Increased access to eBook loans for all - until June 30th

Updated: Apr 12: See the Internet Archive’s response to questions about the legality of this. The number of libraries & librarians who signed this statement supporting it is worth scanning.

I changed the title of this post to more accurately reflect the situation. And I will only be promoting titles for which I have copies sitting dormant in our school collection.

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Thanks to the National Emergency Library, anyone can borrow the same ebook at the same time — free via the Internet Archive and the Open Library — as waiting lists have been abolished until June 30th.

Anyone (sign up here) can borrow up to 10 items at a time, for a 2-week loan period, to read online or download to read via Adobe Digital Editions (create a free Adobe account here / download the free Adobe app here).

And the books aren’t just the tired old out-of-copyright ones. Searching the 1.5 million titles in the catalog (scanned from various academic institutions) can be tricky, so start from this page: Books to Borrow -> Fiction -> in English -> sorted by Title — using this short URL: bit.ly/openlibraryfiction . About 140,000 titles are returned from that search (and the number has gone down a bit over the last few weeks as authors have opted to have their works removed). (At first I was promoting a shortened URL — bit.ly/openlibraryfreefiction — that returned results sorted by “most viewed” — but that included some dubious Penthouse story collections near the top of the list….)

Since the COVID-19 lockdown crisis has hit schools — and school libraries — making physical access to books impossible or problematic, we teacher-librarians have been scrambled to curate and advertise the digital resources available to our communities — especially ebooks and audiobooks — and especially the type of books that would provide free, voluntary pleasure reading for our secondary school students.

Elementary school students, studying from home, have the benefit of accessing free EpicBooks (see my previous post) during school hours, which provides a great variety of picture books and nonfiction texts, as well as some graphic novels. Plus authors and publishers are letting picture books be read online via YouTube for all to enjoy.

For middle/high school students, there are quite a few places online to find free essays, short stories, and poetry (e.g., Open Culture), but it’s harder to find large collections of longer, more engrossing novels and narrative nonfiction.

School and public library systems can purchase new ebooks and audiobooks for lending through software vendors like Overdrive (with its Sora app), Borrowbox, and Follett Destiny — but those platforms can require an initial/ongoing investment of money or have a very awkward interface.

Many international school libraries are too small — or have been unconvinced of the demand for novel-reading on screens — to take the plunge. Which leaves them, in this current international situation, with no physical books and just the free ebooks (works old enough to be out-of-copyright, e.g., published before 1923) available via Project Gutenberg et al.

There’s nothing wrong with reading classics. I have curated two lists on Goodreads of free classics suitable for middle-school students and classics suitable for high school students. (NB: Goodreads has an online reading interface that uses Project Gutenberg texts.)

But many of the titles on offer through the Open Library — and accessible thanks to the National Emergency Library — are more popular and relatively contemporary. Terribly useful for schools without access to their libraries and book cupboards.

You can find titles like Holes (and its sequel, Small Steps), The Boy with the Striped Pajamas, The Giver, Speak, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, etc.

You can find series like Harry Potter, The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Hunger Games, Lord of the Rings, etc.

You can find authors like Rick Riordan, Michael Morpurgo, Roald Dahl, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Agatha Christie, Stephen King, etc.

Think book circles, think book groups, think shared reading experiences…

This is the time for students to read The Diary of Anne Frank, if they haven’t before!

If laughter and escapism are called for, then why not have students appreciate another modern classic — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

I’ll be highlighting individual titles, series, and authors available as free National Emergency Library ebooks through my secondary library Twitter feed in the coming weeks — follow @SecLibraryNIST.

The power and portability of large print and paper — in promoting non-academic non-fiction

“You’re printing out newspaper and journal articles on paper — and putting them in a plastic binder? Whatever for?”

For several reasons.

We want students to be reading the best of contemporary non-fiction and that includes long-form journalism and essays for sustained silent reading. Printouts are: Easy to see. Easy to read. Easy to share. Easy to stay focused on.

And we back them up with an online (Flipboard) magazine space and an archive (Google Folder: bit.ly/longarticles) of clean-form PDFs — where the articles have been saved in OSX Reader View format (stripped of ads and in a larger font).

(Feel free to use ours, but I would also encourage you and your students to start your own curation projects….)

The six threshold concepts we anchor our library program on here at NIST International School are: format, value, process, discourse, structures, and authority.

Printing out long-form articles helps me highlight the affordances of both format and process.

