Librarian's Corner: Homecoming

Homecoming

by: Cynthia Voigt

When I was in middle school, my best friend and I were very avid readers, but we had very different tastes. She liked the Baby Sitter's Club books while I was starting to get into Stephen King. As a result, our book choices didn't tend to over-lap much (with the notable exceptions of the first few Harry Potter books and Ender's Game).

One of her all time favorite books was Homecoming, by Cynthia Voigt, she must have read it at least a dozen times by the time we were 13. Obviously, she tried to get me to read it, but I wasn't really all that interested. I knew that it had something to do with kids our age, and family issues, and they were looking for their mother... but it sounded boring and really touchy-feely, and not for me.

Fast-forward about 13 years. My husband and I were in New York for our niece's wedding, and over the weekend, I was looking for something to read. I noticed a copy of Homecoming sitting around, and remembering that it was my best friend's favorite book when we were kids (and that it's one of my mother-in-law's favorite books), I thought I'd pick it up and give it a try. I'm very glad I did. I loved the book, and only wish that I had actually given it a chance when I was still in middle school.

The book centers around the Tillerman children, who have been abandoned by their mother while on their way to stay with a relative in Bridgeport, CT. Dicey, the oldest, has been put in charge of her three younger siblings: James, Maybeth and Sammy; and is responsible for getting the four of them to Bridgeport safely. While there are many times in the book where the plight of these young children is heartbreaking, it is more of a 'girl's adventure' book than anything else. Dicey is cunning and resourceful, and more than willing to do whatever it takes to keep her family together. 

The children spend their days walking to Connecticut, and spend their evenings fishing cooking and camping out. The spirit of the adventure takes them all the way to Connecticut, where they find themselves in an unexpected situation. I don't want to give anything away (no spoiler alerts needed here), but let's just say that this is yet another situation that Dicey will have to cope with as she tries to keep her small family together.

I wish that I had picked this book up when I was Dicey's age, I know that I would have loved it. I was all into 'girl's adventure' and strong female leading characters when I was a kid, and if I had only listened to my friend, I would have had another wonderful book to love. Although actually, it isn't just one book. Homecoming is the first book in the 'Tillerman' series, followed by Dicey's Song (which I currently have checked out from the library, and plan to read soon). There are a total of seven books in the series, and I hope to read them all eventually, as I'm quite hooked.

So that's it for today. I hope you liked the first entry in a new monthly feature that I'm planning to run! The next Librarian's Corner will be posted on July 21st! Until then, keep checking back for more posts about things I'm doing! And I'd love to hear what you guys are reading! Let me know in the comments!

Happy Reading!

Crocheting a Uterus

So uh, I crocheted a uterus. Why? Why the hell not? It's cool as all get out and it didn't seem to hard. So I made one.

I'm not going to get into all of the deatils about the pattern, because its not my pattern. And besides, you can check it out here. You might have to sign up for a ravelry.com account, but don't worry, we don't bite... much.

Anyway, onto the uterus! (I bet you don't hear that phrase very often, do you?).

I had never made anything stuffed before, and I wasn't sure that I would be able to crochet a 3d shape, but it was actually pretty easy.

I started out with the body of the uterus, just crocheting in the round, following the pattern and watching as it started to take shape. The only sort-of tricky part here is that you have to pull the tube at the bottom up into the body of the uterus to make the cervix, but it's actually pretty easy, just follow the pattern carefully and you'll do fine.

Next up were the fallopian tubes, and these were much trickier than the body, if only because they are a lot more narrow, and since I was working with a 5.00 hook, I sometimes had trouble getting my hook in there and stabbing through the right stitches. My advice? Just be patient, count your stitches and use stitch markers, I cannot stress that last part enough.

My un-assembled uterus

The little loopy bits on the end may look tricky, but they're not too bad. I had to google how to do it though, because it's not clear in the pattern. Here's the link I used. Again, it just takes some patients and practice, you'll get it, I promise.

When you're done making all of the bits and parts (and it shouldn't take too long, there's only 3 of them after all), it's time to grab your pipe-cleaners and put the whole thing together! That's right, I said pipe-cleaners.

You stick them through the fallopian tubes, so that there's about 2" sticking out. This will help you attach it to the body of the uterus, and it will also provide some stability for the tubes, otherwise they get all floppy like.

So go ahead and place your tubes fairly high-up on the body of the organ. The pattern calls for a specific placement, and I recommend it. And then just attach them. And guess what? You're all done! You have yourself a crocheted uterus! How cool is that?

very cool indeed

Bonus points if you have a carved skull and a framed picture of the Mütter Museum to put your uterus next to!




