Ooooh. . .I don’t come out swinging often. . .but when my son comes home horribly upset because he lacks one book shy of the goal of forty read for the year. . .and according to his account the teacher questions his ability to have read some of the books he has read in the last little reading blitz he has done? Oh. . .we will be talking. Here is a kid that has read across genres–faithfully all year long. He is right there as a reader. I guess the rule is you cannot attend the swim party unless you have read the forty books required. Noah IS a READER. And this celebration CRAP has created a most negative experience for him now.

Probably anyone reading that would be outraged, but some of us were doubly outraged having gone through something similar ourselves. I will never forget the sight of my 8-year-old son sobbing over Mrs. PiggleWiggle, knowing that when he finished it he would still have 3 more books to read to qualify for a pizza party.  That was just one particular evening, but there were many more like it. He liked to read, but he was the kind of reader who goes slowly and remembers thoroughly, just like his father.

Reading incentive programs only work if the student has a fighting chance of being successful. Clearly Paul’s son is a very good reader who worked away during the year only to have his efforts thrown back in his face. Luckily for him and his classmates, he has a knowledgeable father who can help the school understand where they are going wrong. But it’s a scene that plays out all over America as people try to encourage improving reading skills by turning it into a dagger over a child’s head.

Here at the library, we also struggle with how to keep kids reading over the summer without turning it into an ordeal for parent and child. We long ago gave up counting the number of books that children read because it was clearly unfair for the child who was tackling Redwall or Harry Potter to be penalized for their ambition. We’ve been encouraging children to instead keep track of the time they spend reading, giving them a turn on our gigantic game board and giving them prizes along the way. This year, we’re taking it a step further and just saying Read something every day, and come in once a week to take a turn on the game. No pages counted, no time counted, just form the habit of reading daily.

But we very much hope that no child ends up feeling humiliated and disappointed that maybe their sibling or their friend finished the game and they didn’t. It’s hard to balance incentives against the potential for failure, so we have made it as do-able as possible. The worst possible outcome of creating an incentive for reading is creating a child who hates reading because it has become a burden instead of an adventure.

I’m glad Noah has a great dad who can help him deal with his disappointment. No child should end up left out of a party because they didn’t read quite enough. And no child should ever ever cry over magical Mrs. PiggleWiggle and her funny cures for badly behaved children. I can only assume that Betty MacDonald and today’s children’s authors would all be horrified if they knew what children are put through in the name of reading goals.

Book lovers like me will also find it reassuring that 87% of them came to borrow books! How quaint, and how wonderful. And it was great to see that 58% of them read daily to their children and another 26% read a few times a week. It’s not 100%, but in this age when families are so busy, and the triple threat of screens/sports/shopping taking up so much of the limited leisure time, 84% looks pretty good.

The report’s most touching statistics are the ones associated with low-income people. The thing they value the most highly is having librarians to help people, tied with having computers with Internet, both at 88%. People have been saying for ten years that books are dying and the tax haters see libraries as unnecessary. (Someone just asked last night if there is anything in our online databases that you couldn’t just get from Googling, clearly seeing the library as unnecessary in that process.) But low income people don’t have easy access to Googling anyway, and they obviously appreciate the help they get from librarians in finding the information and services they need.

Parents, Children, Libraries and Reading is, all-in-all, a love letter to libraries and librarians, and who doesn’t love getting those?

At my library we are currently giving every one of the 270,000+ items a new RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag. Everyone from every level is expected to put in some time tagging, because we rented the machines to program the tags, and the longer we keep them the more we pay. It’s actually been fun to go spend an hour in a completely different part of the library, taking the books off of shelves that I never looked at before.

Coincidentally, I ended up tagging both the youth and the adult sex education sections. By the way, if you ever wondered, the kids’ sex education books go out much more than the adult ones. All of the ones that went out during the time we have been tagging got tagged on their way back to the shelf, so that’s how you can tell.

