LISNews: Librarian News

It's time to kick yourself. You too could have been a contender, like Susan Kowalski, if only you had read about and entered the Smart Poodle Publishing contest publicized on LISNews last November.

Kowalski, a school librarian at Pine Grove Middle School (East Syracuse, NY), recently took third place in the Smart Poodle Publishing "What I Wish Everyone Knew About Librarians" writing contest.

Here's her interview with the The Syracuse Post Standard and here are the winning essays in their entirety.

Not necessarily.

And that's the lesson that Stephanie Rosalia was teaching her students at P.S. 225 in Brooklyn. The website they were looking at, All About Explorers, is intentionally peppered with false facts.

Ms. Rosalia, the school librarian at Public School 225, a combined elementary and middle school in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, urged caution. “Don’t answer your questions with the first piece of information that you find,” she warned. Story from the NYTimes.

The Times has an article from February 11, 2009, by Alice Miles, "Look out, Kipper! These books are deadly! It's no wonder that our children don't enjoy reading. The first material they are given ticks boxes but dulls minds "

...
In all schools, book space is under pressure from the march of the screen, just as reading for fun has been replaced with ICT. I recently worked in a school where six-year-olds, a computer apiece, were learning basic graphic design and creating fireworks on their computer screens, but I was told off by a teacher for spelling out “colour” for a boy who asked me. The teacher wanted to encourage the children to guess: ‘kl', wrote one girl.

School libraries have been rebranded “learning resource centres”, their books shoved down one end of the room while computers take over the rest. The computers tend to be underused because of their controlled and anodyne content - rather, in fact, like the reading scheme books.

Read more about it at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/alice_miles/article5704459.ece

UCLA law professor and freedom of speech scholar Eugene Volokh recently posted at his legal group blog, the Volokh Conspiracy, a post about a school libraries matter. The post, What May a School Board Do When It Concludes an Elementary School Library Book Omits Important Information?, takes a look at a recent case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. An opinion has been released in the matter.