Speed of Change

Some teen staff met yesterday and one thing semi-hashed out was a Facebook page for library teen stuff. I feel like we've been asking for it forever; I started telling the kids "soon" in November or so -- which was totally my bad. Attention-to-Detail Boy asks me about it every single time he sees me. Then he tells me it's not hard to do; he can help.

Before that, we'd been asking for a blog for forever, so kids could type in their own words and see them, instantly. We don't call it a "blog," but what we have is nice and it allows teen staff and kids under our supervision and sign in to make changes and share stuff instantly. We've had it up for a year, now.

What I'd nearly forgotten about was the struggle before that to have a regular webpage for teens assigned and designed - that must have been eons ago that we were satisfied with that. Well, I'm tossing old meeting notes and one page is sticky note-flagged: April 2009 we hashed out the contents. Not even three years ago and it's already a dated platform.

Ref Grunt

- She wants to give me her credit card to look up library card number; -No, it needs to be a picture ID. Sighs, goes to car, returns with her library card
- Got a guy going on the resume template in Word rather than show him how to make it stop double spacing. And now I have changed my mind and gave him a blank page again. (Help him several more times. Yay, he got it printed before being timed out! Aw - typos; at work again.)
- Horoscope Man called: read Taurus, Libra, Capricorn to him.
- Needs books for college-level work: WorldCat indicates they are held by universities, except one is in the City library. Give her their address, hours.
- Computer available? x3
- W00T! Question about a book, before hour 2 on desk.
- Copier
- Nicholas Sparks book about (with?) his brother
- Sign thingie for FedEx driver: small Demco box. I'm guessing some kind of spine labels.
- Add money to card to print
- Confession: I might have bent a rule if he hadn't approached the desk and said "Hey sweetheart, I need a computer."
- Holds
- PIN

Not That There's Anything Wrong with Girls

I've been following with enjoyment Hank & John Green's Tour de Nerdfighting and am struck by how full of screaming girls their audiences are. (The video at this post seems typical.) I can figure out lots of easy and even complicated reasons for this having to do how we've socialized girls to shriek at males they find compelling and/or cute and socialized boys that showing enthusiasm for other males isn't a good idea.

But given stats about boys falling behind in their ability to do sustained reading and given promising projects like Guys Read and excellent blogs like Guys Lit Wire it seems like an opportunity to give regular guys two great role models of writing, creating, and reading young men has gone to waste.

YouTube

"The Beast with a Billion Eyes," by Lev Grossman (Time, January 30, 2012, pp.39-43)

Grossman includes all the numbers, but here's the gist: "More video is uploaded to YouTube every month than has been broadcasted by the three big TV networks in the past 60 years."* However, the average viewer stays there only about 15 minutes, versus an average of 3 hours of watching television. With TV, we know what's on -- roughly -- and where to look for it. While YouTube has "channels," most people don't use them like TV channels (though they are working to change that). Grossman explains the challenges of searching such a massive universe, even alluding to the problems of using natural language to tag/catalog things: sometimes people mark their videos with a description, but often they "call it 'LOLOLOLOL this thing is amazeballs!!!!!!!'"

One of the ways YouTube staff hope to improve channels is by introducing TV-network like channels with known stars and brands (Jay-Z, Amy Poehler, Disney). Yet current viewer habits put the amateur (semi-pro?) on top: the former hedge-fund manager Salman Khan and his math problems; teen character Fred and his 2.4 million followers - which Grossman compares to The Cartoon Network's mere 53,000. Some observations from public library land: maybe younger people watch Cartoon Network on YouTube, but don't subscribe to anything. Maybe it's more sophisticated high schoolers and 20-somethings actually subscribe to stuff. 


Grossman concludes that whatever changes YouTube makes, it's likely that the massive site will remain quirky: "What Nyan Cat [hyperlink added] tells us is that when you put amateurs in charge of broadcast media, odd things happen, and that's what YouTube does."

 their link for more: http://www.time.com/time/youtube



*Note: Google-owned Blogger know that Google-owned YouTube is spelled correctly, but has given me the squiggly lines under "Grossman."
P.S. I am about to get lost in the land of meta nyan. . . . Must. Put. Down. Keyboard.

I've been thinking about genre fiction. Pull it out in separate shelving? Cover library book spines with little heart and spy glass and vampire fang stickers? Use tagging on Teen Scene to point readers in the right direction? Beyond those mechanics, there's the stuff I didn't get in library school, much of which seems to have to do with using expressions like "appeal factors" and "pacing." 

Explorations, serious and not, have caught my eye, too; the most recent is Adam Gopnik's piece in The New Yorker, "The Dragons Egg" (December 5, 2011, p. 86). He explores high fantasy, with just a few titles as touchstones: The Lord of the Rings, The Once and Future King, Eragon, and he throws in Twilight as a contrast. The appeal factors of high fantasy include "cool parts" and complicated mythologies; "gratification comes from the kid's ability to master the symbols and myths of the saga, as with those eighty-level video games, rather than from the simple absorption of narrative." Meanwhile, "the genius of the narrative [of Twilight] lies in how nearly the familiar experiences are turned into occult ones. . . . [t]he tedious normalcy of the 'Twilight' books is what gives them their shiver. . . ."

