Are you getting more?”

After the disastrous Teen Summer Reading Program, it’s nice to know that I still rock at something, even if it is a quiet, behind-the-scenes type thing like collection development.

The life cycle of a porcupine

At left is a photo of my adorable porcupine (referenced below). This is what he looked like while the weather was relatively cool and dry. This morning I happened to look at him and noticed he had a bit of a shine--the 87% humidity was melting him, and turning the hardened salt dough back into, well, dough. More watery dough than it started. His quills pointed limply sideways as they slid off his back. I had to move the little guy to the trash can (as he was leaking through the plate), where he continued to melt.

Then he got squished when we carelessly tossed an old jar. I sure hope porcupines survive a little longer in the wild.

Summer Programming Wrap-Up

The summer finally draws to a close, and with it the summer programming at the library. Yesterday was the last of our book-and-movie discussions, and it was the first program at which I had any attendees! The two kids were admittedly a little younger than my target audience (being 10 and 12, instead of 13+), but they’re very bright, articulate kids and I had no other audience, so it really didn’t matter at all.

The book being discussed was Rodman Philbrick’s Freak the Mighty, and its movie form The Mighty. The kids had some really good comments, ranging from why the book’s title worked better than the movie’s title to what parts of the movie didn’t work because they didn’t match the book’s characterizations. With only three of us, the discussion petered out after about a half-hour, so we talked a little about Holes (the last title I tried to do), Harry Potter and the movie adaptations, and how listening to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials on audio is a richer experience than just reading them by yourself. (I said, these are really bright kids.) Before we wrapped things up, both kids asked if this was the last time I was doing this, or are there more planned for the school year? Alas, there is nothing planned, but I do think this would work better when school is in session (particularly with the homeschool crowd) and there is now a tiny bit of demand, so… we’ll see. Their mom also asked of I’d be doing this again, because the kids told her that they liked it, too. We’ll see.

Today’s storytime was the last until after Labor Day—vacation schedules being what they are, we just don’t have enough bodies in the building to spare one for 20 minutes AND deal with the extra 40 patrons in the room afterward. So, we’ve cancelled it for the next two weeks. Which is just as well, since today’s was a disaster. Only about 20 kids (on the high end of average, but still), most of them younger than the usual group. I cut it back to only 4 books instead of my usual 5 quick reads because the crowd was getting noisy. The thing is, it wasn’t just the kids I was reading over. Sure, they were getting restless and noisy. But I’m used to that. My problem was more the three women (mothers? Babysitters? Interlopers?) chatting in conversational tones while I was trying to, essentially, entertain their kids. And that’s just rude. I’m wondering now if I ought to have called them on it, but… eh. I’ll have 2 weeks off from it; maybe they’ll learn some manners over the break.

Today was also the last of our Summer Reading Program crafts for the younger kids. The theme this year was “Read up a storm!”, so most of our crafts and science experiments have been storm- and weather-themed: decorate a cloud or a lightning bolt, make snowflakes, make frost or fog, snow crystals, etc. Today we ran out of steam and made porcupines. Lump of salt dough, dry spaghetti quills, googly eyes. Voila! Porcupines. They have nothing at all to do with weather, but they’re cute and easy and have relatively little clean-up. 9 kids showed up to make them and we had just the right amount of dough, so that was good. (10 lumps, counting my prototype.) One girl, about 7 or 8, asked, “can we eat this?” I shrugged. “You can, but you probably won’t want to. It’s flour and salt. It’ll be gross.” Time passed. 5 minutes later, my back is turned and I hear “ewwwwwwww! It’s disgusting! … Try this!” So the next five minutes involved each child at the table surreptitiously pinching off a tiny bit of the dough, putting it in their mouths, and proclaiming its utter grossness.

I do enjoy working in the public library. Where else would I get this level of hilarity?

Blogging Roundup

Having been on vacation for a week, I don’t really have much to say that’s library-related, except maybe to mention that I ran into a kid’s mom at Whole Foods today. The kid is one of my favorites and she’s spending the summer with her grandparents in Europe, and I extended the due date on her summer reading books so that she could take them with her and not be behind when she has to start middle school in September.

Aside from that, I got nuttin’. So instead, you, dear readers, get my Blogging Roundup, where I talk about a bunch of other people who update more regularly than I do.

Library-related blogs I read, with little commentary:

Librarian.net, mostly because my boss reads it and I don’t want to be out of the loop when she starts telling me about something, but also because it’s sometimes interesting to follow the links.

Librarian Avengers, because her logos are awesome and I have to love anyone who has a manifesto up on Why You Should Fall To Your Knees and Worship a Librarian. And it’s an entertaining blog, and if I had money, I hope she knows I’d buy her CafePress stuff.

The Feel-Good Librarian, because I do really like that there’s someone else out there who obviously believes in the public library the way I do, and who also gets that warm fuzzy feeling from helping patrons. And while I try to deny my warm fuzzy side and blog to snark on some of my more entertaining encounters, the FGL really does enjoy more of the sunshine and lollipops without the ego. Most of the posts there do make me happy.

I’m not talking about most of the other blogs I read, as they’re more personal blogs than professional, and I’m trying to keep to a theme here. So, apologies to my friends who undoubtedly feel slighted.

However, I’m making one exception for a blog I don’t actually read, from the creator of a comic I don’t actually read, because this one entry talks about something I’ve noticed myself in many types of work: Justin Pierce, creator of the webcomic Killroy and Tina, The Most Heartbreaking Story Ever Told. Specifically:

When you work in retail, you notice things - like how guys will often make sidebar purchases to salvage their dignity. When a man comes into your checkout with some dog rawhides, Tampax, and a box of Fiddle Faddle (placed strategically in that order), you know he only needed to get one of them. Condoms can vary: if a lady is with him, a man will display his box of condoms significantly, but if the guy’s buying it alone, he’ll throw three bags of rock salt on top of it and give you a “gee-how-did-that-get-there-oh-well-ring-it-up-anyway” expression.

I noticed this when I worked at K-Mart (which is Wal-Mart without the glitz). I saw it when I worked at the grocery store, people tucking Soap Opera Digest in between Corn Flakes and toaster waffles. And I see this sort of thing at the library, too. A boy comes to the desk to check out a stack of books: Hardy Boys, Hardy Boys, Animorphs, Mary-Kate and Ashley, Hardy Boys, Gary Paulson’s World of Adventure. Or the girls with a stack of non-fiction: Dolphins, Neptune, Harriet Tubman, periods, trains. And I know they don’t give a crap about sea creatures, sea gods and/or planets, or railroads, Under- or Above ground. (For some reason, the girl-puberty books are split between the children’s room and the YA section, but all the boy-puberty books are YA.)

I don’t know what kind of point I’m trying to make here—just that it’s something people do all over with all kinds of products, not just with condoms in discount department stores. Human nature is weird. I guess that’s my point.

I’m official!

I am officially a Rhode Island resident. We spent nearly four hours at the DMV this morning/early afternoon, but when we emerged, we had spiffy new licenses and spiffy new plates. I have 5 days to get the car inspected. I’m leaving on a week’s vacation Sunday morning. The vacation is still in RI, though, so it’s not impossible to get this done anyway.

I don’t know how to relate this to libraries or comics. So I’ll just say… um… I’m officially a resident of the state in which I work. How’s that?