Cornelia

FYI London reports that London, Ontario will have North America\’s first public library-based media literacy centre, thanks to a $200,000 donation from CHUM Televsion.

For more information, see here and here.

The new issue of the Marginal Librarian, put out by McGill library school students, is now available.

Is Amélie Poulain an MLIS Student? – Michelle Atkin
How I Became a Mail Artist – Francesca Maniaci
Panslav – Donald Prochera
The Database Culture of the Postmodern – Robert Kelly
Copyright and Book Piracy – Eric Anctil
Profiles of 1st Year Students – Carolyn Littlejohns

ALA has just announced the winners of the Newbery Medal and
the Caldecott Medal, as well as other book awards for children and
young adults.


The Newbery goes to A Single Shard, by Linda Sue Park, and the
Caldecott was won by David Wiesner\’s The Three Pigs.


You can read the press release here.

Coca-Cola, the Canadian Library Association and the Canadian Association of Children\’s Libraries join together to support Share the Story reading circles. This new initiative will \”help to eliminate waiting lists and lottery systems for popular storytimes\”.



Apparently Coca-Cola is \”sensitive to the issue of marketing to children\”.



More.

At the University of Alberta, graduating MLIS students must
produce a \”capping exercise\”, a web page that contains one of
their best term papers or other work. The topics range from
Information Needs and the Studio Arts to Harry
Potter Tuesday Fun to
Library Systems and On-line Services in China.



Here are the listings:

Capping Exercises
2002 (only one so far)

Capping Exercises
2001

Capping Exercises
2000

Capping Exercises
1999

The winners of the An Chomhairle Leabharlanna The Library Council\’s fifth annual essay contest have been announced. The topic of this year\’s essay was \”Without my library…\” Young people in two age categories (under 14 and under 18) shared their ideas on life without libraries.



Here\’s a sample of the winning essay in the under 14 category:

The bus grinding to a halt, and a young woman stepping smartly off and moving toward the glass doors of the library. A bitter wind tugs at her hair as she crosses the busy street. Reaching the swing doors she grasps the handle firmly and pulls hard. The door stays put, not budging in the slightest. She pulls again, harder this time, but again to no avail. Peering through the glass, she can see oaken shelves empty, greying computers dormant in the corner. She turns bitterly and heads back to the bus stop and begins her laborious wait for the next bus.

The Librarian and the Monster Cat: A True Story of Sailing Adventure (the July 2001 editorial in Sailnet) is about a \”50-year-old female librarian at a middle school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, [who] sails across the Atlantic Ocean on one of the monster catamarans that competed in The Race, as a crewmember on one of the biggest, fastest, most complex and dangerous sailboats in the world!\”

Matthew Heintzelman\’s article Children\’s Picture Books with Librarians and Libaries: An Annotated Bibliography investigates the images and stereotypes of librarians as found in picture books.




He discovers that

\”librarians are often judged on the basis of their ability to connect with their respective communities. Perceptions of the librarian as aloof, shy, bookish, authoritarian, fragile, etc., are so ingrained into the popular psyche that their image–and that of libraries–in popular culture is rarely varied\”.




Here\’s the story of Library Lil:
\”A small-town librarian converts the residents to reading books. When confronted by a hostile motorcycle gang, she turns out to be physically strong enough to defend her library. In the process, she converts the motorcycle gang into readers, and develops a special relationship with the gang\’s leader.\”

(This comes under the heading \”Librarians and Control\”, of course.)

Matthew Heintzelman\’s article Children\’s Picture Books with Librarians and Libaries: An Annotated Bibliography investigates the images and stereotypes of librarians as found in picture books.




He discovers that

\”librarians are often judged on the basis of their ability to connect with their respective communities. Perceptions of the librarian as aloof, shy, bookish, authoritarian, fragile, etc., are so ingrained into the popular psyche that their image–and that of libraries–in popular culture is rarely varied\”.




Here\’s the story of Library Lil:
\”A small-town librarian converts the residents to reading books. When confronted by a hostile motorcycle gang, she turns out to be physically strong enough to defend her library. In the process, she converts the motorcycle gang into readers, and develops a special relationship with the gang\’s leader.\”

(This comes under the heading \”Librarians and Control\”, of course.)

Heintzelman divides the picture books he examines into the following categories:

Librarians and Control

Non-Fiction Books

Spinster Librarians

Librarians as Facilitators

Miscellaneous Librarians

Maternal Librarians

Feline Librarians

Fearsome Librarians

Neal Pollack has written an article on Eric Richmond, librarian and poet.


Richmond\’s fate was determined in the spring of 1982, when he was a junior in high school. He came downtown one day and went to the library on Michigan Avenue, where his mother worked. Over lunch, he recalls, he said to her:



\”You know, I wouldn\’t mind working for the library. It\’d be an OK job to have. It\’d beat the hell out of digging ditches or working in an office somewhere.\”



You can read the full article here: The Fierce Librarian.

Neal Pollack has written an article on Eric Richmond, librarian and poet.


Richmond\’s fate was determined in the spring of 1982, when he was a junior in high school. He came downtown one day and went to the library on Michigan Avenue, where his mother worked. Over lunch, he recalls, he said to her:



\”You know, I wouldn\’t mind working for the library. It\’d be an OK job to have. It\’d beat the hell out of digging ditches or working in an office somewhere.\”



You can read the full article here: The Fierce Librarian.Why did the Fierce Librarian decide to get his MLS?


\”I was like, well, the only way I\’m going to get anywhere is if I get my master\’s degree in library science. The original joke I made was that I was going to get my master\’s degree so I could spend the rest of my life working in the Chicago Public Library. After about six months of doing it, I realized that actually I was getting my master\’s degree so I didn\’t have to spend the rest of my life working in the Chicago Public Library.\”

In case your library is looking for some Christmas decorating
ideas, how about a Book Tree? This one
was built by the Teen Advisory Board at the Coshocton Public
Library and entered in the community\’s Festival of Trees.
Here\’s how to build
a
book tree of your own.