In my first session on Wednesday, Leonard Marcus, author of Minders of Make Believe, reminded me that juvenile fiction books aren't just made up stories. They are reflections of the times in which they are written. Some things to note from this session: after the American Revolution, children couldn't get enough stories of American heroes such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. I wonder why this doesn't apply anymore. Before color printing, children bought their books in b&w and colored them, themselves. One famous children's book, The Little Engine That Could, encouraged perseverance during The Great Depression. Another interesting fact, libraries used to be Hardback snobs - no library bought pbks. Until the inflated dollar of the 1970's forced libraries to accept the cheap pbks into their collections.
Also on Wednesday, I slipped into a session on Google Scholar. Now with approximately a million and a half ebooks, Google Scholar allows users to search for ebooks available for free at libraries. It essentially is a database of all the ebooks available... everywhere. Right now, Google scholar is in talks with WorldCat. I'm wondering how far this will go. Google is making them too hard to ignore. And they are providing access to magazines and journals online as well.
I attended two sessions with UNT graduate, now a professor, Michael Stephens. Stephens is the author of Tame the Web, a blog encourages libraries to welcome their users and promote a "transparent" communication within our libraries. I loved Stephens view of how libraries. He's philosophy of having a transparent library includes: open communication between library workers and the public by way 2.0 technologies. And pretty much, stop making library practices such a secret to people - let's open up and be a team! Actually make the library for its users - not for the librarians. Introduce library staff to library users. Be open to customers about how the library spends it’s (their) money.
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