It also shows discourse, as respected writers (authority) engage in current events and academic arguments even on more casual platforms (i.e., not just in formal academic papers).

After all, long-form articles are both precursors of books and post-publishing marketing devices. So even if a student might not have the time to read a full-length, adult-audience non-fiction book, they can still be exposed to an author’s style and ideas via excerpts or profiles.

The format of printed material with a large font and no additional distracting additional material (e.g., ads) makes it easier for eyes to navigate the reading space. It’s faster to scan back and find the last place you stopped reading — if interrupted. And less text in the current field of vision prevents adept readers from scanning too far ahead. There’s less text in sight, yet still plenty ahead to engage you.

And if a physical copy of an article proves terribly interesting (and tends to disappear), such as this one:

I just print out another one……

The combination of print/online copies of articles helps us deliver the sweet spot of reading material (the intersection of appeal, accessibility, and availability — or in Design Thinking terms: desirability, feasibility, and viability). Students get exposed to ideas and authors that might lead them to tackle more challenging material — perhaps even full-length books!

Slipping the SDGs into everything....

The UN Sustainable Development Goals are spreading throughout the curriculum, not just at IB World Schools, but everywhere.

Last month on April 2nd (International Children’s Book Day — the birthday of Hans Christian Andersen) the SDG Book Club was launched at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. The initiative is jointly sponsored by the United Nations, IFLA (Int’l Federation of Library Associations), IBBY (Int’l Board on Books for Young People), the IPA (Int’l Publishers Association), the International Booksellers Federation, and the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

Every month new booklists (aimed at children aged 6-12) — in the 6 languages of the UN: English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and French — will be announced.

The goal? 17 months to read 17 books, one per month until September 2020 (which is when Moscow is hosting the 2020 biennial IBBY Conference).

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sdgbookclub/

So how was the first round of books for Goal #1: No Poverty?

Arabic:

• Aina da’at, Author: Mohanned Al Akoos

• The Wonder Bag, Author: Omaima Ezadeen

• The Strange Wondrous House, Author: Omama Allawati

Chinese:

• Adventures of Sanmao, Author: Zhang Leping

• The Prince and the Pauper, Author: Mark Twain

• Ah, Xiangxue, Author: Tie Ning

English:

• Serafina’s Promise, Author: Ann E. Burg

• The Last Stop on Market Street, Author: Matt de la Peña

• A Chair for My Mother, Author: Vera B Williams 

• The Happy Prince, Author: Oscar Wilde, Illustrator: Maisie Paradise Shearring

French:

• Jouer Aux Fantômes, Author: Didier Levy, Illustrator : Sonja Bougaeva

• L’usine, Author: Yael Hassan

• La Pauvreté et la Faim, Author: Louise Spilsbury, Illustrator : Hanane Kai

• Ma Robe Couleur de Fruits, Author: Myriam Gallot, Illustrator : Julia Wauters

Russian:

• The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish, Author: Alexander Pushkin

• Vanka, Author: Anton Chekhov

• The Cat’s House, Author: Samuil Marshak

Spanish:

• A la Sombra de los Anacardos, Author: Antón Fortes Torres, Illustrator: Simona Mulazzani

• De Noche en la Calle, Author: Ángela Lago

• No Comas Renacuajos, Author: Francisco Montaña Ibáñez

• Un Punado de Semillas, Author: Mónica Hughes, Illustrator Luis Garay

From Wikipedia: “The name Sanmao means "three hairs" in Chinese, or "thirty cents" (a reference to his poverty). While the character has undergone a number of transitions over time, he has always been drawn with the trademark three strands of hair, which implies malnutrition as a result of poverty.”

Well, the English list is okay, though “The Happy Prince” is maybe a weird choice. Or, should I say, an old choice? Was to increase the accessibility? (Yes, “The Happy Prince” is widely available free on the internet.) Was that a reason behind the Russian choices? i.e., Pushkin (1799-1837), Chekhov (1860-1904), and Marshak (1887-1964).

I’m also wondering about the Chinese choice of Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper.” Yes, a pauper is poor, but is it a well-known book in China?

In some ways, it would have been interesting to make one of the English choices a translation of a Chinese “Sanmao” story as that character is definitely a representation of poverty.

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At NIST we have made little bookmarks to insert into books we have on display in order to highlight SDG connections, especially new books.

(click here for a PDF of these printable SDG bookmarks)

We simply place these bookmarks into appropriate books on display.