So that's it! Go forth and crochet your own uteruses. Uteri? Either way. And I'd love to see what you come up with! Send me some pictures at CarynSKA@gmail.com, or friend me on ravlery.com (you know you want to); CarynSKA. Oooor... Just leave a comment with a link! I'm dying to see what you guys come up with!

Libraries without Books and Books without Libraries

When I was a kid my favorite place to be was the library, and my favorite thing to do there was to simply walk up and down the aisles and aisles of books and stare. Sometimes I would pull out an interesting book, sit down in the middle of the row and read it. This is still one of my favorite things to do in a library, and since I work in one, I often get the chance to wander among the stacks. Having said that, you will probably think that I am irreparably biased toward onsite collections, and honestly, I am. There is something magical and wonderful about being surrounded by endless rows of books, and there always will be, but that doesn’t mean that offsite collections don’t have their merits as well.

            In January of this year my husband and I took a trip to DC, and of course, since I’m a bit of a geek one of our stops had to be to the Library of Congress (where I got a library card, of course). The building was beautiful, and the main reading room was one of the coolest places I’ve ever seen, but one thing that was rather conspicuously absent were the rows and rows of books that I have come to associate with libraries. Now, that’s not to say that the LoC doesn’t have an onsite collection, of course they do. Rather, their onsite collection is carefully preserved, archived and catalogued, most of it away from the public eye. The LoC’s main job is the 9^th step in the ‘Life Cycle of Information’, that is, preservation. Yes, they do strive to make important pieces of their collection (like their Gutenberg Bible) available for the public to see, but most of their job entails preserving documents and artifacts from our country’s past.

Another library with a rather large onsite collection is the main branch of the New York Public library. There are 8 floors of stacks below 42^nd street containing who knows how many books (there are 53 million items stored over its many braches), though these stacks are again, not available to be browsed by the public. The NYPL is a research library, and these items are available to the public (you don’t even have to be a resident of the City of New York), but they are not there to be browsed. You submit an item request, and if you have the proper credentials, a librarian will fetch your book for you.

Now, having said all of that, you’re probably wondering what exactly my point is. My point (and I do have one) is that onsite and offsite can have much broader meanings than simply having a book inside the physical walls of the library. Working in a browsing library, and having pretty much grown up in one, I tend to think of an onsite collection as books that are available for me to browse through, look at, touch and even smell. I love being surrounded by books, but as you can see from the examples of two very well-known reference libraries, sometimes an offsite collection can be much more beneficial to the public.

Both of the libraries that I mentioned have extensive digital collections, and I’m not just talking about eBooks. They have both taken the time to digitize large portions of their collections, and especially items that are very old, very rare and very valuable. These are pieces of history that the public has every right to have access to; but many of the items are much too fragile even to be displayed, let alone interacted with. The only way that these items can be made available to the public is by putting them online, an offsite collection that can be accessed anywhere in the world. One such object is the $5 Confederate bill that was in Lincoln’s pocket the night he was assassinated (if you’re interested, click here to check it out).

As you can see, onsite collections can be extensive, but unavailable. While offsite collections can sometimes be accessed anywhere around the world. There are merits to both sides, and neither option is perfect for every occasion, or every collection. Any library that wants to really make a name for itself (and the Library of Congress has certainly done that) needs to employee both on and offsite collections. Even our small little local library has stacks that can be browsed, as well as eBooks that can be checked-out and read anywhere.

Access is Not Enough - Closing the Digital Divide

If you can't tell, I'm double-dipping here. I've been writing papers and responses for my grad school classes, and I'm just not having enough time to work on the blog as well. So I thought ya'll might like to take a peak at what I've been working on for school...

Current research states that if you want to be able to speak a second langue fluently you need to be exposed to it as a child. We often talk about basic computer skills as a language, describing ourselves as computer literate or illiterate. This suggests that in order to be fluent in the language of computers, we need to be exposed to be exposed to them as children. But now that most school-aged children are being exposed to computers, why aren’t we all equally successful? 

Because the Digital Divide is no longer about the ‘haves’ vs. the ‘have-nots’. Most children have access to a computer at school, but there is a world of difference between a school that can give each of its students a personal laptop and a school that has a lab with maybe 10 old desktops for a student body of 500+. This new Divide runs on socioeconomic lines. 

“Socioeconomic status for many individuals ultimately determines what type of technology (if any) they will have access to and, just as importantly, how often they get to use it” (Morrone, Witt 2013). Being in a classroom with a computer is no longer enough to make our students competitive. They need to not only have the computer, but to know how to use it, and how to use it well. Libraries can make a difference here, but I believe that the real solution to this gap will have to be provided by the schools. 