I want to keep processing tidbits on genre fiction, so I'd better make myself a blogger label.

Waiting on Wednesday

I'm a day late, but I feel the urge to play along with the meme that asks, What forth-coming book are you eagerly awaiting?

I did some book ordering today, and Cinder, by Marissa Meyer sounded swell to me, and had good reviews already in place in our book dealer's database. Our Teen Advisory Board kids get a chance to read 2 - 3 publisher blurbs and "vote" on books they'd like to see in the library. Maybe one kid (out of 6 in attendance) marked this title. But my gut reaction is to agree with Abby the Librarian who sums up the appeal this way, "What if Cinderella was a cyborg? (I mean, seriously, if that question doesn't intrigue you, I don't think we can be friends.)" So, I've ordered one for my library.

I bought my first string of fairy lights at the Woolworth's in Northampton, Mass., on a solitary trip, a bus ride away from my own college town. I grew up in a lovely/eclectic colonial revival house, in the windows of which we put a single white candle-light each Christmas. Our tree featured a string of big, colorful bulbs. Tiny white lights seemed new, special, mine.

On that same trip, I bought, somewhat sheepishly, some women's magazine or another, telling myself that the cut-out gift tags inside would be Useful for the presents for my family I imagined wrapping at school and flying home to Richmond with. Whether I didn't use them was because I didn't buy presents before leaving, or because I eventually realized that it could be ruinous for the look of wrapped gifts to fly with them, I no longer recall. I think, really, I bought the magazine for a nostalgia for looking at magazines with my mom, especially at Christmas time. There were even a couple she'd saved so we could look at them over and over - and refer to that one that had ALL the good cookie recipes. I remember one one with a sweet cartoon story -- if not by Maurice Sendak, then by someone else with a similar style.

So magazine and lights and other sundries in hand, I felt grow up: I felt like a shopper in "Silver Bells." Nine times out of ten, the verse that begins "city sidewalks," brings Northampton to mind. My new lights hung in our College Street-facing window of Northy Rocky; and they graced the bay window of the room in Abbey. In my memory of my MacGregor single, that bay window is so sunny and dogwood tree-filled, I almost imagine I would have skipped the lights, but I doubt it.

At college, every spring I'd take sweaters to be stored at the dry cleaner's, and I'd pack up books and knicknacks and my fairy lights and flannel sheets and store them in next year's dorm basement. Senior year, even having drawn a rather good number in the housing lottery, I followed the outstanding Noreen to 1837 Hall. The Ramada Inn of dorms needed the help of my fairy lights most of all, and they were up and plugged in most of the year. In December, 1988, they spiffed up my first apartment, a swell place on Park at Strawberry St.

That first strand lasted a surprisingly long time: Mississippi and back, I believe. Maybe it was one of two that hung year-round in the dining room on Mulberry St., making it possible to brighten any gray day, make every party sparkle. I do remember that when it finally stopped working, I thought, Well, that was good long run.

Now I live in the second house I've owned, and for the first time ever I've hung lights outside (in the contorted filbert, visible through the french doors in the family room). They're hand-me-downs from Mom, who decorated outside at the farm where they live now for the parties they threw for several years. I love the way tiny lights make the dark part of the year sparkle, and I love the string of memories they invoke.

(later): Am I in danger of collecting links on Christmas lights? Here's Seth Godin on lights and community.

I can neither confirm nor deny that I have had the book mentioned here in my hands.

My first job after graduating from college was at Richmond's Valentine Museum, where I served as assistant curator for the photograph collection for a couple of years. At about the same time, my brother worked part time at A & N, but not, I think under this sign:

In recent years, the Val has also added this sign, below, from the Mill End Shop to its fine neon collection. The fabric store remained in business on Cary Street through the early years of its gentrification -- or as I saw it, the transformation from a street full of useful shops to a street full of Boutiques. The former being much more useful to an actual Fan / Museum district resident than the later. Thank goodness for the staying power of Mongrel (ne Cards, Cards, Cards) and Bygones.

But, I digress. Phil and I went to the Museum for a special Henrico County 400 open house. We enjoyed a small photo exhibition, curator talks, a quick Wickham House tour, and a behind-the-scenes tour. A new collection included the workers' newsletter for a factory at Seven Pines; there was a handbill from the opening of Byrd Field, and a booklet from the 1930s(?) touting Sandston as a lovely suburb. 

Confession: my favorite part of behind-the-scenes tours there is finding photo storage boxes with my handwriting on them.

The End!

Book idea #85: work with words.

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