We also use our digital signage to highlight connections between books and SDGs — especially on special days (Int’l Women’s Day) and weeks (Earth Day/Week).

NB: Nadine Bailey has made one of her wow Libguides for the SDGs — see https://library.wab.edu/SDG.

IST's Literacy Lab - a great example of a "sustainable, student-staffed and managed learning center"

I have always wanted a writing center in my secondary school library. A maker-space for language and texts. Back in 2012 I saw one in the library at the International School of Tianjin (IST) in China, but I never managed to get one started back in Singapore, despite buying books like Richard Kent’s “A Guide to Creating Student-Staffed Writing Centers, Grades 6-12” (2006/2017).

Then last November at the Bangkok Librarians’ Knowledge Sharing Workshop, Eleanor Surridge did 5-minute slam session summarizing the history and growth of IST’s writing center, which has developed since 2011 into a full-blown Literacy Lab, led by students, rather than teachers, and offering support for five activities: Reading, Writing, Note-taking, Presenting, and Discussing — in five languages — during lunch breaks and after school. It is based out of the library as that is considered a hub of learning (of course).

As a follow-up, four IST high school student leaders attended the Taipei EARCOS Librarians’ Weekend last month and gave a more in-depth presentation, entitled “Establishing a Sustainable Student-Staffed and Managed Learning Center” (see PDF of their slides), about their Literacy Lab and how it works.

The IST Literacy Lab is based on several well-known models — Cognitive Coaching, (Teachers College) Writers Workshop, and the work of Peter Elbow (who popularized “free writing” through his book “Writing Without Teachers”). The approach is basically about asking questions and having genuine conversations. Note it is a teacher-free zone — it’s just students helping students. And of course this volunteer work counts as part of CAS (Creativity, Activity, and Service, as per the IBO) for the student coaches.

In Taipei the student leaders were accompanied by Joe Schaaf, MYP/DP English Teacher, N-12 Curriculum Coordinator, and Literacy Lab Advisor, but the session was all theirs — just as the coaching, management, and supervision of the Literacy Lab is all done by 45+ students (out of a total of 277 Grade 5-12 students).

I’m so excited about them coming to Bangkok to train our students next year. This PDF outlines what a two-day (4 hours/day) training schedule might look like.

Watch this 2017 video which introduces the Literacy Lab to IST students.

Sturdy, clean-cut, constructable bookshelves on wheels -- made with German precision

I’m dying to order these bookshelves — or even some furniture — from Werkhaus, a German company who had displays at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in April. Not necessarily for my library, but for classrooms and communal areas around school.

They say they can ship the shelves (flat-packed) anywhere — and the prices are reasonable (180 EUR / US$200 / 6,500 THB / S$280) for the model MB 8005 shown below).

I would strongly encourage you to download their online catalogs and have a look. Or just go to their Instagram feed.

Something is sure to appeal. For example, see these customized book display units:

Going beyond bookcases, perhaps you have a little summer house which could use some nice outdoor furniture…..

Reseller Shop login
Password = order2006

Gorging on graphic books...

The graphic books section of our library is in a major thoroughfare — but I suspect it would still be popular even if I moved it to a back wall.

The books are divided into Fiction, Nonfiction, and Biography/Memoir, with additional labelling to indicate interest level: (SEC) = All secondary [MS/HS] students; (YA) = Young adult; and (AD) = Adult or advanced.

I am particularly pleased to have so many nonfiction graphic books on history, feminism, and refugees — in addition to the typical crowd-pleasers (Tintin, Asterix, Bone, etc.).

Metaphors & Visualizations

UPDATE: May 5, 2019: Maggie recently did a podcast explaining her path as an illustrator embedded in the web development world.

And you can subscribe to her ongoing visualizations at https://illustrated.dev/

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My daughter Maggie is just as obsessed with metaphors as containers and conveyers of meaning as I am — though she works through illustration while my medium is words.

We’ve started a Metaphor book list on LibraryThing — which anyone can add to.

See her latest project here — “explainers” about Javascript and coding — related to her job at Egghead.io. She’s releasing about one a week via Twitter at the moment.

View fullsize

Click to enlarge

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I must mention a book Maggie recommended — and which we have in our library for computer science students — Grokking Algorithms. Lots of online access options — also see animations on YouTube.

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For a more extreme example of trying to explain something complicated using simple words and images, see this set of “Baby University” board books created by Chris Ferrie, a quantum physicist and father of young children.

