The Singapore Red Dot Awards — an annual exercise in curating a basket of recent books for children in international schools

This piece was originally published on the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative blog — and is cross-posted here.

Collections of global literature for young people can be found all over Singapore — in the libraries of the 50+ international schools that serve the expatriate population of the city-state.

Singapore is a privileged “bubble” in Southeast Asia in so many ways (economically, culturally, educationally, etc.) — and international schools are a bubble within that bubble, given that Singaporeans are not allowed to attend them without special dispensation from the government, which prefers to educate their own citizens but needs attractive schooling options for the elite foreign workforce being enticed to relocate there. (Out of a population of 5.64m in 2018, 3.99m are citizens or permanent residents, while 1.64m are non-resident or expatriate — roughly 30%.)

The teacher-librarians in the international schools (which offer national curricula and/or International Baccalaureate programmes -- PYP, MYP, & DP), are a highly connected professional group via ISLN (the International Schools Library Network) — and they represent a good mix of nationalities themselves, as well as expat experiences.

Ten years ago ISLN started the Red Dot book awards — shortlists of recently published books from around the world worth promoting in their schools -- which means books worth buying multiple copies of and worth readers discussing. It was modeled on similar awards run by similar teacher-librarian networks in other countries (e.g., the Panda Awards in China and the Sakura Medal in Japan).

NB: "Red dot" is a proud epithet in Singapore, appropriated from a disparaging comment made years ago by the leader of a neighboring country. The island may be just a little red dot on the map, but the 54-year-old nation now exudes power and potential.

For the Red Dot book awards, eight titles (published or translated within the past four years) are selected in four age categories and students are encouraged to read as many as possible and then to vote for their favorite, with category winners announced for each school and for Singapore as a whole. The voting is just for fun -- there is no prize for the winning titles or authors. The real prize is the students actually reading the shortlists. (You can browse ten years of the book selections by clicking through the slideshows below.)

Early Years -- all shortlists -- on Goodreads

Younger Readers -- all shortlists -- on Goodreads

Older Readers -- all shortlists -- on Goodreads

Mature Readers -- all shortlists -- on Goodreads

For the ISLN teacher-librarians who participate in this annual exercise, the personal reward is found in the group process of choosing titles for the shortlists. I've blogged before about the evolution of the award -- and about the wide reading we go through looking for the right ingredients to make up a balanced basket of offerings, always discovering books we love, even if they don't make the shortlist.

I've also written about the difficulty in ensuring the diversity of our shortlists, remembering diversity is relative. So many of the lists of "best diverse books" for children are not very diverse from an international point of view. Nadine Bailey (another former ISLN member, now working in Beijing) calls it the #NotOurDiversity problem. She speaks for all of us international school teacher-librarians in lamenting the lack of "mirrors" for our third-culture kids and diaspora clientele.

(Have we made mistakes? Yes, I cringe as I see the picture book version of "Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortenson on the first year's list -- as he is now known for his "Three Cups of Deceit.")

Ideally Singapore books would be included every year, but it doesn't always happen, given the fact that the baskets need to balance not only geographically but also in terms of genre, theme, setting, style, etc. This list in Goodreads shows the ones that have made the shortlists, including "Secrets of Singapore," a fascinating compendium of information by a mother/daughter team; a picture book biography of the founding father of Singapore ("A Boy Named Harry: The Childhood of Lee Kuan Yew"); and the superlative faux history about an artist growing up in Malaya/Singapore, "The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye" by a Malaysian graphic artist.

Books relating to the region are also highly desirable, e.g., "Earth Dragon, Fire Hare," a middle school novel by a New Zealand author about Malaya in 1948 featuring a Kiwi soldier and a Chinese Malay freedom fighter; "Tall Story," a (literally) fantastic story straddling the Philippines and the UK; and a gripping non-fiction account of the 2018 Thai cave rescue, "Rising Water."

Translations are the most important kind of “diversity” or “disruption” needed for the Anglo-centric collections in our schools. As Tiffany Tsao put it, 'power carves the channels that determine how Culture with a capital C flows among countries and their inhabitants.’ And the residual power of the historical British and American empires in Asia is evident in countries like Singapore (though it theoretically recognizes three other official languages — Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil).

We always welcome works in translations, as evidenced by these past Red Dot choices.

That's why this Global Literature in Libraries Initiative is so valuable, highlighting authors and works in different languages for us to read. I particularly appreciate their LibraryThing catalog of children's and YA literature (originals and translations) for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Polish, and Spanish (so far).

Having said that, IBBY (the International Board on Books for Young People) is the most important source of information about global literature for children and young adults -- and it's always been a mystery to me why Singapore isn't a member (though I almost forgive them because of their annual Asian Festival of Children's Content (AFCC) which does so much to promote regional authors and illustrators). I moved to Thailand two years ago and was thrilled to be back in a country with an IBBY branch.

• IBBY Honour Books

• IBBY Booklist on Young People with Disabilities

• Bookbird journal (via Project Muse) - e.g., read this article by professor Kathy Short (think: Worlds of Words) based on a keynote she gave at the 2018 IBBY Congress in Athens: "The Dangers of Reading Globally."

• Biennial congresses - the next one is in Moscow, 5-7 Sep 2020, and the one after that is Malaysia, 5-8 Sep 2022 (and I expect all our active Asian teacher-librarian networks to be fully contributing)

The Bologna Children's Book Fair, where every April countries converge in Italy to exhibit and exchange publishing rights, is strongly connected to IBBY -- and is a wonderful place to physically browse the best of children's books internationally. Next month is its sister event, the Shanghai Children's Book Fair, and I'm hoping some fellow teacher-librarians will be attending and passing on books to watch out for in translation.

I was lucky enough to be at the Bologna Children's Book Fair this past April when the winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award was announced. When the crowd around me heard the name "Bart Moeyaert," it burst into wild cheers and clapping. But my colleague Philip Williams and I just looked at each other in embarrassment and said, "Who?" A quick search on our phones for books to immediately order revealed the disappointing news that no English translations of his work are still in print (though I trust the re-publishing wheels have started turning since then). Knowing about good authors and books is only half the battle.

In seeking books to put on a Red Dot shortlist, we have often come up against the problem of availability, e.g., does a translation exist?, is the book still in print?, and/or is it easy for our schools to order the book and get it delivered to Singapore?

Awards, no matter how small (like the Red Dot), create ripples of awareness. That's why we teacher-librarians watch each others' awards closely, looking for titles to read and potentially add to our own collections or shortlists, e.g.,

• the Panda Awards in China

• the Sakura Medal in Japan

• the Golden Dragon Awards in Hong Kong

• the Morning Calm Medal in Korea

• the Bangkok Book Awards in Thailand

But it's frustrating if you can't easily get your hands on books from other countries.

For example, Nadine Bailey and I are both judges for the Neev Book Awards, a relatively new award looking for "high-quality children's literature from India" leading to "a fuller understanding of India, Indian lives, and Indian stories." This year the winning title in the Neev YA category is "Year of the Weeds" -- a book we passionately recommend -- and one which pairs perfectly with a former Red Dot title from Canada, "Blue Gold" -- as both highlight the human costs of mining metals to feed our appetites for the latest technology.

While the Canadian novel is readily available via sites like Amazon.com or Book Depository, the Indian one is not (yet). Yes, it is listed on the Amazon India website, but people outside of India can't use that (without a credit card registered to an address in India).

I know both Nadine and I will be advocating for "Year of the Weeds" to our colleagues on the Bangkok Book Awards and Panda Awards committees (the local ones we now serve on, having cut our teeth in Singapore on the Red Dot Book Awards). Getting copies will be tricky, but we're working on ways to help others get a chance to read this brilliantly humorous novel that offers an insightful critique of the abuses of democracy and capitalism through the lens of the Gond tribe, an indigenous people of India. (If you aren't familiar with the Gond, please seek out "The London Jungle Book" -- as you will never forget the arresting images and metaphors the author/illustrator employs to explain his culture in that picture book memoir.)

Following and participating in awards like the Red Dots is invaluable for those of us entrusted with expanding the arena of possible discovery for young people. As Dr. Edith Ackermann so eloquently expressed it, "We have a responsibility to introduce children to things they don't yet know they will love."

I view these annual award exercises as formative assessments, where the "canon" taught in our schools (or stored in our book cupboards) is the equivalent of summative assessments. We librarians can help those canons evolve by continuously exploring world literature in order to provide new, refreshing, mind-expanding reading material -- for our students and our teachers.

The difficulty in delivering decent booklists....

WARNING: This post will mainly be of interest to school librarians using Follett Destiny — and it is born of frustration based on tools available.

Every (school) librarian faces the challenge of delivering a decent-looking booklist to their community — for students, teachers, parents, or fellow librarians.

We want the list to be attractive — so ideally it includes the book COVER. We want the list to be informative — so besides the TITLE and AUTHOR (both critical pieces of information), ideally it includes a DESCRIPTION of the book or indication of its content or genre. We want the list to be actionable — so ideally it includes a LINK or POINTER, leading the reader to the catalog or somewhere else the book can be found.

Side conversation: What about leading readers to Amazon or Book Depository? For example, this recent blog post by Pernille Ripp, a middle-school teacher (not a librarian) gives us a very valuable list of the most popular books in her classroom this past year, delivered in a long blog post with every title linked to Amazon (as well as 76 Google slides, one title per slide) and a link to the same list re-created on Amazon. If people buy the books on Amazon, her classroom probably gets a percentage. The Singapore librarians network — ISLN — similarly posts their annual Red Dot Book Awards shortlists with links to Book Depository — and makes money for their organization by virtue of people buying via their links. Should our school library be doing the same thing? Give a link to our catalog as well as a place where purchases will benefit us?

I would add two more desired elements in a booklist: ORIGINAL DATE OF PUBLICATION (which lets the reader appreciate the age of the work — 19thc, 20thc, this year, etc.) and CULTURAL CONNECTION, i.e., some attempt to identify the relative diversity of the works in the list. (See my previous blog post on PRIZING BALANCE, which touches upon the difficulty of tagging/searching for such attributes.)

When my English Department asked me to add more books for their list of suggested summer reading for students entering the IB English Literature program in August, this is what their sample list of 20 titles looked like. Notice how they were trying to get a bit of geographical/cultural info into the Genre column.

The limitations of such a list are obvious. So I took up the task of creating a list of 200+ fiction and non-fiction “adult” titles (which is what they wanted — the lack of YA is a separate issue) all available in our library (which means there might be other books I would have put on the list if I had currently had a copy). The size was determined by the number of students (120+) — so there is sufficient choice of books for the cohort. The number of titles meant I needed tools that would let me scale re-use of bibliographic information.

I started by making a Resource List within Follett Destiny based on our library collection. But how to deliver that list? As I explained back in 2013 in this blog post, you can’t just share a link out of Destiny. You have to hand-edit the link (which gets ugly) so then it’s useful to turn it into something more simple, like this bit.ly — http://bit.ly/nistdplit — which takes you to the page below. But that Destiny output doesn’t print very prettily — and you don’t get the Description of the book on the page (instead you have to individually scroll through the titles). Not ideal.

I know Follett haven’t bothered to improve their Classic interface (like making links easily shareable) because they were counting on the new Discover interface and its Collections feature. But that hasn’t improved very fast either. Collections aren’t meant for lists over 100 items, they say (so I couldn’t import my 200+ Resource List into a Collection) — and when I experimented with trying to half import, half edit a Collection, I got the result below.

Notice there is no Author output in the list, Title covers that were explicitly uploaded into the Classic interface of Destiny are not output in the Discover interface Collection, and only books added to Collections from within the Discover interface get a QR code and link — i.e., titles imported from a Resource List don’t.

I couldn’t deliver a PDF looking like that.

So I considered other tools that would let me deliver a list of 200+ titles. Ones that let me tap into a big reservoir of bibliographic data.

There’s Goodreads — but, no, the Description of a book can’t be included in a list Display — only your Review (so I’d have to put a Review into each title). Which is what I’ve done for shorter lists, e.g., the Red Dot Book Awards shortlists — see below:

And there’s LibraryThing — but, again, the Description of a book isn’t one of the options when setting up how your catalog displays lists of titles.

