Community @ TTW

So as I apply for more youth services jobs, waiting for the promised greying of the profession to open jobs for me to move into, I read. A lot. A lot a lot. Somewhere around a book book a day, and a few giant stack of picture books a week. Now, to find these giant [...]

I think one of the problems with typical cataloging systems is that picture books are all shelved together, placing Eve Bunting’s Smoky Night and One Green Apple next to Hurry! Hurry! This not only causes the awkward moments where parents of a three year old end up with a bedtime story about the LA Riots, [...]

The first part of this question has two answers: the generalizing version and the wibbily version. The wibbily answer is that I [...]

When I was a teen and tween, the library was a safe space. I had other safe spaces too, including the theater, but I knew that I could let my geek flag fly at the library with no judgements. And this was in the era right before YA literature started to heat up. There was [...]

The most important thing to do in a reference interview, whether with an adult or a child, is to not start walking over to the shelf until you know what the patron is actually asking. In my (limited) experience doing reference, either volunteering at my library, answering questions for preschool teachers at my outreach centers, [...]

Children are people: people who happen to be short, have limited vocabulary, limited life experiences, and are at a different developmental state than I. Kids are human beings with differing tastes, interests, opinions, and a drive to be respected and taken seriously in their information needs. I get confused when asked how I talk to [...]

Libraries are a hospitality industry. For my first presentation for library school, I looked at Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table, and had to look at how how ideas of how to make a successful restaurant applied to the library “industry.” A lot of my ideas on library service were formed by this presentation, this opportunity [...]

I struggled with how I should answer this question. The problem with most of the effective presentations I’ve made as a teacher, as a storyteller, as a performer, and in meetings when I worked in Hollywood is that they weren’t difficult, and that was why I was so effective at them. When you’ve got the [...]

I am a living, breathing library program. Before going to library school, I was one of those artists whom people such as yourself hired to come into libraries to do programs. I’ve done mask making/performing, storytelling, and creative drama workshops based on books. I’ve also written Theater for Young Audiences plays, acted in them, and [...]

It used to be that a patron would come to a library with an information need, would go through a reference interview, and the librarian would go out into the desert of information to find that one droplet of water that the patron needed. These days, there is a flood of information available to patrons. [...]

I’ve been working so hard on writing essays for job applications, and suddenly I realized that I could publish the answers in my blog, so all this work would be read by more than one person. So that’s what the content from my blog is, these days, for the most part. Enjoy and/or I’m sorry…

Dear Photograph

This takes the idea of the person’s hand with the image to the next level. I think it could be integrated nicely into digital storytelling.

There’s a Simpsons episode that contains a view of the Old Springfield Library, with a banner across it that says “We Have Books About TV.” So many of the ways that libraries attempt to stay relevant today puts that brilliant parody to mind: carrying blockbuster DVDs and loaning out e-readers, to name two. This is [...]

A massive link dump of many digital story sites. StoryCorps What they do is different, but it’s in the same spirit. Books I still want to read that I discovered too late: Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green.  YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Print. Fields, Anne M., and Karen R. Díaz.  Fostering Community…[Read more]

With Peggy, I was able to approach the project in a totally different way that I did with Tina’s. If Tina’s was me proving to myself that I could recreate the CDS workshop method but with someone else, Peggy was my proof to myself that I could recreate what Media Arts Center was doing in [...]