You can read his metaphor for quantum vs. classic computing, “The minimal effort explanation for quantum computing,” on his blog. Now see how he simplifies the concept of quantum computing using images and minimal text in this selection of pages from his children’s book.

We have all these books in our elementary library right now, and I’ll definitely be buying some for our secondary library.

Public Speaking: Desire vs. Fear

One element of the Global Citizen Diploma (which all our NIST Year 10 and Year 11 students are working towards) is “Public Communication” — defined as “the ability to communicate effectively, ethically, and publicly on issues of personal interest or passion.”

I don’t like speaking or performing in front of an audience.  I learned this when I was in 7th grade, back in Maine in the States.  I naively answered a call for auditions for some one-act plays — and landed a main role.  The panic didn’t appear until opening night.  I survived, but promised myself I would never have to endure that level of anxiety — voluntarily — again.

Skip to high school graduation.  I was expected to make a speech.  I could only think about how this would ruin my whole graduation day experience.  So I went to the head of school and made some excuse about letting other people have the opportunity to be in the limelight.  It worked.  I got to sit in the audience and listen to my friends up on stage — which I enjoyed.

What was my problem?  Was it self-consciousness?  Was it feeling I didn’t have anything I felt was important enough to say? Or just plain fear?

Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate how much my stage fright is related to my commitment to the content of my message and how much time and attention I have given to preparing the form of my presentation.

For example, when I was 32, my father died after a long illness.  As it was an expected death, my siblings and I had plenty of time to ponder his influence and importance in our lives.  When it came to planning the funeral, I was the last person they thought who would want to speak publicly, especially at an emotional event.  But I did want to.  Because I knew exactly what I wanted to say about my father.  I worked hard on my speech, spent time memorising it (so I wouldn’t be afraid of losing my words in the moment), and when the time came, I actually enjoyed sharing my memories of him in front of a crowd.  Which was such a revelation to me.  I wasn’t “cured” of my phobia, just more meta-cognitively aware of all the elements at play when speaking in public.

You might think, how could a teacher be afraid of public speaking?  They do it every day!  But audience matters.  Peers are more intimidating, especially professional peers who arrive with their own knowledge of the content.

In the teaching and school librarianship world, there are endless opportunities to present to peers, at conferences of various sizes and styles  And I have volunteered many times over the years.  But it’s never an easy decision.  If either my content or my chosen format isn’t solid on the day, I’ll feel that old fear.  Preparation is key.

I keep a list of my public presentations on my website:  see http://www.thelibrarianedge.com/presentations/.  The first one listed was in 2006 at an EARCOS Teachers conference in Manila.  The most recent one was last November here at NIST.

A year ago I had to prepare two major presentations for an annual EARCOS conference here in Bangkok, with hundreds of educators from all over Asia in attendance.  The workshop content was up to me and the audience would include anyone interested, so it could have been 5 people or 50 or more.  I began dreading it months in advance.  Doing the preparation work was the only solution.  I put in hours thinking about my approach, researching the best examples, and deciding on the order and format of my slides.  Maybe too many hours.  For sure, I need to work on not letting upcoming speaking events take over my life.  I need to recognise what is “good enough” — as I think my fear of failure makes me overcompensate by providing more content than is necessary.

How were my presentations received?  For one of the workshops — on Critical Concepts & Teaching Information Literacy — I asked people to give quick video feedback as they exited the room.  This link will let you watch a few of the responses from the 30+ people attending.  All were complimentary.  In retrospect, perhaps I need to find a way to get quick critical feedback from participants, e.g., “How could I improve this presentation?”

There’s another EARCOS librarian event coming up at the end of March — at the Taipei American School in Taiwan — with about 100 librarians in attendance.  I will be giving the opening remarks to the gathering — which will be a different kind of speech for me — as well as a presentation on information literacy skills.  Am I looking forward to it?  Let’s just say, I’m already preparing….

Power & Privilege: Global Understanding through Children’s Books

Books are powerful in so many ways.  They contain the power to allow people to speak across time and space — and cultures.  The voices and images that come out of books have the power to create “mirrors, windows, and doors” (as Rudine Bishop Sims, a giant in the field of children’s librarianship, once said).  Mirrors to reflect identities, windows into other worlds, and sometimes sliding glass doors allowing readers to step into other realities.  