Last year I set up a NIST Library LibraryThing account (and TinyCat) to collect our students’ “best reads of the year” — and I laboriously transferred their comments into the Comments field of the LibraryThing titles, just so I could produce a booklist that included them, but it would be useful if I could output a summary Description of the book in the same way:

Someone suggested Novelist (the EBSCO tool), but you can’t add titles — and they don’t have a lot of non-fiction in their database.

So I went back to Destiny. Reports weren’t a solution — as you can’t output a Cover. The best I could do was to export my Destiny Resource List as a Bibliography — which at least gave me the Author, Title, and Description.

which I then copied into a Google Doc — and then I hand-edited each title, adding the cover, enhancing the format of the Title and Author, and adding extra information. Which took time. See below (or view the whole document via http://bit.ly/2019summerdplit).

Google and Wikipedia were my friends for determining the original date of publication and the Author bit. That’s the kind of information I wish my library catalog would store/output.

Yes, the Author information is my pathetic attempt to provide some cultural background on them. And, yes, there are too many “Americans” on this list, but of course they are a diverse bunch as the names sometimes indicate. And I know saying “man”/”woman” is barebones, but that’s all Google and Wikipedia can tell me right now. (Maybe authors should edit their own pages and tell us how they want to be identified.)

In future I want to have far more translations there. So don’t judge me on the diversity of the list right now. This post is about better generation tools.

And I wish my library catalog would let me create / maintain lists of Authors — and lists of Series — as that is information I would love to curate and share with students.

If anyone can point me in the direction of better tools than these (short of telling me to change my library system!), I am listening.

Prizing Balance: an exploration of world children's literature

NOTE:  This is a reproduction of my 30-minute (whirlwind) presentation at the Librarians' Knowledge Sharing Workshop held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in November 2017.  I have tried to note which slides relate to which points, within the text below.

Diversity is a hot topic in children’s and YA literature at the moment, but for us working as school librarians in international schools, it’s always been an issue as we strive to provide access to texts that reflect our varied student populations, curriculum concerns, local context, and worldview.

NETWORK-BASED ANNUAL BOOK AWARDS

One of the most fertile channels for discovering new literature to bring into our schools is the annual book award shortlists generated by country-based international school librarian networks.  Most of you in the audience have participated in one or more of these, whether getting your students to read and vote on the books or working with your network colleagues to help choose books to shortlist every year. 

Of all the experiences of being in a locally-based international school teacher librarian network like ISLN in Singapore or BLISS in Bangkok, the most rewarding aspect for me has been being involved in the running of their annual book awards.  Serving on such a committee means belonging to a group dedicated to finding books that would be great book group choices for students of different ages.  I love the ongoing purposeful interaction with other teacher-librarians, as we struggle to satisfy our criteria and deadlines.

Asia seems to be where this international school library phenomenon started. (Slide 2)

When Barb Reid and I began the Red Dot book awards in Singapore, now in its 9th year, we were inspired by China with its Panda Awards and Japan with its Sakura Medal.  Later, Hong Kong, Korea, and Thailand set up awards, as did Switzerland and Germany.  More recently I discovered the Jarul Award in India, which is for picture books published in India.

• Singapore: Red Dot Awards
• China: Panda Awards
• Japan: Sakura Medal
• Hong Kong: Golden Dragon Book Awards
• Thailand: Bangkok Book Awards
• South Korea: Morning Calm Medal
• Switzerland: Golden Cow Bell Awards
• Germany: Hansel and Gretel Award
• India: Jarul Book Award 

All the awards listed above have varying criteria and structure:  in their number of list categories (e.g., Singapore produces 4 lists, Bangkok 3), number of titles on a list (e.g., Singapore has 8 titles per list, Bangkok 6), criteria for inclusion (e.g., published how recently - Singapore is the past 4 years, Bangkok the past 5), timing of the shortlist announcement/voting cycle, and activities related to the annual results (e.g., Singapore has had a Readers Cup competition, Switzerland produces literal Swiss cow bells (custom-cast) to send to each author-winner).

The less concrete but more important selection criteria - e.g., "excellence" but also "diversity of author, theme, genre, setting and narrative style" (Bangkok Book Awards) - are an ongoing challenge (as I will discuss in detail further on).

Each network also has its own time, space, and financial constraints regarding the process of determining a longlist and shortlist. 

Is it easy to meet in person to discuss books, or is the book group in effective a virtual one?  Does that determine how many people can be on the committee?  Who should provide input to the longlist -- and shortlist?  (What about students?)  How many people will have time to read or ability to access each longlist book in order to contribute to the shortlist decision? Given the budget/acquisition cycle in the school or country, when is the ideal time to publish the shortlists so books will be in the hands of students soon enough and long enough to be able to vote?  (And how important is the voting element anyway?)

BOOK AWARD MODELS

Let's step back and consider four major models of book awards.  (Slide 5)

• Popular Survey -- one person, one vote -- epitomized by the BBC Big Read (first famously done in 2003) and the annual Goodreads Choice Awards.  These awards are summative and democratic in nature.  One such annual popular survey for children's literature is the K.O.A.L.A. (Kids Own Australian Literature Award), which has been going for 31 years now (more re this award below).

• Professionally Curated "Best of" Booklists -- the most obvious examples for children's literature are the annual national ones, often organized by library associations, such as the US Newbery/Caldecott, the UK Carnegie/Greenaway, the Australian CBCA "Book of the Year", the Canadian CCBC Book Awards, and the NZ Book Awards -- though there is also the international biennial IBBY Hans Christian Andersen ones for authors/illustrators.  These are summative within a year, but formative over time of a canon.
   
• Book Tournaments via Brackets -- where pairs of books are pitted against each other in a series of rounds until a final winner is declared (by a judge or team of judges).  In children's literature the most prominent example is School Library Journal's annual "Battle of the Kids' Books" -- though there are adult ones as well, e.g., The Morning News Tournament of Books.  Note there is a free online app called BracketCloud that allows anyone to set up their own single or double elimination brackets, e.g., see this description of having students set their own personal reading challenges using Google Drive -- so they are the "judge."
   
• One Book, One Community - Not really an award, but a popular reading initiative where a particular book is chosen (by professionals) for a group (whether grade, school, city, or state) to read and discuss within a given time span.  See this Wikipedia entry for many examples of such a shared book experience.  A powerful way to extend this would be to choose a title that has different editions, i.e., picture book version, young readers edition, and adult edition (including print, digital, and audio formats), so a wider range of readers can participate.

Most of our network awards fall into the "professionally curated" bucket.  And most of us then have the students vote for their own personal favorite such that winners can be announced.  However, a point of criticism has been that students are only able to vote for something on a list that an adult has pre-selected -- which can be called a delusion of democracy.

But what's the important thing here?  The lists?  The books?  The reading?  Student agency in determining lists?  The structured competition? 

Perhaps we need to ask ourselves:  Why?  Why did our networks set up these awards?  Why does each school participate each year?  The answers vary.

For example, the instigation for the Red Dot Book Awards in Singapore grew out of Barb Reid and I being concerned about the multiple copies of the "same old books" sitting on the shelves in the primary school reading cupboards, reflecting "classics" from the dominant culture of teachers working in our respective international schools. 

We wanted a reading initiative that would allow us to regularly refresh the book cupboards with recent literature reflecting the diversity of our community and supporting our school values of internationalism -- i.e., books worth buying multiple copies of and discussing.  The professionally curated "award" list was a good vehicle because what we really wanted was to invest in some books for a "one book, one community" reading experience.  Voting for the "best book" from the shortlist is just a diversionary tactic -- to encourage the reading.

I'm now thinking I want to complement that kind of award with an annual popular survey one -- to address the goal of kids sharing their favorite reading with the community, no matter where the books come from.   For that kind of a "children's choice" popularity contest I am inspired by the K.O.A.L.A. awards in Australia, which I learned about while visiting Cranbrook Junior School in Sydney a few months ago. (Slide 6)

Megan Light, the primary teacher-librarian there and one of the award's administrators, explained how the annual awards are structured to be both formative and summative.  The shortlists are the top 10 books that kids nominate (criteria: Australian and published within the past ten years) in four age categories.  If titles are shortlisted five times without winning, then they go into the K.O.A.L.A. Hall of Fame (a wonderful summative list along with the cumulative winners list).  Megan pointed out that the nomination process is a good excuse to discuss the award's criteria with students, e.g., what makes a book Australian, how to check the "publication age" of a book, and what age of reader is a book best suited for.

THE CURATION TASK

In choosing books for the curated-list kind of award, we adults also sometimes struggle to figure out the right age category for a particular title, but the bigger challenge is in determining what set of titles in a category will satisfy the not-so-concrete criteria of having a "broad range of books" across the shortlist, which we all agree (to varying degrees) is important. (Slide 7)

Stealing ideas from other networks' annual shortlists is the easiest path.  Hence, there is a great amount of overlap between our choices, all the while coveting works from Asia as well as works in translation.  And we are all looking for books that relate to international issues.

Refugees are an obvious topical star at the moment.  Last year Singapore chose the Canadian title, "Stormy Seas" -- a large-format upper-primary/middle school picture book for older readers with parallel storylines of refugees from Nazi Germany, Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, and the Ivory Coast -- which we in Bangkok have also selected.  Interestingly, Alan Gratz (USA) came out with a similar (chapter) book called "Refugee," featuring three narratives based on Nazi Germany, Cuba, and Syria. Sometimes we're just spoiled for choice! (Slide 8) 

I recently read a 2016 Routledge academic text devoted to analyzing children's books awards, with chapters written by different experts -- Prizing Children's Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children's Book Awards.  See Slide 9 for the cover, and slide 10 for a screenshot of the table of contents as well as the purchase price.  I suggest you peruse the free preview via Google Books before deciding whether to buy, though I highly recommend the contents on the whole. 

The chapter by Claire Bradford on Australian books (now eligible for the the US (ALA) Printz award) is particularly interesting, where the conclusion is that only Australian books that are not "too" Australian succeed in the American arena.  June Cummins's chapter on how the American Newbery is not really about excellence, but is instead an identity-based award, deserves attention -- as does her argument for the use of intersectionality theory. (Slide 11) 

A BALANCED MEAL

When it comes to generating a diverse shortlist, my best metaphor is the balanced meal (Slide 12) -- and this begs the question of what attributes or facets we should all be considering in terms of diversity.  

Luckily the people at Kirkus Review (in collaboration with Baker & Taylor, the booksellers) published some diversity collection lists last September, and I did a basic reverse-engineering of their taxonomy. (See Slides 13-17 inclusive.)

Pay attention!  Because all of us need to be considering our own library catalogs (and subject headings) in light of the work they've done, though their facets are aimed at the American context.

Kirkus tagged books by four diverse elements:  race/culture, religion, gender expression, and/or disability. (Slide 14) 

And for each of those, they then categorized the book to what extent that feature is present.  CENTRAL = central to the book; IDENTIFICATION = relevant to the plot; or INCLUSION = when the diverse element is part of the background or seems to be normal. (Slide 13)

Besides those attributes, they also looked at types of experience for the characters in the book in relation to the diversity (e.g., coming out, reckoning with, etc.) and whether they were lead characters, background characters, ensemble casts, or families.   Of course, they also considered what I would call "standard variables" -- e,g, genre, time (past, future, or present), and the age of the assumed reader. (Slide 15)

As international school educators, we also consider how books can be linked to our schools' values, mission statements, and curriculum.  For example, those of us working in IB (International Baccalaureate) schools are always on the lookout for books that reflect the Learner Profile as well as ones to support whatever PSE (personal, social, and emotional) curriculum is used (e.g., see this UWCSEA East Primary Libguide). (Slide 17)

If you're interested in a taxonomy for Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), look at the results of Myra Garces-Bacsal's ongoing project for the Office of Educational Research at the National Institute of Education (NIE) in Singapore (based on the CASEL project in the US), which she is publishing as a Social and Emotional Bookshelf on her blog.  The more raw tags for each book can be seen on her LibraryThing catalog for Gathering Books.

EXPANDING OUR BORDERS

As international schools, probably one of the most important elements of diversity we want to consider is geographic connections, whether local, national, or regional.  Like Kirkus's distinction between three degrees of representation of diversity in a book, we might consider three types of connection -- 1) geography as it relates to the characters or setting of the text; 2) the background or origin of the author; and 3) location of the publisher.