Anyway, tagging all over the library has made me think a little more about the current trend in children’s departments for throwing out Dewey or Library of Congress cataloging and making up a whole new system. Typically, the librarians will decide that shelving picture books by the name of the author isn’t friendly enough to patrons, and they will come up with some way of grouping the picture books by subject–dog books, say. My library did that with a few key subjects that patrons tended to ask for repeatedly. We have sections for:

• ABCs
• 123s
• Concepts
• Folktales (with multiple versions of The Three Pigs, The Three Bears, etc.)
• Nursery Rhymes

That to me is being friendly to patrons. We’re getting ready to pull a few more topics that we find difficult to track down when they are scattered around–superheroes, princesses, transportation. Again, friendly to patrons, and good marketing of the collection.

But I’m queasy about the fad for rearranging everything into browsing collections.  While tagging, I noticed anew that you find things arranged basically the same way in the adult and in the children’s collections. Stories are by author; nonfiction is by subject. They too have some special collections pulled out (we have an enormous mystery/crime fiction section) but by and large you know to go look for the author’s name.  You can learn it as a child, and it is still true when you are a teen and still true when you are an adult and still true when you are 80.

We always want patrons to fall in love as we have ourselves with the authors that speak to them, and this is just as true of child patrons as it is of adult ones.  When you take all of the attention off of the person who created the book and focus all of it on the topic of the book, I think you lose something. Let’s say your child falls in love with Kevin Henkes’ Lilly, but Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse is off with the school stories while Julius the Baby of the World is off with the new baby books. How do you find another Lilly, or meet Kevin Henkes’ other wonderful characters?

The tension between being able to browse pleasantly and being able to locate a specific book has always been with us in the library. Every time you pull a book out for a display, you’ve simultaneously marketed it for someone to spontaneously discover while also making it much harder to find if you have someone who knows they want THAT book. There’s nothing new about that. What’s new is the idea that browsing should always trump locating a specific book.

The other thing that troubles me is that I have been a librarian long enough to know how sometimes I have had a great idea and over time realized that it wasn’t so great. Usually, there’s not a lot of damage done. But if you toss out the entire cataloging of your collection, or even just of your picture book collection, you are tossing out a system that has been tested and tweaked for well over 100 years, especially if you start switching around your nonfiction collections as some people are doing. From the stories people tell about making the switch, they are putting aside the expertise and training of catalogers to make very personal, immediate, almost impulsive decisions with stacks of books.

I just think back on my great ideas that weren’t so great, and I can feel my eyes getting big at the thought of what a huge consequence it is if throwing out cataloging and making something up isn’t so great after all.

Never before have I completely forgotten to get ready for storytime. Fortunately, doing storytimes for 30 years leaves me able to spring into action pretty quickly, so I pull together the books for today’s theme, dinosaurs. I grab some dinosaur cut-outs for tags. I grab my storytime pal Puddles, and I am ready to go.

Except I’m not. Because I ran into storytime at the last second and was all jangly and still startled, I set a tone of being frenetically cheery. Kids, of course, pick up on your mood quickly, so we were not off to a good start. And let me tell you, if you aren’t projecting calm and quiet, you are going to have a heck of a time getting the kids to sit quietly to listen.

And then there was that theme…dinosaurs. I have a lot of rambunctious little boys in this group, so I thought it would be a good match. I was wrong for a couple of reasons.

Dinosaurs are not calm, either. They are ferocious, and exciting, and a teensy bit scary, which I belatedly realized as I watched a little girl surreptitiously edge toward the door to try to see where her mother was.

And books about dinosaurs are short short short. You would think that with a short-attention span group, you would want to use short snappy stories, but in fact the opposite is true. It is only in a longer, engaging story that the most active kids have a chance to settle in and calm down and really begin to follow the story with interest. Quick stories mean a lot more transitioning between activities, and every time they have to settle themselves back down. It’s too hard!

Finally, the other big mistake with my theme is that they do LOVE dinosaurs! They want to come right up to Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast to point out different parts of the dinosaurs. Every page turn is another trip up to the front to check out Triceratops or Stegosaurus  with all of the accompanying cries of “I can’t see!” from the seated children. But although they love dinosaurs, they have no clue that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. It’s not especially funny to them to see dinosaurs wearing clothes, like in the cute and interactive Dini Dinosaur. As far as they know, the dinosaurs back then DID wear clothes and take baths in a bathtub. You can really spin your wheels trying to help them to understand that better.