But what worlds are contained in the books on offer at a school like ours?  Is our collection balanced in terms mirrors, reflecting the range of our community, vs. windows, providing enough views of other worlds?  What is enough?  And what worlds aren’t being represented?

Books are products emerging from political, economic, and cultural systems, and this is especially true for children’s books, because societies tend to control what their children are told and taught.   So it’s interesting to consider what messages manage to be written by whom, privileged by whom, published by whom,  and distributed/promoted by whom.  What messages aren’t being conveyed?  Why or why not?

I think about these questions every day in some way, whether in choosing what book I should read next, or choosing books to order for our library, or trying to figure out how students absorb and interpret the books they read, while wondering what texts they really are reading — and why or why not?

My master’s degree in children’s literature (20 years ago) looked at the works of “A.L.O.E.” (A Lady of England) — a very privileged British woman who wrote books for children in both England and India — and even moved to India as a missionary, “to civilise the natives.”  Christianity, not surprisingly, was a dominant ideology of her books, as it was of the British imperialist project.  (You can read the whole thing here: “A.L.O.E.: Writing Home”. Good material for insomniacs.)  

Not surprisingly, since that time I have maintained a particular interest in children’s literature emerging from India.  I get to read a lot of it these days, as I’m part of a judging panel for the Neev Book Awards — for outstanding children’s literature which “leads to a fuller understanding of India, Indian lives, and Indian stories.”

My favourite book (for children and adults) that exemplifies global understanding is “The London Jungle Book” by Bhajju Shyam, which narrates the experience of a man from one world traveling to another for the first time (including first time on a plane), expressing his perception of the other’s world using his own culture’s art. The book is a diary of an artist from the Gond tribe in central India who moves to London, England, to work for two months.  He just nails British culture in a visual and insightful way that I, as an American who lived in London for many years, could never have done.   I am so grateful for his voice — and as a librarian, it is a privilege for me to share voices like his, ones that don’t always get heard. (I also wonder what A.L.O.E. (whose real name was Charlotte Maria Tucker) would think as she read it….)

That book was published by my favourite Indian publisher, Tara Books.  A year ago I attended an international school librarian conference in Chennai, India, where Tara Books is located — and got to visit both their production workshop and main storefront.  See photos here.  Notice how the artwork in the books is being silk-screened. The books are handmade, which is something that begs a question.  In how many countries would this be possible?  How much do we pay for these books?  How much are the workers remunerated?  What are the economics behind the international flow of books around the world?  Tara Books is unusual, but this kind of an exception makes you think hard about the rules.

Looking ahead, I’m so excited that a Tara author — who also happens to have attended NIST for several years as a student! — is coming in June to be the graduation speaker for the class of 2019.  Amazingly, Samhita Arni became an author when she was in her teens, having written a re-telling of the great Mahabharatha when she was 12.  More recently, Tara Books has published Samhita Arni’s version of the Ramayana from Sita’s point of view — a female perspective on power, privilege, and male politics.  Last November Arni published an article in an Indian newspaper, highlighting the resilience of Sita in making her own choices and the importance of “small acts of rebellion.”

It is because of stories like these that I long ago became hooked on books and then began to use my own power and privilege as a librarian, with the economic and political means to spread textual products (read: books), to encourage multiple voices and other worlds to be explored.

The legality of Extended Essays in library catalogs -- as exemplars

Someone just contacted me via Facebook to ask about the legality of the Extended Essays available in the UWCSEA library catalogs — meaning, is it violating copyright law?

I started this microblog in part as a way to not have some of my small contributions to semi-public conversations be hidden. So let me repeat here what I said in the (closed) Facebook group: Int’l School Library Connection back in May 2017.

Do you make any student work publicly available via your library catalog? We do and the issue of copyright was raised over on the ECIS iSkoodle teacher-librarian forum. Below is a reprint of what I just posted there......

Okay, everyone, I have an update on this issue -- of us making some of our students' Extended Essays and TOK Essays publicly available in our library catalog.

The IB said this in response to our query:

"Your students retain copyright ownership in their essays (note that contractual arrangements may alter this rule) and the IB is granted a non-exclusive license as per our rules and regulations. Therefore, the IB does not control distribution rights, only the copyright holder does."

My TL colleague Barb Reid has attended copyright for educator workshops here in Singapore and she contacted an expert on copyright issues, and he said:

"The creator of the work (student) is the owner of the copyright in the absence of an agreement to the contrary. It is the "cultural norm" in Singapore Government institutions for students to sign over copyright of work created while they were a student to the institution. This is an area of contract law."