This raises the question of, who wrote it?  And who did they write it for?  Looking a book in terms of accuracy (e.g., did they get the details right?), authority (e.g., what culture is the author/publisher from?), and authenticity (e.g., is it realistic? from what perspective? is it convincing?).  (Slide 18)

In considering a book with a particular geographic orientation, we also have to ask questions in relation to the potential reader (i.e., students in our schools).  1) Will it appeal to them?  2) Is it easily available, in the sense, will we be able to source it and get it into our libraries? 3) Is it accessible to the reader (e.g., does it require background knowledge or a glossary or translation of terms in order to be understandable? how close it it to the students' current experiences?). (Slide 19)

For example, I recently read "A Moment Comes" by Jennifer Bradbury as part of the shortlist process for the BLISS Book Awards.  It's historical fiction set during the partition of India in 1947 and features three narrative perspectives (a Muslim boy, a Sikh girl, and a British girl).  Indian terms are used throughout -- and like a good reader, I persevered and tried to get the meaning from the context.  Only at the end did I discover a glossary, explaining all the terms, which would have been useful to me as I read along (sigh).  As the name "Jennifer Bradley" isn't particularly Indian, I did a bit of online sleuthing to determine whether she was writing from a position of accuracy and authenticity -- and it turns out she spent a year living in the Punjab.  (Slide 20)

Another book I read for the shortlist was "A Flame in the Mist" - fantasy historical fiction set in samurai Japan -- which also provides a glossary in the back that I also didn't realize was there until I finished the book (sigh sigh).  My research on the author, Renee Ahdieh, revealed she is an American whose mother is from South Korea, so she has Asian roots. (Slide 21)

For authenticity and accuracy about a geographical region, translations are the best bet -- and for the Red Dot Book Awards we have always tried to include them, watching the winners of awards like the Batchelder Award in the US and the Marsh Award in the UK.  Similarly the Hans Christian Andersen Award, probably the most important international children's book award, is an excellent source of books that provide geographical (and linguistic) diversity. 

One past choice -- "Moribito" by Nahoko Uehashi (winner of the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen) -- is a translation of a popular Japanese series that features a female samurai -- so a natural read-on recommendation for "A Flame in the Mist" mentioned above.  (Slide 22). 

"Bronze and Sunflower" by Cao Wenxuan (the 2016 winner and first Chinese author) has been a shortlist choice for several of the international school library book awards. Set during the Cultural Revolution, the slow-moving but heartwarming novel is part of a very popular series in China.   It's exactly the kind of book our students might not have discovered without our intervention.  One of our key functions is to expose readers to books they otherwise might have missed or books with slightly different writing styles due to cultural differences.  (Slide 23)

There is a wonderful blog and Facebook Group called the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative (GLII) which promotes books in translation. 

The founder, Rachel Hildebrandt, has recently organized people to develop online catalogs of children's and young adult literature in translation using LibraryThing.  The number of languages will only expand over time.  (Slide 24)

How are cultural differences bridged in texts?    How do authors and translators ease readers into unfamiliar territory and accommodate varying expectations (beyond the use of glossaries noted above)?

One of my favorite bloggers, Venkatesh Rao on Ribbonfarm, who usually writes about technology and business, published a blog post in 2009 called “The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink,” in which he discusses the choices available to writers in light of the issue of potentially different cultural markets.  NB: He was born in India but now lives and works in the US.

1). The Fishbowl Style - where you assume everyone is swimming in the same water of understanding - I.e. you don’t explain anything because you are writing from within a culture; 

2)  The Expository Style - where you (laboriously) explain everything as you go for “outsider” readers;

3). The Global Contextual Style - where local/global cultural analogies are made, e.g., reference a Bollywood actor, but compare them to a supposedly well-known Hollywood one;

4).  The Literary Way - what he calls the “Salman Rushdie method” — where you just write creatively and demand the reader work to construct meaning - or live with the opacity! 

Rao argues that hyperlinks offer such a great potential to writers today, to allow "Fishbowl" writing thanks to hyperlinks behind words that might require cultural explanation.  While this is common in online blog and journalistic writing, it has yet to be fully utilized in many (any?) of the ebooks available, especially not mainstream literature.  Instead the internet is assumed to be sitting there as one big online “glossary.” (Slides 25-26)

DEEPER INTO THE WORLD

When it comes to world fiction, there’s one book I highly recommend as a tool to improve the balance of your collection and the information in your catalog (i.e., intellectual access or subject headings): "The Complete World Guide to Contemporary Fiction" by Michael Orthofer. (Slide 27-28)

Unlike the previous book suggestion, this one is highly affordable - about US$15 for the ebook or paperback — plus he has an information-packed website of reviews.  In the book, Orthofer provides a narrative tour of authors from different countries or regions. This helps me look for titles in my collection that I need to add subject headings to, e.g., "Translations -- from BLAH language -- into BLAH language" -- as well as geographic connections.  (If you are fascinated by who would produce such a labor of love, read this 2016 New Yorker profile of Orthofer.)

Another resource you might consider if you’re really interested in what makes certain books culturally specific and to what extent those books are accessible to readers from other cultures, see this Routledge academic text "Subjectivity in Asian Children’s Literature and Film: Global Theories and Implications (Children's Literature and Culture)" edited by John Stephens, a professor of children's literature at Macquarie University in Australia.

See slides 29-30 for screenshots of the chapters and authors, which cover a range of Asian countries and formats.  Unfortunately this book is fairly expensive (even rented as a textbook),  but luckily many parts of it can be read via Google Books here.

TRACKING DIVERSITY

As we international teacher-librarians on the award committees come together each year to find a balanced list of titles, I’m always curious about how everyone tracks their reading over the year, looking for our variables of diversity.

Solving this problem of diversity -- what I called the "balanced basket" problem (in writing about the Red Dot Book awards back in 2014) -- can take up 80% of the time (according to the Pareto principle of 80/20 split).   In Singapore this often meant lugging bags of books to evenings meet-ups, sharing and swapping titles, in the hopes of getting someone else to confirm that a work would work perfectly to enhance our offerings.

In slide 31 are photos of some paper bookmarks we used at UWCSEA East to quickly record things about a book as we read it — what country it’s from, what values it connects with, genres, grade-level appropriateness, literary features, etc.  I use Goodreads in the same way - setting up bookshelves for each attribute.  Goodreads isn't the most perfect social reading site, but it is the most accessible.

This raises the question of how we provide intellectual access to the diversity of our collections through our library catalog.  One way to make these variables searchable is via subject headings.

For example, if we have two Follett Destiny catalogs at our school (primary and secondary) and both want to track books about gender issues, we might agree that both catalogs will use a local subject heading of "LGBT Plus - Gender roles - Free To Be@NIST" (where Free to Be@NIST is the name of the student group looking at gender issues).  This gets around the problem of teaching people what acronym to search for (LGBTQIAP+ or LGBTQ+ or GLBT, etc.).

When it comes to genre identification, our primary and secondary catalogs might use different terms when talking to students, so then we could each use a site-specific subject heading (rather than a shared local one), so only patrons of the secondary library would be able to search for and see "Genre - Realistic / contemporary fiction - NIST" -- whereas the primary library catalog might use just "Realistic fiction".  (Slide 32)

Slide 33 shows how we use subject headings to track which books in our catalog reflect values in the IB Learner Profile or ones associated with Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) -- as well as geographic connections.  (Slide 33)

WHAT'S IN A BALANCED BASKET?

So back to the problem of how our network committees get balanced baskets of shortlisted titles. 

How many aspects of diversity are we are looking for? 

Ensuring a range of genres is the usual starting place.  When I came to NIST, the Y8 team asked me to run sessions with the kids looking at these genres:  nonfiction, horror/supernatural, humor, fantasy historical fiction, realistic, science fiction/dystopia, and graphic books. (Slide 35)

But in talking to students about genres, I realized you can break them down more simply into three baskets based on a continuum, moving from unreal to real:  Unrealistic Fiction, Realistic Fiction, and Nonfiction. (Slide 36)

By applying the dimension of time (past, present, and future) to those three baskets, you can start to map more specific genres.  For example, if realistic fiction about the past is "historical fiction," then unrealistic fiction about the past might be "alternative history" or "historical fantasy" -- and nonfiction about the past is history or biography. (Slide 37)

Adding in an emotional response to a book gets you to more genres, e.g., realistic fiction in the present time could be either Mystery, Horror, Thriller, Humor, or Romance -- depending on the emotion it invokes.  Slide 38 shows some emoji-book-review bookmarks we use, asking students to consider whether a book made them cry, smile, think, or be scared.

But the basics are the three categories:  Unrealistic Fiction, Realistic Fiction, and Nonfiction.

What if each professional longlist reader for our book awards came to the table prepared with a basket of books, balanced for the following variables (while also adhering to the publication time conditions, e.g., with the past 4 years)?  (Slide 39)

• Genres (unrealistic fiction, realistic fiction, and nonfiction)
• Local / Regional / Global connection (whether author, setting, or publisher)
• Diversity / Social / Global issues
• Male/Female appeal
• Translation
• Format, welcoming any:
  • Graphic / Wordless
  • Verse novel
  • Poetry
  • Short stories

What tool might allow us to share our respective proposed baskets?  Barb and I dummied up a Padlet example -- see Slide 40.  It's just a suggestion.  We'll see how it goes in this next cycle of longlist to shortlist.

The geographical balance is often the hardest to ensure.  Working on the Red Dot Books shortlists, we might find ourselves with a great set of titles, but then suddenly realize when we looked more closely that we had no Australian books or no Canadian books -- and would have to go back through our longlist more carefully. How much easier if everyone had noted geographic connections as they read throughout the year.  

But we always got there in the end, as the backlist of shortlists over the past 9 years of the Singapore Red Dot books demonstrate (see them all here).  Getting the balance right takes time, but is so worth the effort.

LEADership and diversity

I've been reading and listening to Peter Senge, the leadership and management change guru, quite a bit recently.  He talks about the the root of the word "leader" being one who steps over the threshold, lifting their foot in vulnerability, and doing what's right for the whole, moving forward.  He says real cultural change is inquiry into our blind spots and letting go. (Slide 41)

We as teacher-librarians must be good leaders of diversity.  We can help our community ask, What is self? What is other?  Reading and noting what aspects of diversity resonate with each of us as we read can help.  We can't promote diversity without knowing ourselves and our own community. 

We have the power to put texts in the reach of our students that will speak across cultural thresholds.

Setting up a village school library in Myanmar

Note:  A version of this was posted October 16, 2016, on the Singapore international school librarian network's blog.

If you were asked to help set up a new school library in a new primary school building in a farming village outside Mandalay, and you wouldn't be able to visit the site until the day before the new school's grand opening, how would you tackle it?  That was the challenge proposed to me in June 2016 by a parent service/charity group at the school where I was working, United World College of Southeast Asia in Singapore.

PACE, which stands for Parents' Action for Community and Service, has built several schools in Cambodia together with the Tabitha Foundation over the past decade.  In 2016 they teamed up with John Stevens and the 100Schools organization in Myanmar to build their first school there, in Shar Pin village.  And it is the first school built by 100Schools to have a library included.

Before:

After (the library is the far-most left room of the new building):

Luckily at the East campus there is a Burmese parent, with whom I'd done a couple of middle-school service trips to Myanmar.  Thet is not only bilingual, but highly organized, efficient, and creative.  She liaised with the Myanmar Library Association (MLA) to get us lists of recommended books to buy as well as book donations for the school.  She also got in touch with the Third Story Children's Books project, which publishes stories in ethnic languages for children in Myanmar.

Thanks to Thet's language and organization skills, over 400 children's books in Burmese were purchased or donated -- which we picked up once we arrived in Myanmar.  Thet and Thida, another Burmese speaker in our group, were able to sort the various books into 11 basic categories -- and the rest of us labeled them.

Poetry - PINK TRIANGLE
Fun Comics - WHITE
Cultural Stories - DARK ORANGE
True Stories - DARK RED
General Stories - LT ORANGE
General Knowledge - BLUE
Fun Learning - LT GREEN
Environment - DARK GREEN
Health - YELLOW
Teacher Reference - YELLOW TRIANGLE
Group Readers - PURPLE

Previously in Singapore, Thet and I had brainstormed what orientation the students and teachers would need, in order to ensure proper use and maintenance of the library.  We came up with a series of posters, illustrated by my talented library staff, that would serve to both decorate the library and establish the library culture for students and teachers.

