On the Hunt for a Job

Well, it’s an exciting and scary time around here. With graduation less than two months away, the job hunt is full under way. People love to give students job search advice. I think it’s probably because we really love to receive said advice. Our main goal in life is to find a job and in this economy and this job market, things can get pretty desperate. However, when there is too much advice on any one subject, a lot of it can start to sound pretty contradictory. Start applying for jobs early they say, but don’t apply if you aren’t available yet they say. Really all it comes down to is try to convey why you are right for the job.

There are some really fantastic job openings out there right now. I’m getting really excited about some of these. I read the job descriptions for children’s and youth services librarians and I just think to myself, that is the perfect job. I can’t wait until I get to be doing that every day! The other thrilling aspect of all this is thinking of all the different parts of the country I could be living in by summer. I seriously have no idea what state I’m going to be in next, and that is really exciting! I am so lucky that I am in a situation where relocating is an option. All the cities and areas I’ve researched sound like wonderful places to live. I just can’t wait to find out where the next stage of my journey will take me.

Allison’s Favorite 2011 Reads (Part Two)

It’s time for part two, highlighting five of my favorite reads of 2011.

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Adult Scientific Nonfiction.

I am really fascinated by medical/scientific nonfiction books for some reason.  This book is a history or ‘biography’ of cancer. It is a fascinating history! I really loved that the author tied the history in with his own stories and experiences working as an oncologist to make it more readable.  Mukherjee has a wonderful way of making even the most technical details easy for the average reader to understand. I am so glad I read this book and I came away with a much greater awe for science and also for the mysterious and scary thing that is cancer.

Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt. Ages 9-12. (I listened to the audiobook read by Lincoln Hoppe).

I really hope this book wins a Newbery! I think it totally deserves it. This book tells the story of 14-year-old  Doug Swieteck. He recently moved with his parents and brother to Marysville, New York. And he doesn’t like it. But with the help of a new friend, Lil Spicer and a book of Audubon prints Doug comes to love this new town as well as learn how to grow into the type of person he wants to be. There is a ton going on in this book but Gary Schmidt weaves it all together into a story that will have you crying and laughing and in the end, cheering.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. Ages 10 and up.

This is a book that stays with you. This is a book that left me speechless. Conor is a young boy dealing with the fact that his mother has cancer. Dealing with the fact that his mother is dying. But it is also a book about hope, and about the power of stories in our lives. There is a monster who comes to visit Conor. The monster will tell Conor three stories, and then it will be Conor’s turn to tell his own story. The writing in this book is amazing, and so are the darkly beautiful illustrations. I will never forget this book.

Inside Out and Back Again by Thannha Lai. Ages 9-12.

A story told in verse. A 10-year-old Vietnamese girl immigrating to the United States with her family after the Vietnam War. Ha relates her travels her new home and her difficulty adjusting to the new life and surroundings. I was so impressed with how well Lai is able to say with so few words through the voice of Ha and her poems. This is a moving book and one that is filled with hope.

Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok. Adult Fiction. (I listened to the audiobook read by Grayce Wey).

This is another immigrant story, though a very different one. Kimberly Chang immigrates to the United States with her mother as a young girl from Hong Kong. They live in heartbreaking poverty as Kimberly’s mother works in a Chinatown clothing factory and Kimberly becomes a star pupil at school with her bright intelligence. They must work hard for everything they have, but Kimberly is determined to make a better life for herself and for her mother.

Also, I must add two more books: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray and Delirium by Lauren Oliver. They both receive honorable mention.

Halloween Craft Night

Thursday night was Halloween Craft Night at our residence hall library. It was the first success of our Thursdays at the Library programs! We had five families show up this week, compared to only one family for the past two weeks. So I was pretty jazzed about that!

We made owls and spiders. The owl idea I borrowed from my public library’s Crafty Creations program last week. I thought they were so fun and simple and such a big hit with the preschool age. The spider I got from our office manager and a lot of the other residence hall libraries were using it. But when the little kids tried to do it, it was more of a challenge for them to do one their own. I probably won’t do this one again with such a young group. But they are still super cute, aren’t they?

After the crafts were all done the kids even asked if they could watch a movie. Overjoyed, I put on “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!” The great part about these programs is that these families are usually already friends and it is a great way for the parents to get together and talk while the kids are participating in the activity.

My only concern is the language barrier. I believe all of the families that attended last night spoke Korean as their native language and some did not know a lot of English. It made communicating with some of the parents really hard and I feel so bad about it. I’m wishing I could learn Korean, but I know that isn’t very practical. Maybe a few phrases.  Any suggestions for programming for families when there is a language barrier? What can I do better?

A Library Filled Day

Today was a really great day because I got to do library things all day. Okay, I know for me that is pretty much every day, but today just felt especially great that way for some reason. I spent my morning at my internship at the public library. We had a rather large fifth grade class come in for a visit to work on their famous Americans research project. I had such a blast helping this group of kids out! The librarian I was working with gave a quick introduction to library resources and then we let them loose in the library for their research. And of course we were there for all their questions.

First of all, fifth graders are an age I don’t work with a lot, so that was a great change. It is also a really fun age! They were all so smart and it was great to see them scattered about the library, working away. The other cool thing was seeing all the variety in the fascinating famous Americans they had chosen to study. Yes, some of them chose topics so out there it was a little difficult to find good resources for them, but they were each so passionate about their choices that I could tell they weren’t going to give up in the face of a little challenge here and there.

Helping them with their questions gave me such a thrill and reinforced how much I can get excited about information literacy and sharing that knowledge with students. It was so heartwarming to my little librarian heart to see these fifth graders learning to use reliable databases and knowing how to look something up in an index.

