PUPPET STAGE 60TH ANNIVERSARY

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On May 17th, Central Library celebrated 60 years of the Jemne Puppet Stage. Several staff who had performed in the stage over the years returned, reminisced, and enjoyed two nursery rhyme puppet shows and a special appearance by The Forty Performing Bananas. Presenters included retired Children's Room supervisor Shirley Brady who talked about Della McGregor and the puppet stage and Steve and Carolyn Lonning who performed for many years as the Star Puppet Theater.

--Barb S.

Notes from the workshop Novelist Plus

Five Central staff attended this session at Ridgedale on Tuesday, May 5. The presenter, Duncan Smith is one of Novelist's creators, researchers, and trainers. By the way, the "Plus" after "Novelist" is the addition of nonfiction to the database. Mr. Smith's presentation went beyond simply a "how to use Novelist Plus." He talked about how important the function of "reader's advisory" is to patrons.

According to Mr. Smith, fiction readers usually have about five favorite authors in mind when they come to the library looking for a book. Their hopes are that we have purchased the current or new books by their favorite authors and that there will be an available copy on the shelf. If not, they tend to drift, check the book carts for recently returned materials (it must be good if someone else checked it out - right?), or they will ask the librarian to recommend a good book.

Reader's advisory begins by a librarian asking the patron what their favorite books are. In a sense, we are asking the patron to tell us a story. They may tell us about their favorite characters, plot, setting, theme, subjects, or the effect the book had on them.

On our part, we should not push against a reader's taste but we should listen carefully and re-state or paraphrase to make sure we heard the story correctly and to acknowledge that we heard and understood what they were trying to convey. It's particularly important to listen for any part of the story that is re-stated or re-emphasized because that means it has important meaning for the reader. Acknowledging the reader's experience lets them know that we are celebrating that experience along with them. Remember, it is the quality of the interaction with the reader, not the frequency that matters. Mr. Smith reminded us that readers are engaged and creative as they read.

Duncan Smith remarked that readers are "escapists" and he asks, "What are they escaping from?" According to him, readers are escaping from a limited and narrow view. Readers want to live fully and reading helps "recover potentialities that our everyday lives take away." Now there's something to ponder.

The second half of the workshop was all about the functions of Novelist Plus and its many wonderful features. I did pay close attention but did not take many notes. Maybe my colleagues that were also in attendance can add to this blog. I noted that the juvenile nonfiction part of the database is curriculum based to help students with assignments. The database even has lexile ranges to assist us in finding materials suitable to young readers. Novelist Plus will put together series with short list capabilities to print out for the patron. Print lists are also available to help with displays. Finally, there are many, many subject keywords to assist us in our searches. I learned that the "xy" in a search field means "keyword" (I didn't know that). Should you want me to show you a function about Novelist Plus, please ask and I will be happy to demonstrate! I really do like Novelist Plus and have found it very user friendly. I also recommend this workshop if its offered again - it was excellent!

-Deb K.

Enhancing Quality Staff 2009

Here are some notes from Enhancing Quality Staff 2009.

The keynote speaker was Eric Celeste, a technology consultant. He discussed some of the issues raised by the new “cloud computing” concept, where much of your personal data and documents are no longer kept on your own computer but stored in places such as Google Voice or Google Reader. This has the incredible advantage of allowing you access to your material from anywhere. For example, Google Voice allows you to have one telephone number which you can instantly transfer from device to device. Going to be staying at your parent’s house for a week—you can make it so that any time someone calls your telephone number, it rings at their house. No more juggling phone numbers or having people unable to contact you.

All of this connectivity comes at a price, however—privacy. Google gets a complete record of who you call. Other convenience services are even more intrusive. Mint.com, for example allows a person to access all of their financial information in one place. To do this you must give Mint.com all of your account names, passwords, and even security challenge question answers. This question, privacy versus convenience, is going to be popping up more and more.

Celeste also mentioned a new search engine to keep an eye on--Wolframalpha.com. It goes live sometime this month. It is a computational search engine and will be able to process data sourced from the web to answer questions, rather than just find answers already determined by others. You will be able to ask it, for example, to describe the weather for a week in 1865. Here is a link to Wolfram’s blog describing how it will work:

Another interesting speaker described using Google’s collaborative tools to co-author a book with two people in Europe. An earlier speaker had discussed using these tools (here is a link to his Google Docs slides), but listening as she described how she actually had used it was much more illustrative.

One final observation was that everyone was talking about RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication) as the new way for libraries to keep in touch with their patrons. More and more people are using RSS to keep up with their favorite web sites. RSS feeds notify the patron when new material is added to a web site that has RSS enabled. Perhaps this is something we should think about. For an example of a library RSS implementation, visit the Hennepin County Library’s web site.

-Ron