Library Sleepover!

A recent Friday night was our 11th annual Upper School Library Sleepover. Originally started by students, I was ready to let this tradition retire with the previous librarian, who retired last year and chaperoned and organized this event for a decade. The students who thought of it as a Brentwood School tradition, however, demanded we do it again, and I am so glad we did! As soon as I advertised the event one time at assembly, it was full, with over 20 students wanting to attend. Members of the Student Library Advisory Council (SLAC-ers) decided we would read Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and watch the BBC Sherlock version of the Sherlock Holmes novella. One senior created a role-play mystery game for us to solve, which we did at 1:00 AM. She creatively invented characters related to the novella, and gave us each clues on paper made to look old, complete with  wax seals. A tenth grader shared that the “library overnight was a great way to bond and meet new people ... My favorite part was when some people summarized the first half of the book by performing an interpretive dance version. Overall, I had a ton of fun, and I'm definitely excited for next year.” We set up our sleeping bags in front of the TV at around 1:30 AM and most of us were asleep by 3:00. It was a night of laughter, acting, books, mystery, and new friends,  and we are glad to keep the tradition going for another decade.

So many of our kids excel at sports or drama, where they get to have parties - end of season parties or cast parties - with their peers who have similar interests. I was honored to have a party for the students who love to celebrate stories, and I was happy to bring them together. Our foreign exchange student from China came too, and it was so fun for her to enjoy the craziness of the teens being up most of the night. Next year I think we are going to read excerpts from Pride and Prejudice and watch the Lizzie Bennet Diaries - we supported the Kickstarter project and bought the DVD already!

9th Graders Prefer Print Books

I work in a 1:1 iPad environment. All of our 9-12 grade students have iPads. I have slowly been collecting a fiction and pleasure reading e-book library with Baker and Taylor's Axis 360. Currently my Magic Wall has about 120 books.

This semester's 9th grade students in Human Development class  have a reading assignment.  They are going to read a fiction young adult novel of their choice, as long as it has a human development-y theme (identity, sexuality, divorce, family issues, drugs, addiction, cutting, romance, teen pregnancy, etc). In a month or two we are going to have a book party with refreshments, where they will present creative interpretations of the books - slide shows, playlists, collage, painting, monologue - whatever they want to do to celebrate and share the book.

This week I have seen this as an opportunity to teach Axis360. I show them e-books in our collection to read  by Chris Crutcher,  David Levithan, and other important authors. I also have print books for the students to check out. Can you guess how many students decided to use the e-books? Answer: about three out of sixty.

The students use their iPads for so much: e-textbooks, assignments, games, everything. I thought this was a great opportunity to teach how to access our e-books, and the students checked out print books. With e-books nobody can see what you are reading, there are no real scary due dates, you won't lose the book, you can read it in the dark (on the iPad).

The teacher thought maybe they like having a print book because it becomes almost like a transitional object when they are getting really into the book. Was she comparing it to a comfort blanket? I think so, and I love the comparison! The kids are attached to the book. They don't want the book for fun to be attached to their other stressful school work, perhaps. I understand that too. 

Providing e-books for this population isn't really taking off the way I had expected. But I am a bit delighted with their attachment to the print book. 

Coming up next: The Library Overnight - will the 20 students attending want to read the free e-book book on their iPads, or do they want the print book? Find out in the next post! 

6 Word Story Contest

I have been looking for ways to make the library a hub for a growing community of writers at Brentwood School, so on the heels of NaNoWriMo, and before the yearly spring short story contest, I was ready for another writing incentive.


The idea for this contest came from Kate Hammond, librarian at Perkiomen School, who sent out her idea for a multi-school 6 word story contest via the listserv for AISL, the Association of Independent School Librarians. I responded, and the 6 Word Story Contest was born. Brentwood School community members competed against each other, with 223 entries, submitted via a Google form embedded on the library blog. A committee from Perkiomen School judged our entries as we judged theirs. The students who participated eagerly awaited the results.


The winners from both schools were announced on twitter a couple of weeks ago. The librarians enjoyed slowly tweeting out all the winners, @bwslibrary tweeted the Perkiomen School winners, and @perklibrarian tweeted the Brentwood School winners.


We had 3 faculty winners, 3 middle school winners, and 5 upper school winners from each school. The results were tweeted (see the twitter stream here). I look forward to holding this contest again next year!

Adventures with E-books, Part 2: The Positives

After several research projects this year (as you can see from our LibGuides), I am in a much better place to review the e-book platforms we have chosen to play with this year. I am reviewing them from the perspective of the upper school (9th-12th grade) that is in its first year of 1:1 iPads.

The Gale Virtual Reference Library is still a favorite for specialized encyclopedias. E-book reference is really the way to go, and if your reference collection isn't migrating online, it really should be. We also have some ABC CLIO ebooks and I am thinking of adding more, since their databases are also quite popular for introductory research at our school. Our upper schoolers now use the GVRL via the easy to use Gale iPad app, Access My Library. The students download articles as PDF's and highlight and annotate using PDF Expert. GVRL is also popular because the students can copy and paste the citations into NoodleTools.

Ebrary has  really caught on with our upper schoolers because of the scholarly content and fabulous keyword searching. Once the students see how they can use a massive library instantly (78,000 books and growing!), with easy bookmarking,  downloading, highlighting, keyword searching, and an iPad app to read the books offline, they are very happy. The teachers are impressed by the ease of access to quality information. [Update to my previous post, the copying and pasting from the app works beautifully into Evernote and the NoodleTools notecards.] The students also seem happy with the idea of reading the books offline via the app, but I don't know how many have done so. I have to review my ebrary usage statistics - but who has time? I know they are using it - I see them in the library. I will look it over when research season is over. Currently the 10th and 11th graders are using it, and the seniors are about to start.

