Meme: Passion Quilt

Passionate informed critical-thinking citizens

First we teach and model reading and love of reading to our students in our elementary school libraries. And after that, I firmly believe that we have a higher purpose, from elementary through high school, of guiding our students to learn and think for themselves. This is a crucial attribute of involved citizens. Beyond the ability to read, beyond being an avid reader, a citizen needs to be media literate, information literate. Especially now, we all need to be able to find information, sift through the propaganda to whatever truth can be found, decide what we believe is right, and express ourselves.

Learn Every Day http://gexie.blogspot.com/

Week 6 - #14 Tagging in Technorati

Couldn't see any difference when I searched blog posts by keyword and then searched tags. There were significantly fewer hits for the tags search. Oddly enough, when I searched several times, for blog posts (for "school library learning 2.0") the number of hits kept changing. Maybe that indicates that the number of posts out there are changing by the second. The search of tags got me more specific hits. Tagging definitely rocks!

I'm still feeling my way with tagging. I do like the ability to search tags to see what others have posted. However, I am a library cataloger. I am torn. On the one hand, I love the freedom of creating my own tags, making my own individual connections. In my very own filing cabinet, I have some pretty exotic file names. However, others don't always see things the way I do. That is positive and negative in my opinion. Positive because I can express myself and have my tags intuitive to me and easy to find. ( I have often chaffed again the strange, arbitrary subject headings demanded by cataloging standards. Bildungsromans, for crying out loud, what elementary school kid, or high-schooler for that matter, is going to look that up to find books about coming of age. These headings keep book searches for the elite and the librarians. Why not include "coming of age" as a heading since we are no longer limited to the space of a file card?) Positive because I can explore the tags of others and learn. But the cataloger in me says, oh my god, how can we find things without consistency and rules of some kind? The negative is that this way of categorizing posts, etc. feels like chaos and can be very frustrating when trying to locate something that someone else has tagged. As I get more familiar with tagging, though, I see that this is a great way to explore. I have my own bookmarks and posts tagged in my own unique way, without having to squeeze myself into someone else's idea of what tags should be, and I can share these with the world. As long as I am not trying to lay my "hands" on something specific quickly, I can explore other's tags. The tag cloud is an ingenious way to help with that exploration. I can choose the tags that the majority have used or experiment with those that only a few on the edges of the tag world have used.

As my mind is expanding, this tagging is growing on me. Who knew?

Week #5 - 11 The wonder that is Library Thing

I actually looked at Lulu and Biblio first. After all, they were the #1 and #2 Book category winners for the 2007 Web 2.0 awards. Biblio surprised me by having a long list of available copies of an out of print group of books that I have been casually looking for since about 1974: Piet Hein's Grooks, Grooks 2, and Grooks 3. I love those little poems. I crave to see "Icelander's Lament" in print again. I just may have to shell out the $20 and buy all three.

Library Thing, though, was very good. I loaded my 86 books and tagged them. My tag cloud is particularly nice. I haven't been very social with Library Thing yet, but I did "invite" someone to come and see my collection. I would like to see more sorting capabilities on Library Thing. For example, the librarian in me longs to sort all my Sue Grafton's into alpha-order by title: A is for..., B is for... However, that does not seem to be an option. I did enjoy being able to tag books as a group, especially since I loaded many of my series favorites.

Librarians, please take note of Miriam Grace Monfredo's Seneca Falls series. Her protagonist is a lady librarian before and during the American Civil War. The mysteries are very well devised and Monfredo deftly brings in historical elements of the Women's Suffrage movement, which began in Seneca Falls, New York. I was fascinated all the way through the series. I watched the PBS special on the Movement called Not for Ourselves Alone about the same time I was reading these books. It brought the stories to life because Monfredo's Glynis Tryon (spinster librarian) reflects on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and their movement's activities in Seneca Falls and in England. This is a great bunch of books!

Oh, and don't miss the Laurie R. King series beginning with The Beekeeper's Apprentice. These are the adventures of retired detective Sherlock Holmes and his young apprentice, Mary Russell, who later becomes his wife. One of these books, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, also deals with the Women's Suffrage movement in England. The plots are so deliciously intricate and the characters are so insightful. You'll be as enthralled as I was. I gobbled up all six of them like chocolate. What a creative mind this woman has! She writes of disguising as Arabs and spying in the Middle East in the early 1900's, discovering the ancient writings of a female apostle to Jesus, a ghost coach riding the moors and the resurrection of the Hound, fears of madness connected to the famous San Francisco fire, and a wonderful, well-written romance that lightly interweaves through all the books.

Well, enjoy my Library Thing collection, if you are interested. Here's the URL: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/donnielou

Goodnight.

Week #5 Online image generator

My son is now enshrined on the cover of People Magazine. Fame is a terrible burden. It was a hoot putting this together. I sent this cover to my son and I am sure he will be thrilled. He has a wicked sense of humor and is way ahead of me using image generators. He created this photo. I've always liked it because it has that David Bowie look to it.

Week#3 - Flickr, etc.

I already had a Flickr account, but I hadn't been using it much. See my fun librarian trading card. I can't believe how many photographs I took in order to get this one. The webcam was just too pixilated and my glasses reflected too much. I had to run out to the car and get my digital camera, but it turned out pretty well.




Good night.

MonsInvasion2

MonsInvasion2, originally uploaded by donnielouise.

Are you scared yet?

MegSrpjt1

MegSrpjt1, originally uploaded by donnielouise.

Senior culminating project - Monster Invasion - plush polar fleece monsters from outer space created by Meghan Mitchell and sold for the benefit of the Humanities Department at SOTA.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Week #2 Setting up the blog and avatar

I pasted my first HTML element in the Blog. I like it. I already had a blog set up at Bloglines.com with the same blog name. I had posted a couple things about starting out with Follett Destiny library system this summer. It was too cute. My first post was entitled, "Destiny is Ours".

I kind of like Wildcat Cataloger. I feel that way sometimes because I am a sort of hybrid. My degree is in Language Arts/Education and I have a teaching certificate with a school library endorsement. However, when I needed a job and was interviewing for school libraries, this cataloging job came up and I interviewed for it, too. That job is the one that came through and it was paying about the same. I jumped at it because, oddly enough, the cataloging module of the library endorsement coursework was my favorite. (It has been said that this makes me a very strange individual, but "I yam what I yam". )

However, I am not the Head Cataloger. My job is actually entitled: Library Technician. It is a classified position, which means I am not paid to be a teacher-librarian and the job requirements are written for someone with an Associate Degree. I prefer to think that only someone with my unique skill set can do this job as well as I. Because of my background, I am uniquely able to communicate with school librarians and understand their needs. Just as they are a hub between students, teachers, principal, and the community; I am a hub between librarians, the head cataloger, the automated library system, our tech. department, our director. I add items to the library system, create new items by copy-cataloging or original cataloging (mostly fiction, some biography and occasionally non-fiction)

Like those wildcats of long ago who migrated from oil field to oil field, I'm a wildcat; going from book to book, librarian to librarian, certified to classified. I never really know my "place".