In the afternoon, it was time to shift gears as I headed over to my little on-campus library. Today was our first day care visit and I was really excited. There is a day care in the same building as our library. We are trying a new community partnership with them and invited them to come into the library once a week for a visit and a short story time. The class was a group of 12 two-and-a-half-year-old children. I was a little nervous that they would be too young to enjoy the fall stories I had picked out, but it turned out that the story time went like a charm.

They were really enthralled with my choice, Fall Leaves Fall by Zoe Hall. They were able to relate to all of the fall experiences of the children in the story and it made for great talking points throughout the book. Crunching leaves, jumping in big piles of leaves, gathering leaves to look at them and study them, they really latched on to all of that. My second pick was a great fall classic, Apples and Pumpkins by Anne Rockwell. I have fond memories of reading this story myself as a child. It is not ideally suited for a read-aloud, as the illustrations are quite small and there isn’t a lot of story. But the fall experience is there and it is quick enough that it held the children’s attention.

I interspersed the stories with a few songs and rhymes. “Open them, shut them,” “Leaves are falling all around,” and “Two apples in the tree.” These were also pretty good hits. The story time was followed by about 10 minutes of letting the children pull and look at books on their own in the library. They really seemed to enjoy this, though I did feel bad for all the re-shelving my student assistants had to do!

The best part was at the end, after all the children had put their jackets back on and were getting ready to go back into the rainy weather to walk to their center, the teacher asked, “Can we come back next week?” And my answer was a resounding YES!

Presentation on Blogs for Children’s Librarians

On Friday I gave a presentation to my student organization: Social Networks and Blogs for Today’s Children’s Librarian. The title of our group is Children’s and Young Adult Library Services Student Organization. We call ourselves C-YA for short. My friend Amanda started the group last year when she saw a gap in our school’s options and opportunities for those interested in youth services. And luckily I get to be vice-president! It’s been an awesome year watching us grow as an organization! Hopefully soon we’ll be passing it on to another cohort of great students to continue the tradition.

For my presentation, I wanted to try using Prezi. It is an online presentation software that just recently entered my radar and I’ve been dying for an excuse to try it out. I was happy that our C-YA meeting was the perfect chance to do that. Prezi is a really cool departure from the slide-based metaphor of presentations. If you think about it, it really makes sense. How many outdated metaphors do we cling to long after they no longer make sense? Slide presentations when it’s been decades since anyone used an actual physical slide. Card catalogs when we’re no longer limited to those tiny 7.5 by 12.5 cm cards? When everything has moved online, it makes sense that we start letting some of those old ideas go.

Hence, Prezi. It isn’t your standard, linear, bullet point presentation. It zooms, it twists, it goes in circles, basically it flows. You can make a pretty good point that it more closely represents though processes, especially when it comes to brainstorming and creative planning and such. It shows connections and relationships. And really, who I am I kidding, it just looks really really cool.

So, in the spirit of emerging technologies (which is fitting considering my topic), I made a prezi. And you should totally click on the link above and check it out. You can even use it to start making your own. I had a lot of fun with it. While I’m sure I still have a lot to learn, for the most part it is really intuitive.

I had a lot of fun with the topic as well of course. I am really starting to get sucked into the blogging world and it is SO MUCH FUN! And much credit goes to Abby the Librarian and her wonderful blog. I got a lot of ideas from her CYPD handout on a similar topic, which she presented with Melissa from Mel’s Books and Info. Thank you so much! I just wanted to post the link today, more thoughts on this topic to come later this week, as well as my favorite blog discoveries so far!

Thoughts on Programming

One of the things I thought about before I decided to specialize in Children’s and Young Adult Services was programming. From my viewpoint as a circulation clerk, it looked like programming was about 75% of what the children’s librarian at my library did. Huge, complicated programs with hundreds of tiny details that all had to fall into place and it was a lot of planning and a lot of stress. I wasn’t so sure I wanted any part of that.

So I hesitated. Did I really have it in me to plan programs? Was it really how I wanted to spend a significant part of my time doing? In the end I decided to go forward with it, but it was still a worry in the back of my mind. So when I started my internship at my local public library this semester, I asked to get as much experience with programming as I could. I needed to make sure I really wanted to do this aspect of the life of a children’s librarian.

Now that I have observed and participated in a whole month’s worth of children’s programs, I can say with enthusiasm that I am convinced. Programming is great! It is not nearly as intimidating as I anticipated, tons of fun, and so rewarding too! I’ve observed a variety of programs, and I’m happy to think that every thing I’ve observed so far, I would be pretty comfortable doing in a future job too. Preschool storytimes, baby programs, first grade tours, storytimes in front of a full auditorium, read to a dog programs – they are all fun and they are all centered around the things I truly am passionate about – developing early literacy and sharing a love of reading with children. I’m so lucky that my internship coordinator is going to be giving me an opportunity to actually present a couple of these programs later on in the semester.

Introductions are in order

My name is Allison McLean. I am a second year graduate student in a Masters of Library Science program. I am specializing in Children’s and Young Adult Library Services and this is a blog about my experiences as a new member of the library profession.

My hope is to find a job as a children’s librarian at a public library after I graduate this May, though I am open to all different types of libraries as well. I’m interested in reader’s advisory for young people and developing early literacy skills as well as information literacy and library instruction for library users of all ages.

I am currently an intern in an outstanding children’s department and gaining invaluable experiences in programming and reference work there. I have several jobs on campus as well, including supervising a library in the family and apartment housing on campus.

This blog will feature my thoughts and ramblings on my experiences leading up to graduation and looking for a job in the field as well as book reviews and other various topics I find interesting and relevant. I hope you keep reading and discovering this exciting world with me!