We also created about 80 laminated shelf-markers -- using simple animal logos and different colored paper.  The children were told that when they came to the library each time, they should pick an animal and a color to keep track of where they found books.  To help them remember where in the "village of books" (i.e., the library) each book "lived" -- so they could help it get back to its right place. 

With Thet's help, I also did a talk about book care on opening day where I asked the children to consider how books are like people.  (They can be old or young, tall or small, speak different languages, have a front, a back, a spine, etc.  And they need to be treated with care and respect, especially when it comes to turning pages.)

Through Thet's connections, we also met up with a wonderful young Burmese teacher and storyteller, Tess (aka Tin Ma Ma Htet), who works as a professional development coordinator for the Phaung Daw Oo School and the Monastic Education Development Group in Mandalay --and with the Third Story Children's Books Project.

Small world connection:  Tess has also been involved with the teacher training project our Dover colleagues have done in Burma.  (See a video interview with her in 2015 here.)

Tess entertained the Shar Pin students with storytelling on Sunday, while the rest of us were setting up the library, and we trust that she will continue to visit Shar Pin to see that the books in the library are being fully utilized.

The school's official opening was Monday, October 3, 2016 -- and here are some basic shots of what the library finally looked like.  

The PACE team was amazing -- and it was such an honor to work with them.  The cost of the whole 5-classroom school?  US$72k.  The library room itself?  US$7k.  US$3k went to the library design and materials.  I can't wait to do another.

Extra:  Thet took me a local civic library in Mandalay -- the Brahmaso Library.  It's a lending library with a reading room attached.  Closed stacks.  Card catalog.  But also with a digital terminal to content provided by UK universities and the British Council.  See photos here.

Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in the Library

A phrase I have wanted to expand upon for years -- so it sat in my "to-blog-about" folder until last month when I needed a presentation topic for the School Librarian Connection - Prague 2016 conference I was helping Dianne McKenzie organize.

My descriptive blurb eventually went like this:  "An exploration of different ways school libraries support these three key values and provide a platform for 'intimations of excellence' and meaningful connections for our students.  How our spaces, resources and presence act as 'intellectual middleware' to amplify learning."

Howard Gardner gets the inspiration credit, thanks to his two books -- "The Disciplined Mind" in 1999, in which he argued that students could study just three things (Darwin for truth, Mozart for beauty, and the Holocaust for (the absence of) good -- and its 2011 re-write for the digital age, "Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: educating for the virtues in an age of Truthiness and Twitter," in which he shifted to more general divergent/convergent characteristics (convergent on truth, divergent on beauty, and a combination for goodness -- divergent with respect to cultures and customs, while convergent on ethics).

Couldn't we apply one of those three tags to everything in our library?  Yes -- as an interesting tag -- or perhaps to highlight related books in an ongoing display area. (I'm not someone who is anxious to create new sections, e.g., just for the IB Theory of Knowledge books.  Dewey is far easier for organization.)

We are sitting on mounds of treasure.  That is our eternal problem.  (Cue the next slide:  Smaug in Tolkien's 1836 illustration -- though we librarians never want to be associated with guardian dragons.)  But how to share it?  How to let people know about the mountains of absolutely fantastic stuff we are sitting on top of?  And by stuff, I mean not just what the curriculum requires or what the student already knows they're interested in.  (Cue the slide on the intersection of desirability (students' interest), feasibility (curriculum constraints), and viability (what resources we can offer).)  What about the stuff the students don't yet know they could fall in love with?

I'm particularly interested in how we leverage potentially interesting materials.  (Cue the slide on Michael Wesch and meaningful connections....)  Which brings us to the concept of 'intellectual middleware' -- or cognitive augmentation.  Which is anything that helps make those connections.  That supports intellectual access.  Levers -- something small that helps you move something big.

Subject headings are the most old-fashioned but still useful.  Controlled vocabulary.  Human ideas, not just keywords.  Yet we have to help our users know about them.  Whether through resource lists, links, etc.  What ideas are relevant to them?

One thing our school is now pushing on several fronts is the set of 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Our students are being encouraged to make those connections, whether in the classroom or in the service learning situations.  So in the library we are starting to use that same filter.

I finished the presentation with an overview of the differences between federated search (e.g., via an OPAC like Destiny) and a discovery layer (e.g., via EBSCO).  Because that's what we're talking about -- how people discover what we have.

I had initially been introduced to the possibility of using EBSCO with Destiny at the Taipei American School and was thrilled to learn the International School of Prague had done the same thing.  UWCSEA is in the process of implementing the EBSCO Discovery Layer with our Destiny, so watch for another blog post on that front.

See SLIDES here.

Illuminating Research: pushing concepts and metaphors

• What model do you use, if any, and how effective is it (conceptually and as a visual representation), given your curriculum and age group? 
• Which phases of the inquiry do you find students have the most difficulty with?  Are they skill-based problems?  Or conceptual?  Can you give examples?
• Which phases are easiest?
• Which concepts and/or skills do you think are the most important to teach for your age range?
• Any favorite strategies / mini-lessons / metaphors for teaching them?
• How is research/inquiry visible in your classroom?  What are your favorite tools for making the process visible and/or assessing prior, formative, and summative knowledge, whether collective or individual?
• Any examples you can share of visualizations or evidence of inquiry?
• Are there any books you feel serve well as mentor texts for inquiry/research?
• What are your favorite resources relating to research/inquiry?  (e.g., books, blogs, people, theories)
• What level of referencing do you think is reasonable for your age group?

Last month in Prague, I got the chance to dive deep with small groups of teacher-librarians on the concepts behind teaching research -- at the School Librarian Connection conference.

My preparation for the workshop began with a survey -- for both teachers and librarians* --  and those questions provided the basic outline of my half-day sessions (the morning one focused on primary school, the afternoon on secondary).

Research models are the most obvious visual place to start.

Workshop participants responded to some models highlighted in my slides in extended table discussions and then by hand annotations on a wall chart -- as the slides below show.

Of particular interest was the new (unpublished) UWCSEA East model, heavily influenced by two of our gurus: Kath Murdoch for inquiry, and Cathryn Berger Kaye for service learning (e.g.,  her MISO (Media / Interview / Survey / Observation) approach). 

Kath does a lot of work with international schools, and I pointed out that both UWCSEA and our host, the International School of Prague, are thanked in the acknowledgements of her recent book, The Power of Inquiry. Only one other school was familiar with Cathryn Berger Kaye's work, but raved about her as an on-site presenter and consultant.

We then considered overall metaphors for research, e.g., the journey, and the difference between skills and concepts -- before mapping and discussing ones we felt were easier or harder for particular age groups.

The full set of slides from my presentation are below.  I ended the session by running through some of my favorite metaphors related to research.

*  The results of that survey can be viewed here.

Dewey Designs to Share

Six years ago I asked my daughter, Maggie Appleton, to help me create some Dewey Decimal System signs for the libraries on our new school campus, the permanent home of United World College of SE Asia (UWCSEA) - East campus, in Tampines, Singapore.  At the time she was an IB Art student at the original UWCSEA campus -- now known as UWCSEA Dover.

She didn't come up with them completely on her own.  I'd been searching the web for different Dewey designs and had found this retro design one I liked on Flickr by Susanna Ryan.

But it was fairly monochrome and I envisaged associating different colors with different sections, much like the famous colored layout of rooms at Powells Books in Portland, Oregon (see colored section sign to the right). 

So Maggie got permission from Susanna to modify her icons and to change the colors.

Over the years people have asked Maggie for permission to use her designs -- and, so finally, in a creative commons way (in line with how Susanna allowed to build upon her original design) -- click here to access a DROPBOX folder of all her files.

--------------------------------------------------------------

My good friend and colleague Barb Philip Reid also has a talented graphic designer (step) daughter -- Natasha Potzsch.   And she asked her for a similar favor (to be a signage servant!). Natasha's Dewey designs are also freely available to all teacher-librarians -- click here to access a GOOGLE folder of her files.

We've both been meaning to share these more widely.  So now -- go have fun.  Our daughters are pleased to have librarians use them!  (And obviously let us know if any links don't work....)

Pointing out the errors of their ways -- when it comes to referencing and bibliographies

Inspired by the wordless "Travelers T-Shirt" (right) -- see http://www.demilked.com/…/tshirt-icons-for-travelers-iconsp… -- and prompted by an IBO Diploma Programme workshop on the Extended Essay, Kurt Wittig (my counterpart at our parallel campus) and I developed the poster below (yes, it's Creative Commons, so download and use). 

In the workshop, the leaders admonished us about giving students too much specific feedback on their essays, especially by correcting citations -- though they said we could look and identify types of problems.

So Kurt and I joked that we needed to make T-shirts, like the wordless one above, where you could communicate by just pointing to icons.  A quick visual way to give students big hints about things possibly wrong somewhere in their essay, e.g., relating to referencing and/or the bibliography.  And then let them go find and correct their own errors. 

We started by making the poster below.  (The T-shirts have yet to be produced....)

The problem of self-plagiarism was raised at the same IB workshop, so that was included.  Another one students are often unaware of is the fact that you can't put anything in your bibliography that you don't actually cite in your paper -- what we have called" Extra references" (though it could also have been called "Padding your bibliography").  "No author voice" refers to writing which can be all perfectly paraphrased and cited, but where no analysis or original thinking is evident.  (It's not a "conversation" unless you contribute something!)

Kurt and I also had fun developing an activity for our students based on Turnitin's White Paper Plagiarism Spectrum -- an incredibly useful list of 10 types of unoriginal work.   We thought how great it would be to give students the task of sorting the infractions from "most academically dishonest" to "most honest."

But first we had to do it ourselves.  Below is our result (moving from left to right, most dishonest to least dishonest), though (truth be told) I'm not sure now that I can justify each position.  But that's the beauty.  You have to figure it out for yourself and come up with your own justifications -- each time.

We give groups of students ( 3 to 4 max) each a set of 10 Turnitin cards and see how they organize them, from worst to least worst.   It's a very interesting exercise.

If you feel like trying it with your students, click here for a link to a folder with seven PDFs of the set of cards, each color-coded and ready to be printed out (on A5 or whatever).  A downloaded copy of the full Turnitin White Paper Plagiarism Spectrum study can also be found there.

Center and Satellite Collections: connections between classrooms and the library

School context determines the relationship between classroom libraries and the main library. 

Mandala of Guhyasamaja, Akshobhyavajra, Tibet; 14th century - from the Rubin Museum of Art

Every primary school classroom has a library, as do most (I trust) middle and high school English classrooms. 

But where do these books come from? Who selects them?  Who pays for them?  Who manages them (in terms of checking books out and in)?  Who inventories them?  Who refreshes them?  How are they organized (virtually and physically)?  How much consistency across classrooms is there?

At some schools, a grade or department is given money to buy books for the classroom -- and those books are labeled in some way as school property and listed in some spreadsheet for inventory purposes.  At other schools, classroom libraries are pretty much private collections, consisting of books a teacher brings with them or inherits from the previous tenant of the room.  The first situation makes it hard to know the full picture of resources across grades and departments, and the second raises equity issues. 

At our campus all resources -- whether library books, textbooks, or classroom library books -- no matter what budget has paid for them -- are barcoded, cataloged, and given a location code in our library system (Destiny).  So anyone can search and see what resources are being used where.

creating Core/CLASS Libraries

At first our MS English curriculum used the whole-class novel assignment model, so the priority was selecting and buying a set number of titles in large quantities, and the issue of setting up class libraries was postponed (with teachers using the main library as their classroom in the meantime). Then two years ago we began the switch to the Reading Workshop model, where independent reading and self-choice from a wide range of books are key.  It was time to tackle the issue of class libraries.

There was a pool of money.  And we already had some multiple copies of books (from the old model).  So each teacher began to make lists of books they wanted in their classrooms.

But what made it interesting was that the teachers had come together from a variety of cultural backgrounds -- Australia, the UK, the US, the Philippines, Canada, New Zealand, and Ireland -- and our school, though Anglo-heritage, is not tied to any one national curriculum.  So the authors and titles on one person's list of favorites for teaching middle school were potentially unfamiliar to another.