So we asked our administration what our students sign if anything -- and discovered that our students do sign terms and conditions upon admission and this clause relates to copyright:

"10.11 Intellectual property: The College reserves all rights and interests in any intellectual property rights arising as a result of the actions of a student in conjunction with any member of staff of the College and/or other pupils at the College for a purpose associated with the College. Any use of any such intellectual property rights by a student is subject to the consent of the College upon terms and conditions acceptable by the College. The College may, at its discretion, allow the student's role in creation/development of intellectual property rights to be acknowledged."

So we believe this covers us in terms of making students' work public.

Do your schools have students sign something similar upon admission?

So the issue concerns both the copyright laws in the country where your school is located AND the “contract” between your school and its students regarding intellectual property rights.

Here at NIST I have done the same thing — made the A & B grade Extended Essays available as free, publicly-available PDFs via the library catalog. Read this library blog entry for details.

Genre = Reality Level + Time Focus + Emotion + Format

Speed-dating with books is a great way to expose people to new works or genres. I’ve used variations on the exercise — ever since I heard about “The Reading Game” produced by Carel Press in the UK and bought a copy years ago. Their paper “map” asks students to record their preferences at any one GENRE station, based on best COVER, BLURB, or OPENING LINES.

Since then I’ve done a lot more thinking about the basic elements of genre.

Isn’t it true to say that all content falls on a “reality” continuum?? And what if you then add in a TIME element? And then an emoji?? Last but not least, there’s FORMAT.

Genre will always be a human categorization exercise, but I like to think I’ve nailed its components.

Philip Williams, my colleague down in Elementary @ NIST, calls these kinds of rapid-exposure sessions “book tastings” — and I love his wolf graphic (inspired by Molly Bang’s “Picture This”) — so I now use that in my slides.

Young Readers’ Editions, or, increasing access to ideas....

Do you have a favorite “young readers’ edition” of an adult book you just love — and want to share with teenagers? Aren’t you glad there’s a teen version of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”? “Quiet”? “How to Read Literature Like a Professor”? Malala’s story?

I’m still waiting for someone to pull that magic on “Guns, Germs, & Steel” (though I am impressed Jared Diamond allowed for a young readers’ edition of “The Third Chimpanzee”).

We’re used to this when it comes to “classics” (read: texts out of copyright — and varying degrees of abridgement and adaptation) — because anything goes when oral storytellers of mythology & fairy tales, Shakespeare, and Dickens are long dead.

I’m more interested in the examples being produced for texts still under the control of copyright by some creator — who cares. Non-fiction and auto/biography are the dominant genres, perhaps because they are “idea-based” — and so the re-working of the language isn’t as great a loss.

Here is a LibraryThing collection of over 60 titles available in editions, originally published for an adult audience, but re-formatted in some fashion to appeal to younger readers (and giving you ISBNs). A few examples are down to the picture book level, but most are at the middle/high school one.

Large Print as a new Middle School trend....

Someone recently let me in on a secret: large print isn’t just for old people (or considered a mistake when doing school library orders). It’s a growing market for teen readers.

The phenomenon isn’t mentioned in a Sept 2018 article on trends in middle-school publishing, but it was featured at a couple of sessions at ALA last June, with public and school librarians testifying to its popularity and advantages, and Thorndike Press has videos of those ALA sessions up on their YouTube channel. For some readers, it helps them read faster, for others (e.g., fast readers?), it perhaps slows them down, so they absorb more.

I got my hands on a pile of them and the big surprise is their size.

Don’t you usually think of large print books as being like door-stops compared to the original?

Of course, inside there still is a size difference - in font. So how do they do it? Well, the paper definitely feels thinner -and perhaps the margins are a bit smaller.

The larger text is an affordance I usually associate with ebooks, where I can control the size of the font.

Having read a few of these YA large-print titles recently, I am also aware of how much the larger text (or the fact that there is less text on a page?) helps me orient myself in the physical book — my eyes can more quickly scan and find where I left off (which is one of the things the Thorndike videos demonstrate, with middle schoolers reading aloud, being interrupted, and then watching how long it takes them to find their place again). Maryanne Wolf, in her latest book, “Reader, Come Home,” talks about this “technology of recurrence” as an advantage of physical books, where we can maintain a better space of time/space orientation within a text.