So, all in all, not the most successful of storytimes. And yet, I still loved getting to leave the grown-up spreadsheets and strategic plans behind and go spend some time with the kids and the stories. It always keeps me in touch with why we bother with all of that work of running the library. The spreadsheets and strategic plans make the storytime possible, so I’ll try to keep that in mind as I work on them. And next week, I will try very hard to remember to get the stories AND myself prepared on time.

So it is a big deal, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get a few laughs out of judging the many entries. The kids know the bookmarks must feature reading or libraries in some way, and here were some of their slogans:

For those of you who need encouragement, we have the bookmark that said, “Reading Is Not Hard!”

In the best back-handed compliment of the year category, we had “You could even have fun reading,” which showed children going down a water slide reading books.

We had one that showed a hand holding a Wii remote, but instead of buttons it had the word “READ” on it–very cool, and very well-executed. We also had something a little more assertive: “Drop the Gadgets and Read!”

For those of you who believe that a love of reading leads to great spelling we had, “I love reating books!”

Two bookmarks were almost identical. They each showed a goldfish in a bowl, with the words “Out of My Mind”. This would seem very enigmatic to most people, but children’s book people will recognize that each child read Sharon M. Draper’s book, Out of My Mind, about a girl with cerebral palsy. Kids LOVE that book! And I loved that they made their bookmarks about it.

A couple of slogans related reading to eating. We had “Reading is a piece of pie,” and of course we don’t know if they know that the expression is usually a “piece of cake” or not, but it’s cute anyway.  Another encourages us to “Eat the book with your eyes,” which is a different way of thinking about the process of reading.

I loved the wordplay of “Plop drip drop splashy reading day,” with raindrops running down the bookmark.

But for most unexpected and entertaining, I have to go with this one: “After a long day of conquering the world for the Roman Empire, I just want to sit and read.” That is my kind of soldier.

Some people will still think this is outside the scope of the public library. But as big a fan as I am of books–and if you could see my house you would know that I am a BIG fan of books–I think the mission of the public library is broader than that. I also would guess that a lot of people who define the mission narrowly are doing so deliberately, because they want to see the public library line on their tax bills go away. Programs and activities get in the way of that, but to me, they are all part of learning.

The great thing about makerspaces is that a lot of people don’t have the room, equipment, or expertise at home for learning a lot of new things. The public library has always been the place for information and learning and pleasure, and this is a new way to offer that. Bring in the 3-D printer where a potential inventor in your area can create a prototype of their great idea and to be able to improve their design. Bring in cloth and mannequins and scissors and a sewing machine and let teens learn how to construct clothing. Make your library a space where people who can’t afford fees for programs (let alone the $2,000+ for a 3-D printer) can come and make their lives better by learning new skills. It’s another way of serving the patrons, and if you haven’t noticed,  it’s an exciting time to be working in the public library.

Chances are, there’s a group in your library that keeps such a low profile, you hardly even notice them. When their work is executed perfectly, they become invisible. And that means they don’t get nearly enough love from their colleagues!

I’m talking about your library’s Technical Services Department. You use them to order your books, keep track of the money you’ve spent, process your materials and get them out to your patrons as quickly as possible. Most of all, you rely on them to come up with records that you use constantly, and if they have done what they try to do, you don’t ever think about them at all. We take an excellent catalog record completely for granted, and we only think about it if we can’t find something we’re looking for.

Think about it: How many times do you send emails saying that a record needs to be fixed compared with how many times you send emails saying, “Awesome record!” “I sure could find what I was looking for because you took the time to enter the names of all of the short stories/songs/episodes!” “Thanks for adding those notes–I never would have found what I was looking for otherwise!”

If you’re like me, the answer is a ratio of something like 15:1. But now that I oversee Technical Services as part of my job, I get a lot more of a look at this self-effacing, highly dedicated, very thoughtful group, and I just want you to know that they deserve some love too, even though they would probably tell you that they prefer to go quietly about their business in the back of your library. Valentine’s Day is coming up–now’s your chance!

Tomorrow will be a big day. The Monday of  ALA Midwinter  is when the youth awards are announced. Right before the awards begin, authors and publishers of the Newbery, Caldecott, and other big awards get the big phone call, and then the prizes are announced at the convention, usually with a huge, vocal audience. You’ll be able to watch it here, if you log in a little earlier than the start time of 8am Pacific Time.