The solution was to develop a Core Library for each grade, consisting of 30 titles -- to be agreed by the group of teachers. (NB: The use of the word "core" does not mean any connection to the US "Common Core" curriculum initiative.)

These Core Libraries -- for Grade 6, Grade 7, and Grade 8 -- would be a negotiated list of the "best books" for that grade, i.e., the books kids shouldn't miss, the books to booktalk first, the characters and stories you want as a common reference point, and mentor texts.  (A manageable list of recommended books also helps with the anxiety related to the paradox of choice, especially for reluctant readers.)

Each classroom -- and the library -- would have multiple copies available of these Core Library titles.  And English teachers would commit to reading their way through the 90 titles, in order to create a shared literary experience.

The selection process involved several sessions in the library where the list was physically constructed by filling in a bookcase in the Middle School Zone that conveniently holds three 5x6 arrays of (90) books in a face-out display. 

Teachers drafted their core libraries by literally placing books on the bookcase, until all 90 slots were filled with what everyone agreed was a good balance of texts -- within a grade and across the middle school (while also taking into consideration key texts used in grade 5 and grades 9, 10, etc..)

Every year the core lists are reviewed. Last June about six books were changed in each core library.  New ones were added, some were moved to a different grade level, and others were relegated back into the multiple-copy recommended reading collection in the MS Reading Zone in the library.  (I need a better term for those titles -- but I mean books we prominently display (see below) and for which we have 3+ copies.  In some ways those books are like the Mega-Core Collection for Middle School.)

A valuable contribution to potential new Core titles or just the Mega-Core Collection comes via the Red Dot Book Awards, as the library always buys multiple copies of each title.  This year the head of MS English is buying 20 copies of each title on the Older Reader and Mature Reader shortlists to be distributed between the class libraries.  We work closely in deciding what multiple copies we are each buying -- as those are the books we also want to be promoting.

It is important to note that the MS class libraries contain far more than just the Core Library titles.  That first year teachers identified 100+ titles that they personally wanted in their classroom library, beyond the core library.  And they keep buying more each year.  Is there an upper limit?  There are certainly physical limits of what you can reasonably display and manage in a classroom. 

To see all the titles (not just the Core Library) that are in our middle school classroom libraries, search the tag "MSCL" in our catalog; likewise, to see all the titles in our high school classroom libraries, search the tag "HSCL".

Links to lists of classroom libraries for individual teachers are available via this Libguide page - Classroom Reading.  Of course, all these one click links are only possible because all the resources are included within the library system.

NOTE:  A key component of this system of distributed libraries is the Follett Destiny mobile app that lets teachers perform circulation functions on their iPhone or let students check their books in and out on the class iPad.  It also allow us to collect circulation data on books -- and to know where they are.  Having gathered all these wonderful resources, we don't want to lose track of them.

See my previous blog post on "Your mobile Destiny" re the Follett app.

See also my previous blog post on liberating your "book cupboards" -- re our management and display of multiple-copy books in the library.

Expert learning in the library.... and classroom

I've been meaning to blog about Andrew Abbott, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago, for two years now -- ever since I saw him present at the American Library Association conference in Chicago.

Though his sphere is graduate students for the most part, his insights -- as a sociologist -- into how students do (or don't do) research and use libraries can be applied to all of us as professional learners -- and to our own (younger) students.  Abbott clearly loves libraries and has written quite a few papers on the history of academic libraries and research tools.  Besides what nuggets of notes I'm going to pass on here, you should go to his webpage at the University of Chicago and read a few of his papers related to libraries - in particular, The Future of Knowing.

First of all, he sees teaching research as basically teaching project management -- and argues that, because teaching is a necessary means of knowing what you do, self-ethnography is the only way to really teach researching.  He forces graduate students to keep diaries and then to teach others what they've learned about themselves as researchers.  (Good 'ole reflection and communication...)

Abbott claims experts mainly wander in the library.  They don't particularly take advantage of general bibliographies or reference books (or even the library reference desk).  Instead they prefer to mine (or ransack) other people's bibliographies - extensively.  Which is good advice for any researcher -- even a someone starting at Wikipedia -- i.e., to go to the bottom of the page and find out where they got their information.

As library research is fundamentally not linear, students are always in danger of getting lost.  Being a mature researcher is about learning what to ignore.  This is where (that trendy word) "mindfulness" comes in.  Trying to stay alert, to see beyond the frame of what is in front of you, to keep your peripheral vision ready to sense the bigger picture.  (Who is that person behind the curtain?  And why are they saying what they're saying?)

Design thinking squiggle (originally from IDEO; see video explanation) - which I think is a perfect image for how library research goes....

Abbott argues that research is not about finding things.  It's about knowing and guessing what to look for -- and then recognizing when you've found something you ought to have looked for in the first place.  That wandering time may feel aimless or useless -- until you find the thing that matters.  The thing that answers your question -- or changes your question.

"Follow your passion" is a popular refrain -- when asking students to come up with their research question (e.g., in the IB Diploma Extended Essay process).  I counsel students looking for a research question to "Follow your attention." (Again, mindfulness....)

What do you click on?  What books do you pick up from a library display?  Notice what your brain desires.  Maybe your subconscious (that fast thinking part of your brain) is trying to tell you something.  Because that may lead you to the best research question -- for you.

Abbott points out that sometimes the best thing to research is the thing you have the most data about.  Work with the materials at hand.  Find a question that interests you within a detailed realm you have access to.  Which brings up that design thinking model on the intersection of desirability (interest), feasibility (assigned task), and viability (resources at hand).  Viability -- what you have to work with -- is key.  

See previous blog post on Design Thinking and Research....

Students must realize is that all research questions are puzzles within a puzzle -- and every answer is only true within a particular context.  As he says:

A given piece of information or interpretation is knowledge only with respect to a particular project of knowing.  Until you have your project figured out, you can't say what knowledge is.

Which reminds me of another session I attended at that ALA, where a university librarian told how he would let students browse a visual photographic archive they had and ask them to choose an image (e.g., a page from a 1950s women's magazine or a political cartoon from a newspaper in the 1880s) and then to formulate a research question for which that image would be a primary source.  And then to consider, for what question would it be a secondary source? (Which feeds back into one of the ACRL information literacy threshold concepts -  Authority is constructed and contextual.)

Abbott has his own list of threshold concepts he tries to get across to students.

One is the important difference between the (keyword-based) concordance-style indexing found via an internet search and the (ideas-based) subject indexing in the back of old-fashioned books (done by people, though computers are currently trying to learn it). 

Finding things on the internet is the students' principal model of cognition.  Their sad belief is that the key to a book is in some subset of sentences that you can search, highlight, and copy.

I love how Abbott enforced close reading in his classroom.  In "The Future of Knowing" he talks about how he assigned undergraduates as homework to memorize 2 or 3 sentences from the required reading (e.g., Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations) -- and silently meditate on them for 15 minutes.  In class he then asked students to write those sentences down from memory -- to hand to him each day.  He says this exercise transformed their reading -- which for him means "using a text as a stimulus for a complex reflection."  The paper the students were later assigned to write on Adam Smith was to take five of their meditation passages and turn them into an argument about Adam Smith.

He believes students need to appreciate that books, by virtue of their length, have arguments and direction that websites often don't.  He says the best students are the ones who can create an outline of a book's argument, revealing the structure of the text.

Anyway, go read him yourself.  His curmudgeonly complaints about undergraduate and graduate students as researchers will be terribly familiar, but I appreciate his long view as an academic and a sociologist, and he reminds me about the importance -- and difficulty -- of meta-cognition in the research process.

Design Thinking for the Research Process (e.g., the IBO Extended Essay)

Design thinking is pretty mainstream these days, infiltrating many domains (e.g., see the Harvard Business Review article, "Design Thinking Comes of Age" in the September 2015 issue).

When it comes to libraries, design thinking is usually invoked as a methodology either for group-solving problems related to the functional aspects of a library, or for patrons designing and creating things in a special "making" space in the library.

From Michelle Ha Tucker presentation, cited below

 "Design Thinking for Libraries: a toolkit for patron-centered design," published by IDEO in January 2015, exemplifies the first -- where the human-centred approach and process mindset of design thinking is applied to finding creative solutions to challenges in the day-to-day life of a library. 

Michelle Ha Tucker from IDEO recently gave a short presentation on "Innovation By Design" at the Leadership Roundtable on Library Innovation, hosted by the Aspen Institute.   She argued libraries are a perfect place to try design thinking because they are "living laboratories" with a steady stream of users to observe and create experiments with, on top of the fact that librarians are great service designers.  Watch a video of her presentation via Jason Griffey's blogpost here. (John Seely Brown's talk on "Re-Imagining Libraries" is also worth watching; I like how he suggest libraries are a place where you can/should find the intersection of homo sapiens (thinking), homo faber (making), and homo ludens (playing).)

From Michelle Ha Tucker presentation, cited above

Libraries, both public and school, are increasingly involved in the makerspace movement -- providing people with access to materials and equipment (especially 3D printers, laser cutters, milling machines, and programmable chips like the Arduino) in a space where they can come together to be creative and make things -- and design thinking has obvious applications to the maker culture.

But for school librarians, the design thinking conceptual models coming out of IDEO are probably of greatest application to the inquiry/research process. 

Rather than a rigid framework with specific steps, design thinking encourages a mindset of being creatively confident, recognizing that projects always start off very foggy, and only through mindful, iterative effort to "see" (via reading and exploring a topic) do possible resolutions emerge.  That research should always open up new questions and inquirers need to be comfortable along the way with ambiguity, rather than quick answers.

In my own situation, design thinking offers valuable meta-cognitive support to our high school students doing the IBO (International Baccalaureate Organisation) Diploma Extended Essay (EE), an independent, 4000-word research paper.

My drawing of Tim Brown's cycle - based on a drawing in his 2009 book.  I noticed that in Michelle Ha Tucker's slide, the word "Implementation" is now "Iteration."

In a previous blog post, I compared Tim Brown's design thinking process to Carol Kuhlthau's - see http://www.thelibrarianedge.com/libedge/2013/01/carol-kuhlthau-meets-tim-brown-guided.html

And since then I've only come to appreciate it more.

Our EE program is divided into three parts over the course of a year -- which roughly conforms to the three design thinking stages -- Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation.  From November 1st to December 15th, our grade 11 students are introduced to the Extended Essays and asked to think about something that interests them and do broad reading and inquiry -- the Inspiration phase -- in order to turn that idea into an acceptable Research Question (RQ). 

Phase two of the EE is from January to August -- which is the Ideation and draft writing phase, and from August to the end of October is the Implementation phase, for final editing and polishing -- and submission.

Below are images of the pamphlet we hand out to each student in November (yes, a paper copy).  It's an A3 printout, folded into an A5 brochure, with the inside A4 space showing the timeline, and the A3 inside, unfolded sheet showing the Checklist for students and supervisors.

In design thinking, two important constraints come into consideration after you get an idea (something you desire to design) -- viability and feasibility.  In his book, Tim Brown quotes the famous designer Charles Eames as saying the mark of a designer is a willing embrace of constraints.

The IDEO intersection of innovation -- taken from www.ideo.com/about

As we ask each student to follow their passion, we must also help them to appreciate the constraints on their inquiry, in terms of the IBO and their school.   Does their research question (RQ) satisfy the requirements of the assignment, i.e., the EE subject brief as set by the IBO?  And can our school provide the necessary support for the research question, in terms of a knowledgeable supervisor, material and equipment for any experiments, and other resources?

For the EE, the ideal Research Question (RQ) satisfies student interest (Desirability), IBO requirements for a subject area (e.g., if doing a History topic, the research question must be on something at least ten years in the past), and our school's (United World College of SE Asia- UWC) ability to provide support and resources (books, databases, equipment, etc.) for such a research question.

I then show students this design thinking concept -- alternating divergent and convergent phases of inquiry. When they come to me for help, I ask them which phase they are in.  Do they want me to help them find more material?  Or do they need me to help them sort out what they've found and pick the best ones, before going back out to look for more?  Do they think they need more? 

The design thinking "Inspiration - Ideation - Implementation" cycle also repeats itself, as new information comes to light. 