Speaking from my own experience, I believe that I greatly benefited from having access (both at school and at home) to a personal laptop. The high school that I attended was one of the first in the area to provide its students with access to laptops, able to be checked-out and used for both academic and personal pursuits. These laptops helped me to be more inter-active with my studies, and built the foundations of research skills that served me well in college. I went to a private school, and I know that the public schools in the area (though very good) did not have this program. 

Libraries can do and have done a lot to decrease the gap between the old ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, but often lack the resources to do more than simply provide access to the internet. In his article in the Public Library Quarterly, Bo Kinney tells us that “…provision of Internet access alone is only one part of bridging the divide, which is a function of broader social and technological inequities” (Kinney, 2010). The Divide, like so many in others in our country, can only be closed by education. 

This education has to come from schools, and at an early age. In their research into the Ohio school system, Lawrence Wood and Aimee Howley discovered that students attending schools in poor urban or rural areas had much less access to computers than students from wealthier school districts. Moreover, they also had older software and slower Internet speeds (Wood, Howley 2012). This needs to change. 

We can tell ourselves that we’re doing everything we can for our children, trying to give them a leg-up by providing them with access to a computer. But access alone is no longer enough. Just because you put a set of encyclopedias in your child’s bedroom doesn’t mean that they are able to access the information contained in them. Our children need to be taught how to use the latest technologies to further their educations and succeed in life. 

All students deserve this chance, and the only way to make that happen is to ensure that children from all socioeconomic have access to the same current technology, and are taught the same important skills. We’re working on one of those, let’s work on the other.

 

 

Kinney, B. The Internet, Public Libraries, and the Digital Divide. Public Library Quarterly, 29, 104-161. Retrieved May 12, 2014, from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01616841003779718

Morrone, M., & Witt, S. Digital Inclusion, Learning, and Access at the Public Library. Urban Library Journal, 19. Retrieved 5-17-14, from http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/urbanlibrary/article/view/1399/pdf_9

Wood, L., & Howley, A. Dividing at an early age: the hidden digital divide in Ohio elementary schools.    Learning, Media and Technology, 37, 37-41. Retrieved May 12, 2014, from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17439884.2011.567991

The Future of Libraries pt. 1

Thomas Frey likes to talk about the future. He asks the question “how will our lives be different in the future?” and looks for answers in many different fields. One of these fields is Library Science, or more specifically, libraries. Frey argues that our relationship with libraries will change. He talks about “four fundamental crossroads of change – literacy, books, education, and work” (Frey). Frey is right. Our relationship with libraries is changing. But it can also be said that change is the only real constant in any of our lives.

In the past we were taught that a literate person was someone who knew how to read and write, and that it was a simple as that. But how many of us have heard the phrase "computer illiterate" in the last decade? Literacy is becoming more than the simple ability to put words on a page. To succeed in this modern era we not only need to be traditionally literate, but computer literate and media literate. Like traditional reading and writing skills, these are things that modern libraries can help with. I have personal experience doing outreach work with a public library teaching senior citizen basic internet skills.

Frey points out that our relationship with print books is also changing. But this is not new. For at least the last decade my teachers have been going on and on about the difference between print sources and electronic sources for scholarly texts. What does this mean? That we've known about this change for a while now, and that digital media is not going away any time soon. With the prevalence of e-readers more and more people (and library patrons) are moving away from books entirely. 

Thomas Frey talks about the availability and over saturation of information in the future. 

In his article “55 Jobs of the Future”,  Frey tells us that in the future there will be people who make their living as ‘Book-to-App Converters’ (Frey, 2011), who would work on making what Frey refers to as a ‘Perpetual Self-Updating Book’ (Frey, 2011). A book-app hybrid would contain all of the information of a 40 volume set of encyclopedias, constantly updating itself. In my opinion, in Frey's world of the future, far from being obsolete librarians will be more needed than ever.

A moderately intelligent adult of 40 years ago was perfectly capable of walking into a library, finding an encyclopedia and looking up the one article it would contain on any given topic, let's say F.D.R.'s presidency. A moderately intelligent adult of today is perfectly capable of googling Franklin Roosevelt, but will be faced with approximately 20.9 million hits (this number can be verified with a quick trip to Google.com). Librarians are not simply keepers of books, they are information specialists, tasked with helping lay-people sort through the endless amounts of information that we are faced with. How much more so in Frey's future world, when we could all have endless amounts of information on any conceivable topic, constantly self-updating in the palm of our hand?

The field of education has always been changing. Children used to sit in classrooms and memorize books full of facts. Now our children are more engaged in learning, and modern libraries are reflecting that change. Libraries of the future might not be filled with stacks and stacks off books, but that doesn't mean that they will bereft of educational materials. New technology, like 3D Printers is changing the way libraries (and librarians) will be able to engage with children.