Have I tried these out on students? Asking them to compare? No, not yet. But I am definitely going to be buying more of them, in order to give a large range of students the chance to choose. And not just the “striving” readers (as the Thorndike brochures have renamed “struggling” readers)….

You can search for children’s/YA titles on the Thorndike website, but I have put together a list of about 60 ones I want to order for my library — in this LibraryThing collection — which shows the ISBNs for the large print versions. (P.S. If your school library orders through Follett’s Titlewave, all the Thorndike large print versions are available there….)

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Epic is Epic

Epic Books has rightly been called the Netflix of children’s ebooks & audio books. It’s a fathomless source of both schlock and gold with an interface that insists on being in control of the browsing experience.

Who should be interested in this? Parents are the primary target — whereby Epic will get a standing order for roughly US$7/month and children get 24/7 access to 25,000 “high-quality kids’ books, videos & more!” But teachers get a sweet deal via free educational accounts which allow them to set up student logins for their online “classroom” — which is free and available for children to access during school hours 5 days a week (where “school hours” seems to mean not after 5pm at night). The child will then presumably pressure the parents to pay for the out-of-hours experience…..

This is not a library tool. It’s designed for a teacher and a classroom, where you set up readers inside your online reading “classroom,” though you can import students from Google Classroom. The material is mainly suitable for primary school children, though there is enough stuff to get a middle-school teacher excited. Heavy on the non-fiction, quite a bit of graphic novels, and lots of picture books. Some videos, too. It’s a badge / motivation environment, with lots of flashing progress notifications.

Teachers can create “collections” — which is the only way to keep track of the good stuff. And new titles are released each week. Some stuff is also probably being removed each week, but it’s hard to know.

Check out some collections below I’ve created to introduce people to Epic. (My profile lists all my public collections — see Ms. Day — and I don’t know why they think I’m based in New York!).

If you want to log in to my trial classroom, use the Student Login - Class Code: pww7754:

• SOME OF THE BEST: Audio Picture Books for younger students
  Right now this includes over 170 picture books, many of which you probably own in your library collection (e.g., Scholastic, Reading Rainbow, heavy on USA classics, etc.). These audio books only really ‘work’ if you’ve got a print copy in hand to follow along with.

• SOME OF THE BEST: Epic eBooks & Read-Along Books for younger students
  Right now this includes over 60 books.

• SOME OF THE BEST: Epic eBooks & Read-Along Books for older students
  Right now this includes over 50 books.

I’ve made some other collections with middle school students in mind:

• MS - Graphic Books
  Right now this includes over 50 eBooks.

• MS - World War I & World War II
  Right now this includes over 40 eBooks.

• MS - Coding & Programming
  Right now this includes over 40 eBooks.

• MS - Poetry
  Right now this includes over 40 eBooks.

• MS - Nonfiction - Recommendations
  Right now this includes over 40 eBooks.

• MS - Fiction - Recommendations
  Right now this includes over 40 eBooks.

• Migrants & Refugees
  Right now this includes over 30 eBooks, including the 3 Parvana/Breadwinner novels.

• International-Mindedness / Activism
  Right now this includes over 40 eBooks.

Good-bye, EasyBib -- Hello, ZoteroBib!

School accounts for EasyBib disappeared over the summer. So what am I recommending to students who need a style beyond basic MLA — and are addicted to the ability to let a bibliographic tool try to read as much metadata from a URL as possible?

ZoteroBib — or zbib.org — a new “junior” version of the heavy-lifting Zotero was released in May 2018. Still open source, non-profit (no ads!), originating out of the US university environment, like Zotero. This version is browser-based, meaning, unlike Zotero, you don’t have to download the application and sync between your machine and your browser.

With ZoteroBib, your bibliography is stored in your browser’s local storage, though you can copy/paste to export it, or save a “Link to this version” which will remain available for 6 months.

NB: Students doing the IB Diploma program should know that the IBO requires “Date Accessed” in your bibliography (for online items that could change over time, like webpages). But MLA 8 does not officially require “Date Accessed”. So what referencing style in ZoteroBib should you select, if regular MLA 8 doesn’t do everything you need? Solution: select the modified MLA 8 style called “University of York - Modern Language Association 8th edition” (see slides for an example). This will include “Date Accessed” in your entries.

NB: ZoteroBib does not allow you to import citations that have been exported from databases like JSTOR or EBSCO. But it does let you enter a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of an article to get citations into your bibliography (see slides for an example).