A couple of students have found e-books in ebrary that we actually cannot access.  I would like to try the Paton Driven Acquisition process soon. Although not officially on my selection policy, I try to buy most of what my community recommends - that day. Sometimes they are even delivered the following day (thank you, Amazon). Those books will at least get used! I'd like to do the same with nonfiction e-books, so that will be my next thing to learn with ebrary, the award winning product that is becoming a favorite (even after all my complaints on the previous post).

Axis 360 hasn't caught on quite as much, because  our kids really enjoy reading in print, as many Americans do. I think that if more popular titles were available, it would be more consistent and students would use it more. Also, since I am not using it for anything curricular, the students are not really forced to learn how to use it. I am saving it mostly for pleasure reading, and some students and faculty are enjoying it, but I'd like a larger affordable selection.

Stay tuned for more of our adventures with e-books, and let me know about your adventures!

Adventures with ebooks, Part One

Maybe I should call this post Misadventures with e-books.. or If I think ebooks are Confusing, What about my Students?

Baker and Taylor's Axis360 ebook Magic Wall needs the Blio reader. That is quite a sentence. They have an OK selection of books (although some are triple the cost of others, and I'm not buying those), and the books appear in the Magic Wall within a day. Customer service is really helpful, and the Magic Wall is pretty, especially on the iPad. Blio is a great reader. And, the platform's price is very reasonable.

However,

• E-books for libraries are just more expensive than the alternative.
• Explaining how to access the ebooks is a chore (we are making a LibGuide and a blogpost about it).
• The Axis 360 MARC records don't work well in our ILS, Destiny! We have to manipulate each record individually so Destiny will show that 1/1 books are in (which will be wrong if something gets checked out, but it is better than it always saying 0/0 are in), and we change the link in the MARC record, so it actually states that you click on the link to get to the Magic Wall to download the book, instead of just being a wild looking URL. Lots of work.

So, why not get the Follett e-books, you might ask. They work seamlessly with Destiny, and the circulation status is very clear. Well, Follett takes  several days to deliver the books and the page turning is painfully slow. S-L-O-W. At least it is slow on our iPads at school. I will keep trying to see if the reader gets better.

Ebrary is a whole other can of worms. On the computer it isn't too confusing, and you can make a bookshelf for your books. You need the bookshelf login to use the app. But then the bookshelf doesn't show up on the app. In fact, the bookshelf has nothing to do with the app. You use the app to search and download from the catalog only on to the iPad. Notetaking on the iPad is essentially cutting and pasting, and then the note has the citation attached, yes, but ittakesoutallthespacessoitishardtoreadwhatwascopiedandpasted.Thequotationslooklikethis. What is the deal with that?
On the computer the notetaking is good, and you can email pdfs to yourself to read on the iPad offline, among other features. But why the 2 products with the same name don't talk to each other is a mystery and a drawback.

Have you found that your patrons like the e-book  options at your library?

Stay tuned for more on our journey, hopefully some improvements in the market, and maybe some feedback from users. I haven't yet rolled these sources out to big groups of users. I am enjoying the experimenting and investigating, and I think this year of playing will turn up interesting results.

Flashcard Wishes

I got stumped by a seemingly easy request this week. One of our Educational Technology teachers and I have been spending time finding a flashcard app that:


1. Allows for large images
2. Allows for lots of text on the other side of the card
3. Can be emailed or shared to small groups or individuals
4. Can be made on computer cloud version
5. Deck can be downloaded to study on an iPad without wifi
6. Can "shuffle" the deck of flashcards, mark ones that are difficult, exclude the learned ones, and other fun learning capabilities like that.

I have tried out a bunch of great tools, but none so far can do all of the above. This is  for an Art History teacher who wants to put ARTstor images on one side and all the notes about the piece on the other (here is my Intro to ARTstor LibGuide). You would think this would be easy to find, but all the ones I have tried so far are missing crucial elements. The best cards are on Gflashcards, but the sharing is limited because of ARTstor's understandable Terms of Use.
Do you know of one that works for all of these criteria? Please share!

Too Many Changes for the School Year?

I am hoping to blog in detail about our many changes and get your advice. Here is a list of the changes for the library for this school year:

Staff: I am now the Head Librarian for our East Campus (7-12 grades), and we hired an amazing new librarian to focus on our Middle School needs.

Tools: We switched from InfoCentre to Destiny, subscribed to ebrary, have Axis360 and Follett ebooks, new apps for databases, and a newly restructured NoodleTools. All this to go with our new 1:1 iPad initiative in the Upper School. Also, I left EZproxy for now and have a different way for students to locate passwords (on a google doc), I have a new look for my LibGuides, and now I need to rework all of them because of this change away from EZ proxy.

Rules: Finally the students will be allowed to drink in the library, as long as the drinks have lids. We have new beanbag chairs in our redesigned (by students) Fiction Alley, and I hope the kids won't use them as gymnastics mats or cuddling areas.

Programming: We have a new piano in the library for Friday afternoon music, I have to recruit new people to my Student Library Advisory Council and Book Club (because many of my previous members graduated), and I am open to new suggestions from my community.

First teaching task: I am teaching the art history students how to use ARTStor on Friday. A new part for me will be the mobile version, which supposedly has a great flashcard feature. I will teach the kids how to access it on their new iPads, teaching from my iPad using the new Apple TV which is installed in the library Lab.


Lots to do! I am so excited for Tuesday when we start the school year!