The last point that Frey mentions, work, is an interesting topic. Libraries have become not only a place for people to do work (who have us hasn’t spent finals week practically living in the campus library?), but for people to find work. In her TED talk, Pam Sandlian Smith tells the story of a man who came into the library often, working on his resume on publicly available computers, attending resume workshops and ultimately landed a job (TEDx, 2013). Libraries have always been places where communities come together to support one another, and I doubt that that is going to change at any point soon.

While I obviously agree with Frey, I don’t think that libraries are going to change as dramatically or as quickly as he seems to think. Change is a constant. The library of today is very different than the library of 50 years ago, and obviously the library of 2064 will be very different from the library of today. Will we all be working in bookless libraries 20+ years from now? Maybe, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As I’ve been hearing over and over again over the last few weeks, being a librarian is not just about books. We are responsible for connecting people with information, and that is never going to change.

Frey, T. (2011, November 11). 55 Jobs of the Future. FuturistSpeakercom A Study of Future Trends and Predictions by Futurist Thomas Frey. Retrieved May 9, 2014, from http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2011/11/55-jobs-of-the-future/

Frey, T. (n.d.). Futurist Speaker Thomas Frey. DaVinci Institute. Retrieved May 9, 2014, from http://www.davinciinstitute.com/speakers/futurist-speaker-thomas-frey/?gclid=CKrb7b7846MCFUcz5wodiRoZZg#topics_future_of_libraries

Frey, T. (2011, September 23). Introducing the Perpetual Self-Updating Book. FuturistSpeakercom A Study of Future Trends and Predictions by Futurist Thomas Frey. Retrieved May 9, 2014, from http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2011/09/introducing-the-perpetual-self-updating-book/ 

TEDx Talks. (2013, December 16). What to expect from libraries in the 21st century: Pam Sandlian Smith at TEDxMileHigh [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa6ERdxyYdo

Project Sunday 5-4-14 & An Announcement

Hello there folks, it's that time again! Project Sunday time!

As predicted, we had another busy one this week, and that's just the way I like it! Here we go!

We started off the day in a semi-lazy fashion, sleeping in and watching some Netflix while we had our breakfast. But around 1 o'clock, it was time to pick up a friend and head out to archery!

This was only the second practice of the season, but apparently I haven't completely forgotten what I was doing:

I am the noodle-slayer!

After archery we wandered around Barnes & Noble while we decided on a game-plan for the rest of the day. My husband and I knew that we wanted a chance to work on our kitchen table, but we were hungry and tired and a bit grumpy. So my brilliant husband suggested that we take a break, go out for dinner and then work on the table if we were still up for it.

It was a great idea! Over dinner we took the time to solidify our plans for the table. So far we had purchase a sheet of B/C plywood and had it cut into 32" pieces. So we sat down and planned out exactly where to make our next cuts and tried to decide if we wanted to attach the panels with pocket holes, or dados.

Then after a delicious dinner of burgers and chilli, we were off to my in-law's house to start making those cuts!

I took like, 5 pictures but I'm trying not to post all of them every time we work on the project. I don't want to over-saturate the blog with pictures of one particular project, and besides, I'm planning on doing a big post about it when the table is all finished. I should save my pictures for then, right? Right.

So we actually made a lot of progress in one evening. We have all of our pieces cut out (except for one that didn't come out super-straight due to a warped fence), and we know what the next several steps are. I have a feeling that this table is going to get done a lot sooner than the night-stands! *fingers crossed*

Well, I think that about wraps everything up... oh right, I promised you guys an announcement, didn't I?

If you follow me over on twitter, you've probably heard this one already, but here goes anyway:

I STARTED GRAD SCHOOL!

Yup, yesterday (5-5) was my first official day as a graduate student. I'm taking two classes this summer and working towards my Master's Degree in Library and Information Science. Yup, I'm gonna be a librarian! Well, someday. I'm very excited and more than a little bit nervous about grad school, so please be patient with me for the next several months while I adjust.
Right now I'm working 2 jobs, I have this blog and another one that I'd like to get back to, and once in a while I attempt to have a social life. Add school back into the mix, and it gets just a little bit overwhelming.

But I don't want to bore you guys with all of the details. Let's just say that while I'm going to try to continue to post regularly, I can't really promise more than a Project Sunday post here and there. But please stay tuned, because you never know, grad school might inspire me to post more than ever!

Until next time folks!



Our Project Sunday sure was productive this week, even if I was busy thinking thoughts of school. What have you guys been up to this week? Do you have any big announcements? Working on any cool projects? I'd love to know about it/them! Leave a comment and tell me all!