The Dreamy Library

Last year, I started weeding the collection. All libraries weed, or should. Weeding keeps the collection current, attractive, and manageable. It’s very easy to hold on to everything – anyone with a junk drawer full of half-burned candles, lame mementos from past romances, maybe-but-I’m not sure used batteries, and old birthday cards knows this. It’s very to easy to say that that book on space travel copyright 1967 “might be good for history” or that the information in this dusty, smelly, brittle book with no jacket that hasn’t circulated in 30 years is “still good.” But we can’t hang on to everything. School libraries, especially, must maintain collections that support the school’s current curriculum. New research supersedes old. Trends in fiction age, becoming uninteresting and irrelevant to our teens. So, we weed. Sometimes the choices are easy and sometimes they’re hard, but they must be made.

These decisions are not made arbitrarily. Libraries have certain criteria by which they weed collections. Deselecting materials is just as intensive a process as selecting them, if not more so. But I don’t want to write any more about weeding — there are plenty of books, articles, and other blog posts about weeding and how it is, or should be, done. What I want to write about are some of the gems you can find when weeding. Books that really, really don’t belong in the collection anymore, but are so quaint or whacked-out or weird that you have a hard time doing whatever it is you do with books that are removed from the collection. (Again, that’s not what we’re talking about here. There are other places to read about that, and it’s a complicated question.)

I have found some outrageous things in this collection, at least outrageous by today’s standards. When I say outrageous, I mean a few different things. Some are blazingly racist or sexist. Some are so esoteric that I wonder how they got here in the first place. Some are cultural snapshots that are irresistible and fascinating to someone removed by time or space. And some are just cool! So I’d like to take this space to observe some of these and wonder about the times when these were the newest additions to our library collection. Who selected them? More importantly, who read them, and WHY??!?

For a few years, since I started subscribing to feeds from various blogs and news sites, I have been using Netvibes as my main reader.  I like Netvibes because of the comprehensive “dashboard” approach to organizing information sources that I need to check regularly.  As soon as I open my browser, I can see windows into my email inboxes, my calendar, my horoscope, and the newest posts from everyone from ALA to Perez Hilton.  At first, I would obsessively read every single post.  Of course, I found out about a lot of interesting tools and resources that way, but also spent lots of precious time.  Now, I read and act on posts in my subscriptions when it’s convenient to do so, or when I happen to glance at them and see something interesting.  On my Netvibes dashboard, I’ve now created separate pages; one for general widgets like email, Twitter, and Facebook, one for library blogs, and one for “dumb stuff” including gossip, recipe, and knitting blogs.  I still never have to worry that I’m missing something; all the information I need is coming to me, so using it is a matter of reading, not searching.

The main way I love to use RSS feeds, however, is as embeddable content on subject and pathfinder wikis for students and teachers.  I love that my wikis will always be up-to-date with the latest content, which is especially cool for custom news feeds or database searches.  Whenever I talk about RSS feeds with a class, I love the moment of understanding when they finally get what that little orange box means on a website, or when they see new content appear automatically on a wiki page to which they’ve contributed.  Of course, my hope is always that they will retain that understanding and apply it to their own personal information needs.

• Now Reading: Beastly, by Alex Flinn

When I applied to be a PLP Fellow for the ADVIS cohort earlier this year, I knew that I would be working as part of an effort to promote best practices for 21st century learning in my school, and this vague idea was enough to pique my interest.  Now, I could not be more excited about this year.  I am thrilled to be part of this project and to learn through modeling 21st century literacy and skills!  I hope that at the end, I will not only have been of some help to my colleagues, but will also come away with some shiny new strategies for collaboration and promotion of information literacy.  As a new school librarian, I’ve been gaining so much from my nascent PLN, and I’m eager for the day when I have something to share with my profession.  I think that will come from experience, but also opportunities like this one.