Which reminds me of one of my favorite library science papers -- "New shit has come to light: Information seeking behavior in The Big Lebowski" - by Emily Dill and Karen L. Janke (2010).  Go treat yourself....

Reading Constellations and Recommendations

Do you have favorite pairs of books you like to recommend to students?  Books where you see the connection, no matter how oblique, and use it to help people find the next "read-on" book?  Along the lines of "If you liked... then try...." kinds of lists -- but perhaps more nuanced.

Then please consider joining a Google+ Community called "Reading Constellations" -- which is a crowd-sourcing space for pairs or small bundles of books to recommend to students.

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Angie Erickson, a middle school literacy coach at our other campus, and I started it after realizing that we both had favorite pairings.

E.g., I recommend "Liar" by Justine Larbastier and "We were Liars" by E. Lockhart under the heading "Lies and terrible family secrets," and Angie recommends pairing "To Kill a Mockingbird" with "Jasper Jones" by Craig Silvey under the heading "Discrimination and crime and coming-of-age". 

We think of these constellations as micro-lists, where connections are perhaps in the eye of the experienced beholder and the number of books is too few to warrant utilizing the OPAC "create a list of related books" function (e.g., Resource Lists in Follett Destiny), which could be considered mini-lists, in contrast to the macro-list capability of a common Subject Heading in the OPAC.

Angie literally ties the books together in her classroom -- to make the connection explicit.

Metaphors and Threshold Concepts for Research

Threshold concepts are something every librarian concerned with research needs to be familiar with.  That's why I was thrilled that Debbie Abilock (of Noodletools) and Sue Smith (of the Harker School) did a session on it at the Research Relevance Colloquium in June.  (See my previous blog posts on Research Relevance: here and here.)

I wrote up my introduction to threshold concepts a year ago - after ALA 2014 - see this blog post (just scroll down to find the section - it's too much to reproduce here, but the links are worth it).

Since then ACRL (the American Association of College Research Librarians) has officially published their Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education which incorporates these six threshold concepts.

• Authority is Constructed and Contextual
• Information Creation is a Process
• Information Has Value
• Research as Inquiry
• Scholarship as Conversation
• Searching as Strategic Exploration

It's hard to argue with any of them -- obvious as they may seem.  We forget how alien some of these assumed understandings are to students.  That's why I live by metaphors.  And threshold concepts have helped to focus my use of them.

I asked the audience at Research Relevance to suggest new metaphors -- and here are some responses:

• a search engine like Google is like "trail mix" - returning results include some M&Ms, some raisins, some peanuts - while a database is like a whole bag of M&Ms -- all good results
• a group project is like a music quartet - each contributing to the whole beautiful sound
• a database is like a bathtub filled with water for a particular size and purpose, while Google is like a river, whose flow is unpredictable and aimless

I particularly like (the dead white male professor) Kenneth Burke's description of the metaphor of the "unending conversation" of academic discourse ->

"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."   [source]

Debbie and Sue spoke about giving students three information sources in three different arenas:  e.g., a tweet, a newspaper, and a journal -- by the same author (e.g., Michael Kraus).  To show how authority is perceived from different angles. 

Just as I would tell my grade 11 IB Diploma students setting out on their Extended Essays:  "go to the library's physical bookshelves, find a book, look at the author (the expert), Google them to see their most up-to-date outpourings, do they have a blog, do they tweet? -- find your experts first -- then find out where they have said what you need to cite -- and choose the most academic channel of their output."

I caution students that their biggest danger is not finding the (right? best? cutting-edge?) experts in your field.  (The Ignorance Trap: You don't know what you don't know....)  Looking for published book authors first is a safe bet.  Someone who has gotten someone else to pay to print their thoughts is someone maybe worth listening to.  On the other hand, they may be already out-of-date.  Everything depends on the context.

We teacher-librarians talked about disciplinary literacy -- and asking teachers in departments, "How do you construct knowledge in your discipline?"  -- and making them define it, e.g., in a Google Doc.

We talked about how students don't like sources that don't support their thesis - they don't know what to do with them.

We talked about how competence in research is a developmental sequence, like beads on a string.  You may not see all students through all the stages, where Stage 1 is concrete truth (novice), Stage 2 is opinion, and Stage 3 is a reasoned opinion.  And we recognized that these stages are not age-dependent.  (Think: Philosophy for Children - http://p4c.com/).

Annotated bibliographies are often a good litmus test of where students are.  Where annotations are minimally:  Describe + Understand + Compare.

Having students think of a bibliography like a detailed ingredient list to a foodstuff or meal is still my favorite metaphor.  You may not need to mention everyday ingredients like water or salt (commonly known stuff), but you absolutely must cite anything flavorful or key to the recipe.

Threshold concepts are key.  Metaphors are key.  And school librarians need to find the right metaphors for their students.  Context is key.

Inquirying into the Research Process - with others....

What tacit knowledge do we all bring to the research and inquiry process?  How useful is the concept of threshold concepts?  What metaphors might help students leap those conceptual thresholds? What pre-searching strategies should we be pushing?  How can predictive search awareness improve search strategies? How can we ensure curation exercises improve the skill of evaluating resources? How we can tap the multi-dimensional power of primary sources?  Are we always aware of the best questioning strategies?  How can we help students build background knowledge?

These are just some of the questions those of us attending "Research Relevance: K-12 Library Instruction for the 21st Century: A Colloquium for School Librarians" at the Castilleja School, Palo Alto, California, June 24-25, 2015, considered.  For a Google Folder of all the raw materials of the presenters -- go to bit.ly/ResearchRelevance

What stood out for me?  What were my take-aways?

I'll start out by saying what we didn't bother with.  Nobody gave a damn about what words we used to identify the research process.  Models were irrelevant.  Instead we heard about examples of where the right resource at the right time with the right focus helped students appreciate what a slippery process research is.

While tools might have been mentioned, they were secondary.  E.g., annotated bibliographies as an evaluation exercise are very useful, but it doesn't matter if they are made in NoodleTools or EasyBib or Diigo or RefMe or Zotero or a Google Doc.

Concepts were king (queen?).  Debbie Abilock and Sue Smith did a whole valuable session on Threshold Concepts -- and my 5-min. Lightning Round on "Metaphors for Research: food for thought" was in the same vein.

Primary sources came up in several guises.  Especially the notion that in order to know if something actually IS a primary source, you have to know what question you are answering.  Someone recommended the Lapham's Quarterly's feature "Voices in Time."

We use Libguides in our school (though I hate to be judged on ours - there's never enough time to go back and make them all beautiful and consistent).  So I particularly like to see how people are using them - in their school and for PD events like this.  Sara Kelley-Mudie did a session on "Where to Begin" when working with students on research -- and focused on the art of questioning and question-storming.  See her beginning point -- her Libguide -- below.

In another session a Libguide was shown that served as a guide to a kind of Google Lit Trip -- where students in Grade 9 reading "The Grapes of Wrath" created a map as if they were taking the same trip from the dust bowl of the Midwest to California, with limited money and resources, and random misfortunes along the way.

This reminded me of a similar Humanities project for high school that a teacher at the Singapore American School shared at an iLearnEd after-school event last April.  As I recall, it was a Humanities unit (joint literature and geography) where students read Max Brooks' "World War Z: an oral history of the Zombie War" (a narrative which evidently roams the world and is largely based on actual locations) and had to prove -- using Google Maps -- whether the locations and settings in certain chapters were real or fictional.  Click here for a video of instructions to the students re working with Google Maps.

Tasha Bergson-Michelson and Kristin Fontichiaro did a plenary on "Tacit Research: What we know about research and inquiry that we forget to tell kids".  See their slides here:

As an exercise, they gave us all time to read an NPR article on Grover Cleveland - see bit.ly/groverstory - and then collected questions that occurred to us.  We had so many!  What a wonderful kind of instigator for inquiry.  About Grover Cleveland and his era, about leaders and ill health (e.g., Roosevelt, Kennedy), about the the rights and power of the media, about the rights of people in positions of power, etc.

We talked about the Wikipedia "Talk" page for each subject and how that also reveals the conversations behind a topic.  We considered at what point we should be pointing students to databases.  How far into the question/topic development process.  We talked about answerable vs. unanswerable questions.   Is there a way to make topic selection sexy? (or even just fun?)  How much time is allotted to question development?  How much to topic selection?

We wondered about the difference between researching on a phone versus a laptop.   Does one device fore-shorten clicking down into results?  How to enable in-depth reading on a device?

We wondered about our cultural assumptions about research.  E.g., Kristin told the story of a student from India who was confused as to why they couldn't use just one source in their bibliography -- because that one sources had something like 700 references listed.  Why did they have to have five references if they had found such an excellent one-stop-shopping one??

Knowing the advanced features of a search engine is invaluable - we all agreed.  Tasha did another session on Predictive Search.

Building background knowledge -- and trying to involve primary sources -- was another focus.  Nicole Hunter and Hayley Beale from San Francisco University High School showed us the LibGuide they made for 9th graders who will spend a year immersing themselves into the full range of Mexican history.

I'll talk about threshold concepts and metaphors for research in a separate post.

So let me end with a beautiful infographic by Michelle Fitzgerald on international reading.  I didn't get to the session she and Debbie Abilock did on supporting students from around the world (otherwise I would have missed Sara Kelley-Mudie's one on beginning the research process!), but I was pleased to find this in the folder afterwords.

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The shape of face-to-face PD for teacher-librarians: Conference, workshop, symposium, colloquium?

Forms of in-person professional development can be considered genres -- and like literary genres, they evolve.  (NB: Forms of online PD are another topic.)  (What is it about us as animals/mammals that being in a room together is different than a Google Hangout?   I liken ebooks to Skype conversations - we do miss something, whether faint pheromones or just broader visual clues about the physical entity/environment.)

The big conference with keynote speakers and multiple vendor displays is the most established.  Outside that paradigm, everyone is experimenting with combinations of macro (whole audience keynote), mini (1 hour workshop/presentation), micro (20 min), and nano (5 min, lightning round style) sessions.  The degree of expected participation assumed in the design of the event also varies, from prepared presentations (whether read or spoken, with or without slideshows) to hands-on exercises to a free-flow unconference style.  Identification of themes and strands helps to tie the event and people together.

What works in one physical setting won't work in another (we all know what the lack of decent wifi and acoustics does to any gathering) -- and the composition and size of the group has an enormous influence on what is effective and what isn't.  (Can I say here that the app I'm waiting for is the one where everyone can speak into their mobile device and it acts like a microphone such that the whole room can clearly hear the question being asked.... If you know of one, contact me immediately.)

The online support for any event is also terribly important.  A decent website, available both before and after the event - with all the relevant backup materials - goes without saying, as well as well-publicized hashtags, so people not able to attend can easily eavesdrop.

As a teacher-librarian, I participate in events designed with teachers in mind (e.g., Learning 2.0 Asia, EARCOS Teachers Conference and Google Apps for Education (GAFE) in Singapore) and events designed with librarians in mind (e.g., the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) and the American Library Association (ALA)), but the best for me are the hybrid kind -- where teacher-librarians get to meet and exchange ideas and experiences related to both teaching and to librarianship.  

Local network after-school meetings provide that kind of in-person contact.  Here in Singapore we have ISLN (International Schools Library Network of Singapore), as other cities do -- Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Hong Kong, China, Japan, etc.  But more dedicated time together with other teacher-librarians is definitely worth it.

In the region, there are several recurring events, e.g., the Librarian Knowledge Sharing Workshop (LKSW) (now coming up to its 4th year , back in Kuala Lumpur where it started); the School Librarian Connection, initiated last year in Hong Kong, up for repetition somewhere, perhaps Singapore; the Shanghai librarians conference; and in Taiwan this November an EARCOS-sponsored weekend on Tech-Integrated Libraries. 

The large-scale version of these are the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL) and the ECIS Triennial Librarians Conference -- though timing and distance are sometimes a problem.

To give an idea of the range of ideas explored in the small-scale regional professional gatherings, see this summary sketch-note from the February 2015 Librarian Knowledge Sharing Workshop in Bangkok -- by Maggie Appleton.

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And to give an idea of who attends these events, see this "Who We Are" Google Doc from the November 2015 School Librarian Connection conference in Hong Kong.

