It’s Audible

I am a big Audible book fan. I like to mult-task by listening to my books instead of reading them. I read/listen to more than 100 books a year. I always have a real book or ebook on my Kindle that I am reading also.
Last year we (as in we, I mean the Library) subscribed to Audible.com for 24 books. We bought a download of the supplemental books that our teachers were teaching. I burned CDs of the download and put them in a CD holder that I bought from the Dollar Tree for a $1.00. (I only burn one copy, because of copyright. By only burning one copy of the download it’s just like buying a book from Barnes & Noble and placing on the shelf of your library. Yes, many people can use it, but only one at a time.) These books on CD are then placed in the Professional Library for teachers to use in class. The teacher can introduce the book by playing the first chapters of a book to get the students' interest up or to help the students with the dialect or names (as in books like the Kite Runner where names are tough).
To make the books more user friendly I took most of them home over the summer and indexed them. What I mean by that is I listen to the book, while following along in the hard-copy book. I made a chart to insert into the CD holder that tells what time each chapter begins on the CDs. This allows the teacher to play the first 3 chapters in class, assign Chapters 4 and 5 for homework and listen to Chapter 6 in class the next day. This really helps with a long book and/or reluctant readers. This also takes a really long time, because not all books break chapters at the beginning of a track.
We have had an Audible Account now for two years. They have contacted us and told us they they will not renew with us next year. I thought this might because of copyright, but they informed me they will not accept purchase orders anymore. If we continue this we will have to use a credit card.

It the teacher is not going to use the audbile book then with the teachers permission we will check it out to a student.

What's Your Sign?

The Element Encycopedia of Birthdays : Know your birthday Cheung, Theresa

We picked up The Element Encyclopedia of Birthdays: Know Your Birthday up at our local Barnes and Noble. We also have the other Element Encyclopedias that we purchased there as well. These are usually housed in our reference section, but today, Ethel decided to arrange them on the table near our Slam Board, up by our circulation desk. Wow, what a hit! Students are constantly stopping by the table to read about their birthdays, and we have snagged some faculty members as well! Sometimes, it's just the little things we do that shows our patrons how cool we are!

GRAFFITI

I was sitting in a session about Urban Readers at the NCSLMA Conference, (mind you no part of my county is urban) when this thought came to me. Graffiti as Art or Graffiti as advertisement. I grabbed my note pad and started making notes of how I could make this happen. I came back to school and got permission from the Principal. He told me he had been in trouble at a former school for having a Graffiti project, but told me to go ahead with it. So I did. I spoke with one of the art teachers, who said she would give students extra credit for working on the project. I bought a big bucket of sidewalk chalk from Wal-Mart, only to find it cheaper at Target the next week; oh well. I've posted some pictures of the project.

GRAFFITI AS ADVERTISEMENT
Arts students, here is your assignment. Come to the Library and select a Book or Magazine. Then take the sidewalk chalk to the courtyard to make your graffiti advertisement.

The Rules
*Artwork should be in graffiti style
*Should advertise book or magazine you have chosen, so someone will want to check it out
*Somewhere in the graffiti it should say “Check it out in the Library”
*Graffiti can only appear on the ground. No chalk on the brick walls
*Must be acceptable for a public school audience

Visual Thesaurus

We bought a couple of copies of Thinkmap’s Visual Thesaurus. If you have not seen this product you need to check it out. It makes looking up a word fun. We put a copy of it on our OPAC computer station and the other on a laptop presentation cart that can be checked out to teachers. I will have to admit you have to drag the students over to use it, but once they try it, we find they come back to play with it on their own. If you send that laptop presentation cart out with a smartboard, this becomes an interactive activity with the students. One year after purchasing this product our English teachers are now starting to use it in their classrooms. Our experience has not been the "Build It and They Will Come" mentality but more like "Slap ‘Em in the Face" with it and they will like it. Am I being too blunt?

Yes, we check out Magazines!

Several years ago we did away with the periodical room. For one thing, nobody here still uses a print magazine index, now that we can our state database, NCWISEOWL (and don’t forget Google). So now that we are not a museum for old magazines, here is what we do. The current issue of a magazine goes out on the magazine racks as normal. We slap a barcode on all back issues and let the students check them out just like a book. We tried using envelopes with a temp barcode and the envelopes came back mangled. We find that it works best to put a barcode on the front cover and let it go just like that. Yes, some magazines come back mangled as well and we just delete them. That keeps them weeded and pared down. We do not keep more than 24 back issues and most magazines don’t even have that many. Our RIS (in-school suspension) classes come in about twice a day to exchange magazines. Remember, boys especially love short pieces of non-fiction and information like magazine articles. Struggling readers enjoy short magazine articles as well. We put the majority of our magazine budget into student magazines—we get LMC (Library Media Connection)—and that is it. If departments want professional magazines, then they can buy them out of their budget. In this media center, we focus our money on students (Lucy learned this after spending many years wasting money on professional magazines that the professionals never read).

We purchase about 40 different magazine subscriptions for our students.

Buying Books for Teens

Ethel and I like to think we run a pretty busy teen library. We try to think like teenagers when selecting books and putting up displays (scary thought, that one), and we are successful. Several years ago, I wrote a grant and part of that grant process involved surveying all of our students on what materials they would like to see in the media center. Yes, we surveyed all 1200 of them. We passed out surveys in first bell, and had teachers collect them immediately. We put the results in databases--one for females, one for males. It was an eye opener--surprisingly, our students took it seriously. We realized many things--that students can name over 350 different magazine titles (not all appropriate for the library), that we have books already in the media center that they wanted (so we probably needed to do more PR on those), and many other interesting tidbits. If you'd like to see a copy of the survey we sent to students click HERE. Feel free to copy it. It is about time for us to do this survey again--maybe at the beginning of next year. The hardest and most time-consuming part was analyzing the data and putting it into a usable format. Lucy and Ethel do suggest you try it--you will learn so much from your students!