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UPDATE Oct. 25, 2018: If people do use the full Zotero (meaning installed on your machine), then it’s exciting to see the new integration with Google Docs. Read more on their blog: https://www.zotero.org/blog/google-docs-integration/

I started to test it out — and it is very good. But you have to get students to do the whole Zotero installation.

Using Maryanne Wolf's new book "Reader, Come Home" to try a Twitter book club

When I found out (via her Guardian article, “Skim Reading is the New Normal”) that Maryanne Wolf had a new book out — “Reader, Come Home: the reading brain in a digital world" — I immediately suggested to my colleague Philip Williams that we read it in tandem, to bounce ideas off each other. I consider her 2007 book — “Proust and the Squid” — a seminal text on the history of reading and such an insight into how we (have to) invest time and effort to learn to read.

Philip proposed we set up a Twitter book club (or “slow chat”) to discuss Wolf’s new book with a broader group (as he enjoyed last year’s Twitter book club on the children’s classic, “The Dark is Rising”).

So this month we have been discussing “Reader, Come Home” on Twitter with other librarians. See our comments by searching the #ReaderComeRead tag.

FOLIO - something to wait for....

In the annual library systems report by Marshall Breeding in the ALA magazine - https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2018/05/01/library-systems-report-2018/ - there is mention of an interesting open source project called FOLIO, which will be an LSP (library services platform) as opposed to an ILS (integrated library system).

“EBSCO has helped launch the FOLIO project to develop an open source LSP, in addition to the content and technology products it offers directly. The company has made major investments to fund the project and has provided direct and indirect support for its design and development.

The FOLIO project offers a fresh idea in library resource management, with a modular approach to functionality implemented through microservices architecture. EBSCO has provided funding and direction to Index Data, an open source development firm, to create its core infrastructure. Index Data championed the project throughout the library community, familiar with its work as a major developer of open source technology components used within a variety of environments.

EBSCO envisions FOLIO as a technology framework that will disrupt the current market of LSPs that are tightly bundled with their own discovery services. These bundled offerings result in a competitive environment that disadvantages EBSCO Discovery Service, despite its efforts to integrate with all the major ILSes. FOLIO’s modular design will accommodate any discovery product and EBSCO will naturally ensure that its own products are integrated.”

The most depressing thing in the report was its comment on Destiny.

“Library software represents a relatively small portion of Follett’s overall business activities. The broader organization also operates college bookstores, distributes educational materials, and provides training across multiple practical professions. Baker & Taylor, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Follett, contributes around $1 billion to the company annually through global sales to libraries and retail outlets. The company is privately owned by the Follett family, with estimated revenues of more than $3 billion.

The Destiny library management system, though a relatively small portion of the company’s business activities, ranks as the dominant product in pre-K–12 libraries in the United States.”

No wonder the product isn't being developed effectively or efficiently.  It's not that important to Follett.

Refugees and Palindrome Poetry.... in a picture book....

Brian Bilston became popular on the internet (especially Twitter) when he published a poem about refugees (which my colleague Philip Williams animated for a display in our libraries (see Philip's video here) and someone else illustrated here).

What’s unusual about it is that it is meant to be read first one way and then in reverse.  These are also known as palindrome poems (for another example, see this well-known video of one called “The Lost Generation”).

Barb Reid just showed me a 2018 Australian picture book which does the same thing - on the same topic of refugees.  Luckily it's available on Book Depository here.  Wish we had known about it earlier as it would be a great choice for our Bangkok Book Awards -- as the Singapore Red Dots have got it on theirs.  (Maybe next year for us...)

Citing images in slideshows - an explanation for Y9 students creating Pecha Kuchas this week

I was asked to give a quick lesson on how to cite images in slides being collected for Y9 Pecha Kuchas on contemporary conflicts.  See embedded slideshow below -- or go to http://bit.lyciteslidesnist

Debated whether to get them to use Noodletools -- or to introduce the new ZoteroBib (zbib.org) -- to help kids get MLA style references, but in the end decided to show them how to create their own simple ones.

Myra's Gathering Books - Social-Emotional Learning Collection in LibraryThing

Myra Garces-Bacsal and her team at Gathering Books have also used LibraryThing to tag their admirable collection of international children's books related to SEL (Social-Emotional Learning).

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/GatheringBooks 

but they haven't set up a TinyCat interface yet....