This past June I attended the 2-day "Research Relevance: K-12 Library Instruction for the 21st Century" Colloquium in California.  Hats off to Tasha Bergson-Michelson, Jole Seroff, and Debbie Abilock - and all the others who organized the event that brought over 80 teacher-librarians together in Palo Alto at Castilleja School, just before the ALA annual conference started in San Francisco.

I was lucky to be attending, both this colloquium and ALA, with a small cohort of international school teachers - the ever-ebullient Kate Brundage from the Singapore American School; the online-wonder Dianne McKenzie from Hong Kong; my new parallel campus secondary teacher-librarian at UWCSEA in Singapore, Kurt Wittig, previously in Cambodia; and a new UWC-related friend, Michelle Fitzgerald from Japan.

Research Relevance was a good combination of  experiences.  We started off with a communal exercise using raw creative materials -- based on "Build a World" from the Gamestorming book (which was inspired by the classic picture book for kids by Ed Emberley - "Build a World"). 

Our task?  To build our ideal library as symbolically or literally as we wanted.  We then did a gallery walk with each table explaining their creation to others.  Depending on your group and attitude, could have been painful or fun.  (Dianne and I had fun....)

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Dianne McKenzie working on our "ideal library" - which we called a "prosumption palace" - a place for both production and consumption.... (not original, but I forget where I first heard it)

Making things is quite trendy in the school/library world.  So we all enjoyed a tour of the school's makerspace -- the Bourn Idea Lab.  Click here to see my Google photo album.

Hands-on experience and group interaction were admirably built into the two days.  For example, someone demo'ed a "write-around" exercise - where you move between tables, visually commenting on provocative snippets.

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And when there was a session on exploring the difference between taking paper written notes vs. notes on a tablet using a stylus vs. notes typed on a laptop, the organizers had tablets and styli (those Latin plurals always look awkward, don't they?) for people to play with.  And every session ended with us writing Post-It note reflections publicly displayed.

The residuals?  A Twitter stream (#ResearchRelevance) and a Google Folder of presenter materials -- bit.ly/ResearchRelevance  (a bit dense to navigate - only for the dedicated).  I'll relay my own pertinent take-aways about teaching and leading research in a separate blogpost.

If you are interested in considering forms of conferences from an anthropological point of view, here's an interesting Medium article by the organizers of a conference on "Genres of Scholarly Knowledge Production."  It considers conferences from an international university humanities perspective, but you can't help but apply it to our own school teacher/librarian PD experience.  E.g., the reliance on one screen and a slideshow.  The front of the room focus.  Thinking how to make the most of human beings being together.   Contemplating how the infrastructure of a conference affects the content and impact of the event....

Crowd-sourcing, cameras, and summer reading

For the past two years I have solved the problem of summer reading lists by crowd-sourcing recommendations from our community via "Summer Shelfies." 

We set up a photo booth area in the library (with help from the Art Dept. and Dave Caleb, one of our digital literacy coaches who is a serious photographer) -- for backlit flashes against a white backdrop -- the kind of lighting that makes all of us look like models.

Individuals or whole classes line up with a book in hand and get captured on film.  I then post the results to a Google+ Photo Album.

Click here to see this year's results so far:  bit.ly/shelfies2015 -- and last year's:  bit.ly/shelfiesphotos

This year we asked for another possibility -- a #bookface creation.

The results can be seen here:  bit.ly/bookfaces2015

Your mobile Destiny: taking advantage of apps

There are three mobile apps for Follett's Destiny library system that deserve greater attention. 

And -- because my mantra is "make the virtual visible" -- the three posters below sit prominently on our front desk as visual marketing props for any student, parent, or teacher who chances by with queries that could be solved by downloading them. 

(Feel free to copy/modify the posters for your own Destiny environment -- click here for a Dropbox folder with Mac OSX Pages and PDF versions.)

DESTINY QUEST

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Click here for folder with these posters in Mac Pages, PDF, and PNG format

QUESTION:  Do you have the book "__________"?

ANSWER: Do you have the mobile app that lets you search our catalog?

I then pick up my iPhone, tap on this app, and type in the title they're asking about.  If we do have it, there's no need to scribble down the call number -- it's in my hand as I walk them to the shelf.

This app is particularly useful when out in the wide world.  I tell people to check if we already own a title -- before buying a book online or at the bookstore. (Why waste your money?)

A secondary benefit is that you can see your current checkouts, if you opt to login.

When patrons ask how to get the app, I just point to the poster.

features

Search:  Includes Library, Digital, and One Search.

Library search results show whether a title is IN or OUT -- and gives one Call Number -- the top one in the list of Available copies. 

NB:  What you can't see is the list of all copies and their Sublocations.  A real shame - as we have popular titles in multiple locations.  Another shame is that Subject Headings are not shown for titles.  But perhaps in future versions.

My Lists and Public Lists:  Very useful. Books searched for can be added to "My List" from within the app.  NB: Visual Search categories/lists are not accessible via the app.

My Bookshelf:  This accesses the three bookshelves available via the Destiny Quest interface:  Now Reading / Want to Read / Have Read.  It would be great if these lists were part of the traditional interface.

Account:  Very useful.  Users can see titles on hold, titles checked out, fines, and their checkout history.

FollettShelf:  Online access to ebooks, allowing users to read books instantly.  (For offline access, they will need the K-12 Brytewave app shown further on....)

Top 10 and New Arrivals:  Unfortunately, these are the Destiny equivalent of click-bait -- catchy titles that fail to deliver real value.  It would be wonderful if we could limit these by other data fields, like Circulation Type.  E.g., New Arrivals only shows the last 15 books cataloged -- and, because our catalog contains ALL texts within the school - whether library books, textbooks, professional books for departments, etc., new arrivals in general aren't of general interest. For the same reason, our Top 10 usually reflects unsurprising results, such as textbooks.

*UPDATED June 13: I just learned that Top 10 can be limited by Patron Type circulations, by Material Type, and by Call Number range -- and "in library use" can be included, if desired.  So my apologies to Follett!

FOLLETT DESTINY

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Click here for folder with these posters in Mac Pages, PDF, and PNG format

TEACHER:  Someone left this textbook in my classroom.  Who is it checked out to?

ANSWER: Do you have the mobile app that lets you teachers not only see who a book is checked out to -- but lets you check books in and check books out to students?

At our school, the Destiny catalog contains all bar-coded resources, including textbooks for departments like Mathematics and Science as well as hundreds of FVR (Free Voluntary Reading) books in English classroom libraries.  So all our teachers are mini-librarians, checking books in and out to students in the classroom, using their iPhones or iPads and this incredibly useful app from Follett.  Yes, it does mean a training session or two, but the effort is worth it, given all our satellite collections and the fact that teachers have 24/7 access to our library (thanks to magnetic door keys) so they can check out whatever books they want whenever they want.

I impress patrons all the time by walking them to a shelf to retrieve a requested book -- and immediately check it out to them while standing there in the aisle -- using my iPhone and this app.

FEATURES

CHECK OUT:  Search for a patron, tap on "Scan" and then the mobile device's camera scans for the barcode -- and voila! A transaction is complete.

CHECK IN:  Tap on "Scan" and scan the barcode -- with an option to "record in-library use" On/Off.  The only thing it doesn't do is tell you who the book was checked out to, if anyone.  (Maybe in a future version?)

PATRON STATUS:  Very useful for quickly showing a patron what they have out.  Again, the only patrons who have the Access rights to this app are Library Staff and Teachers. 

ITEM STATUS:  All our teachers can use this function to pick up a school/library bar-coded book found anywhere on campus and see who it is checked out to.   I use this app function when closing up the library at the end of the day - on books found lying around - rather than just scanning them in.  So I can email a student and say, "Hey, your Psychology textbook was left on a table in the library - come pick it up from me tomorrow."

*UPDATED June 13:  SNEAKING IN AN INVENTORY?  We are asking some of our classroom teachers to help us with inventory, by giving them some old iPod Touches (ones no one seems to be using), with the Follett Destiny app installed on them, so students can scan and "Check in" all the books to be found in their classroom.  (Kids love to scan barcodes -- and I tease them that it's training for them to work in a shop some day....)  The scans will update the "Date Last Accounted For" field for items -- which the inventory function looks at.  (The "Item Status" function doesn't update the date field.)

FOLLETT BRYTEWAVE K-12

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Click here for folder with these posters in Mac Pages, PDF, and PNG format

QUESTION:  Do you have ebooks?

ANSWER: Yes -- and did you know there's an app that lets you read Follett ebooks offline?

I'm not sure how many patrons are using this app, but I need to make sure they know it's available.  Hence the poster.

It would be useful if we could get statistics on how many patrons accessed our resources via these apps.

---

Cross-posted on the Inspired Learning blog of Follett

On reading and balance in four 8-book baskets -- and the ones that got away

The 2014-2015 Red Dot Book Award shortlists, the 8 books in four age categories we choose for our students to read, consider, and compare -- in order to determine a favorite -- for a school and for the island nation of Singapore -- have been announced.  I want to celebrate them, but also point out the books that almost made it -- and still could in a future year -- and certainly deserve a wider reading in the meantime.

You can read the background to our awards and criteria in a blog post I did a year ago -- see Looking Back: the evolution of the Red Dot Book Awards and the Readers Cup in Singapore.

Basically, we look at:   

• publication date (past four years, e.g., 2011-2014);
• ease of access (where a paperback version via one of the free-shipping online vendors (e.g., Book Depository or Fishpond.sg) is the ideal -- and an ebook available is a bonus);
• genre (one nonfiction? one graphic format? one poetry or verse novel? as well as a mix of fiction genres);
• gender (mix of female/male protagonists or appeal);
• country of origin or flavor (wanting a mix, but recognizing some countries just produce a whole lot more than others, and preferring at least one book with a Singapore or Asian connection);
• literary vs. popular appeal (considering whether a book is already played out in terms of popularity or likely to be popular -- as well as books that teachers will love for their literary, teachable aspects);
• appropriateness for the age categories of our award.  
• content, where we favor books with multiple possible connections -- text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world.

Balance trumps everything -- which means every year there are perfectly good books that don't get in the basket, because they unbalance it in some way.  With just 8 slots, we don't really want two wordless books or two poetry books or two biographical books, etc.  So I thought it would be good to lay out what is in this year's baskets AND highlight some books we seriously wanted, which lost out in some way, due to the devil of the balance.  NB: most of the un-chosen titles are theoretically still in the running for next year's lists....

Here are this year's shortlists:

2014-2015 Early Years

ISLN (Int'l School Library Network) Singapore's favorite books »

Our international spread is pretty good:  2 USA, 1 Australia, 1 Iceland, 2 UK, 1 Canada, and 1 France.

We have one memoir (by Alan Rabinowitz, the large cat expert who suffered severe stuttering as a child, but found solace in speaking to animals -- listen to him tell the same story to grown-ups on this "The Moth" podcast).  One story of someone "different" finding a friend.  One non-fiction book of questions to consider, and a Peter Reynolds (of "The Dot" fame) story that considers creativity.  A beautiful French book which is a modern version of "stone soup".  A boy and his dog story that features learning Chinese.  A tale that connects creatures and humans from India all the way to Australia.  And a good-old-fashioned story of a young child befriending a lost lion, as well as a book by an Icelandic author where one unusual person finds a perfect match in another unusual person.

Click here for the longlist Early Years books we didn't choose...  including another French book (Bear's Song), a lovely simple Korean bedtime tale (Blanket Travel); the perhaps too-well-known-already Day the Crayons Quit; the latest-greatest from Peter Brown (My Teacher is a Monster); the rhyming fun of The Brothers Quibble which wasn't readily available; and the most recent wordless genius of David Wiesner (Mr. Wuffles!).

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2014-2015 Younger Readers

ISLN (Int'l School Library Network) Singapore's favorite books »

Our international spread is good:  2 USA, 1 Australia, 1 UK, 1 India, 1 Sweden, 1 Singapore, and 1 Germany.