Today is the day between big days, when everyone on the committees knows their winner but are sworn to secrecy. If you meet up with someone on a popular award like the Newbery, they will probably announce immediately, “Don’t even ask!” I can’t say that I get a lot of people trying to pry information out of me about the Carnegie Medal for Best Children’s DVD, but I couldn’t tell them if they tried. It’s an odd sort of twilight time, where the work has finished but the celebration can’t yet begin. And yet it’s a sweet feeling, too, especially when you are on a committee that does a great deal of work to prepare.

So yesterday was the big day, and tomorrow is the big day, and today is…the day between big days…for everyone except the Notable Book committees, who soldier on while everyone else gets to play.

After a week in which two separate wild boys in groups I was supervising burst into a certain song with a certain incredibly stupid dance with the initials GS, I especially love listening to Mister Rogers. And I wish there was a  modern-day Mister Rogers out there talking to preschoolers, but I don’t think there is. All of the television shows for kids that I see are:

A) Violent cartoons

B) Vulgar cartoons

C) Curriculum-based cartoons

D) More curriculum-based cartoons

Where is the live human being? Where is the adult person who speaks slowly enough that toddlers can follow (really slowly) and who takes the time to explain things? Where is the person who stops and tries to figure out if kids know what the heck they’re talking about? Where is the person who tries to explain the really hard stuff in life to kids?

Fred Rogers will forever be one of my heroes, because he spent his life trying to help kids understand the world, and understand themselves. If he were alive today, he would go talk to a musician about how auto-tune works, and he would experiment with it himself. He would encourage kids to experiment for themselves, too. And then he’d tell them to go dig in the dirt or something that wasn’t staring at a screen.

Sure, it’s partly nostalgia for a less frenetic existence. Sure, the sets were tacky, and the puppets old and beat up…which I think was part of the point. Sure, there were moments that made all adults cringe (though nothing like on a scale compared to Barney). But Fred Rogers was an amazing blend of heart and intelligence. He is speaking to the two and three-year-olds out there, but I feel inspired to pay attention to the garden of my mind, too.

In my library career, I have had exactly two really great ideas. I’ve already written about one of them, the Poetry Scavenger Hunt, which I know other libraries have since picked up and started doing too. Yay, poetry!

Here is the second one: The Giant Gingerbread House. I can’t even tell you for sure when it started–2004, I think. I had seen how popular adult programs were for decorating gingerbread houses, but I am not a fan of small, expensive programs generally speaking. I wanted to do something where every child who wanted to participate could. Frankly, the thought of frosting and kids is another thing that terrifies me, too. Ick.

So I asked the library’s graphic artist at the time, Mike, to build me a gigantic gingerbread house out of foamboard. And he did! And he wasn’t especially happy about it, either, because wrestling enormous sheets of foamboard into brown paper and then finding a way to make them stand took a ton of effort and probably some swearing. On the Youth Services end, we spent some time photocopying two basic designs of a circle with a swirl that would look like pieces of candy, and cutting out the circles. Then throughout the month of December, kids who visited the library could pick up a piece or two, decorate it, and see their work displayed on the gingerbread house. We also let them glue cotton balls to the edges of the roof to look like snow, but quickly discovered that even adults found it tempting to pull at the cotton balls, so that went away after the second year.

In later years, we got some of the prep work handed off to volunteers, and a couple of different staff members took over the planning. For the past few years, Ms. Debbie has been the gingerbread queen, and she even got the building manager to construct a wooden frame that the sheets of foamboard could be velcro’d to. She’s come up with lots of new ideas for decorating, and as with a Christmas tree, every year it is prettier. But one of the things we like about the gingerbread house is that although it is festive, it is NOT a holiday decoration, and we find families of all kinds participate in making it. To the kids, it truly is a giant house, too.

It usually takes them the whole month to finish filling it up, and when the house gets full, we hang up the last pieces around the department. You do need to be a little bit of a fascist about hanging the pieces yourself, to make it look nice, and by the way, your building staff will not love you if you use glitter. But I highly recommend making a giant gingerbread house of your own. It is fun, it is cheap, and it allows the kids to contribute to something beautiful, at their library.

2012 Niles Public Library Giant Gingerbread House

Closeup of Gingerbread House