We have one picture book biography of Lee Kuan Yew (appropriate as the 50th anniversary of Singapore is coming up next year).  A meta-fiction frolic from Jon Scieszka.  A similarly silly offering from the ever-beautiful Tara Books in India featuring an Inspector-Clouseau-type character.  A magical chapter book for young readers from the best-selling author of "Inkheart".  A beautiful-produced purple chapter book of historical fiction inspired (read article here) by Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron and the first female programmer).  An Australian knights-and-swords fantasy featuring Tommy, a kitchen girl (where there is a SGD 15 book -- "The Secret of Flamant Castle" available containing not just the first title -- "The Secret of the Swords" -- but a further five adventures -- so a bargain of a book in terms of reading on...).  And two realistic fiction chapter books, one about a boy in 2nd grade -- "The Year of Billy Miller" -- by the American Kevin Henkes, and the other about a girl just starting school -- "My Happy Life" -- by the Swedish Rose Lagercrantz.

Click here for the longlist Younger books we didn't choose... including a picture book biography of Malala, the Nobel Peace Prize winner (because we have her original memoir in our Mature category); the knowing sarcastic humor of Timmy Failure; two realistic fiction verse novels we really liked:  "Words with Wings" by Nikki Grimes, and "Little Dog Lost" by Marion Dane Bauer; a realistic fiction story of an Australian girl who goes to Pakistan with her parents to help flood victims (Kelsey and the Quest of the Porcelain Doll); a cute graphic novel about people who don't fit in (Odd Duck); a realistic novel about an Omani boy about to move to the States (The Turtle of Oman); a Singapore mystery/adventure novel in the vein of last year's Red Dot choice, Sherlock Sam (Danger Dan Confronts the Merlion Mastermind); a wordless book for older readers -- Aaron Beck's Journey; a light-hearted quest out of the UK: The Magnificent Moonhare; scary stories from James Preller (Home Sweet Horror); the trials and tribulations of a 7-year-old (Penguin Problems); and comedic kung fu chickens on a mission by Jennifer Gray.

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2014-2015 Older Readers

ISLN (Int'l School Library Network) Singapore's favorite books »

Our international spread is not bad:  3 USA books, 1 China (Mongolia) book, 2 UK books, and 2 Australian books. 

We have a graphic memoir (think: Smile) about a deaf girl who has to cope with hearing aids.  An adventurous trio of ghost-busters in London in the future (by the beloved Jonathan Stroud) (you have read the Bartimaeus sequence, haven't you?).  A realistic fiction dog story set in Mongolia (get the hankies ready).  Another realistic fiction story involving a dog, but this one told by a girl with Asperger's Syndrome, set in the US during a natural disaster, also with tear-provoking moments.  A mystery/disaster narrative post-cyclone in Australia.  A fairy-tale-like adventure across the rooftops of London to find a long-lost mother.  A suspend-reality experience where a grandfather shows up in middle-school thanks to science fiction.  And a historical fiction story -- almost a graphic novel because of the amount of visual material -- of a young man and his horse who sign up for World War One -- and end up in the horrors of the Middle East.

Click here for the longlist Older books we didn't choose... NB:  In this category there are a lot....  We had a hard time selecting just eight.  So please -- go out and read all the ones listed here that we didn't choose.  They are worth it...  including the Star-Wars-meet-Cinderella dystopia set in Beijing, first in a sequence; Other Brother by Simon French; the Unwanteds (which won in the Morning Calm Medal in Korea); the adventure of escaping from a library; the beautifully written and sensitive offering by Sonya Hartnett re WWII evacuees; "A Time to Dance" - a verse novel about an Indian girl who realizes she can dance even though she isn't whole (and several people have suggested "The Running Dream" as a perfect complement to it); a dystopia about British refugees struggling in France by Gillian Cross; a brilliant British gothic/horror fantasy set in the 19th century by Jonathan Auxier; a realistic novel set back in the 1980s in India where boys struggle to become tiffin carriers; a moving middle-school novel about a gifted and talented girl creating a family out of a group of misfits; Rick Yancey's latest adventure; Gordon Korman's latest offering -- re an ungifted boy who ends up with the smarties and helps them develop in a different way; a noble dystopia presented by Malorie Blackman; "She's Not Invisible" by Marcus Sedgwick -- such a strong contender -- with parallels to the beautiful Picture Me Gone; Jaclyn Moriarty's "A Corner of White" -- a parallel world fantasy; "Hero on a Bicycle" by the classic Shirley Hughes; "Liar and Spy" by Rebecca Stead -- too well known already by our students perhaps; Jared Diamond re-offering his "The Third Chimpanzee" in a young adult version;  Eoin Colfer launching a new series: The Reluctant Assasin; the Indian mythology equivalent of Rick Riordan's Greek/Roman ones - the Ash Mistry series; a time travel book set during natural disasters of fire and water in Australia -- "The Four Seasons of Lucy McKenzie"; and a book about Aussie soldiers and horses in WWI -- to complement Morpurgo's "War Horse" and Wolfer's "Light Horse Boy" -- "Loyal Creatures" by Morris Gleitzman.

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2014-2015 Mature Readers

ISLN (Int'l School Library Network) Singapore's favorite books »

Our international spread isn't bad: 3 USA, 1 Australian, 1 New Zealand, 1 India, 1 UK, 1 Pakistan.

We have the memoir of the youthful Nobel Peace Prize winner.  An unreliable narrator uncovering a mystery.  A historical novel set in Malaya during WWII and the region's post-war conflicts.  A novel within a novel -- giving us parallel worlds in more ways than one (and highlighting NaNoWriMo and the writing process).  A graphic rendition of the Ramayana from Sita's point of view.  An emotional (and visual) novel that examines cancer from the viewpoint of a teen whose mother is dying.  A post-apocalyptic survival novel set in Australia.  And an amusing and informative exploration of literary devices, all based on the nursery rhyme about three blind mice.

Click here for the longlist Mature books we didn't choose... including Meg Rosoff's Picture Me Gone - which everyone should read;  Sara Zarr's "The Lucy Variations" about the power of family and expectations, framed in the world of classical pianists; a graphic version of war set in Uganda's LRA; an Indian novel about a girl's world coming apart upon learning she is adopted; the Carnegie-awarding winning "Maggot Moon"; dragon slayers in Canada -- not to be missed; desperate, lonely lives in Iceland; historical fiction from Australia (which proved hard to source, hence it had to be eliminated -- but worth finding); "BZRK" by the author of the popular "Gone" series; if you don't know Brandon Sanderson, then start with his "Steelhearts" re a future ruled by super-humans; "I Kill the Mockingbird", a novel re 8th graders obsessed with making people obsessed with "To Kill a Mockingbird"; a novel about the endangered bonobos in the Congo; the multiple-award-winning "Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe"; and the sins of the brother achingly explored by Susin Nielsen, author of "Word Nerd".

We'll be shifting our shortlist selection announcement time to June 1, rather than November 1 -- as we always underestimate how long it takes, which means libraries are delayed in getting books on the shelves.  So with any luck we will make this a spring task, rather than an autumn one.

"Themed" book recommendations... make them visible... and connected...

A couple of days ago, someone on the US-based YALSA-BK listserv (yes, listservs are still active in many arenas -- even though other social media tools have arisen) suggested we crowd-source (amongst ourselves) lists of titles for MS/HS "themed" book talks.

I'd been wanting to promote such lists to my students, but struggled to find a way to make the production process scaleable.  How to keep track of the books I booktalked as a themed grouping and continually promote the list.

A few years back The ReadAdventurer blog published some "walls of books" -- see "140+ Books for the Boys of YA", "120 YA books from the UK", "110+ Australian YA books", and "A Metric Ton of Short YA Books" -- which I loved.  Then there were the online readers advisory tools like the NPR Book Concierge, which also shared booklists using book covers in a very visual way.  I wanted to find some vehicle to do the same thing -- generate lists based on themes -- but be visible in the library all the time.

Then I found +Rebecca Dunham (blog - Lunashee's Lunacy) and her YA themed posters (freely given away under Creative Commons).   Her posters inspired us to create our own, by providing some initial themes and a basic style to copy.  As we didn't have all the books on her posters, we simply modified the selection of titles to match our collection.

Luckily I have a teacher, Mairin Raisdana, who works part-time in our library as our design and production queen; I just come up with the themes and titles I want to potentially booktalk.

Here is a Google Plus photo album of our posters, so far:


An important feature of every poster is both a QR code and a shortened URL (goo.gl or bit.ly) which takes viewers directly to the booklist in our Follett Destiny catalog.  So people can find out whether any copies are currently available in the library or not.  A majority of our high school students do have smart phones, but I also have a number of iPads that can be used as mobile OPACS and QR code scanners.

By linking to the catalog -- to a Resource List or to a search for particular key words or subject headings -- I can booktalk the books shown on the poster, but know there is a ready list of those books plus more -- to put into students' hands.  (Nothing worse than booktalking a stack of titles and not having enough to go around....)

The poster images are also available in our Libguides -- on a High School Reading Recommendations guide -- linking back to our catalog.

Physical copies of the poster are very important.  There's just so much in our libraries that is hidden online (or in our heads).

In the library itself wall space is limited.  So instead, we've got a circular rack of A3 (11" x 17") posters in plastic -- allowing patrons to browse the posters, like they would clothing.  The photos of our poster carousel are at the end of the slideshow above.  I've thought eventually I could get dividers on the rack, the equivalent of "Size 8", "Size 10", etc. -- "Teacher Favorites", "HS Genres", "MS Genres", "Fiction", "Nonfiction", etc.

Note that the hanging posters are not laminated.  (Bad for the environment....) Instead they are put in re-usable stiff plastic sleeves.  This allows for easy updating of the display.  In the slideshow I include some pictures of what I buy here in Singapore, where they are called "card cases" or "hard cases".  I'm not sure what they would be called elsewhere ("document cases"?).  The coat/skirt hangers are from IKEA.

Our school has a big Epson printer -- that allows us to produce posters that are 1.x meters (3 feet+) in size.  So we can also put big-scale posters in hallways and on teachers' walls.  (As we encourage all teachers to give us their list of favorite books -- from which we create a poster for them.  See this previous blog post.)

Google Apps for Education Summit: 3rd year running at the Singapore American School

Just got back from the 3rd annual GAFE Summit at SAS....  Excellent as usual.  It's not that I return with some all-empowering new understanding or tool.  Instead I get a thoroughly enjoyable two day exposure to people totally interested in technology and teaching and learning. 

See the detailed session schedule -- and click on any presentation in order to see if resources are provided.

Here are links to the sessions of expert advice and useful resources that I either attended or wanted to attend (thank god presenters give us the links no matter what):

• Dean Shareski
• Becoming More Productive
• Jennie Mageira -- Blog
• The Draw of Education
•  Chrome Demo Slam-a-rama
• Kimberly Hall
• Chrome is the new black
• Stop Searching, Start Finding
• Chris Betcher -- Presentations
• Screencasting with Snagit
• Google Sites Design I & II
• Jay Atwood -- Presentations
• Sexy Sheets and Dirty Data
• Shaun Kirkwood -- Presentations
• Patrick Green -- Presentations 
• Heather Dowd -- Google Zen presentation
• John McGowen -- Google Scripts, Wolfram Alpha, etc.

I came away with an improved appreciation for Google Drawings, especially as I now realize it's an easy way to put links behind a schematic, e.g., I can make a map of my library floorplan and put links to each collection/bookshelf behind the location of that collection -- and embed it in one of my Libguides.

Chris Betcher's demo of Snagit in the Chrome browser so wow'ed me that I have shown it to at least 5 people today (and changed their lives, I hope).   If nothing else, the TAKE SCREEN SHOT OF THE WHOLE SCROLL OF THIS PAGE function is worth the price of the conference.....

I went to a couple of sessions on Google Scripts -- and felt humbled by my ignorance.  John McGowan -- you might have felt like your demo slam was a failure, but you are a beacon of excellent effort -- and accomplishment.  Andrew Stillman mach 2 in the making.  (Jay Atwood doesn't count for comparison, as he's already in the minor god category.....)

Kimberly Hall or Jennie Mageira mentioned in passing in one of their sessions the difference between Ctrl-V (paste) and SHIFT-Ctrl-V (paste but ignore previous formatting and copy this stuff into the space using the defaults of the destination space).  You don't know what this means to me.....

This conference is about the small-- and important -- stuff.  Productivity, connectivity, and visibility.  And I was glad so many of my colleagues from UWCSEA East were there to share it with me......