Judi Moreillon’s has created a Web site here to complement her book Collaborative Strategies for Teaching Reading Comprehension.  Individual chapters focus on one of seven strategies and include lesson plans for reading developmental levels of emerging, advancing, and advanced. Teacher-librarians have field-tested the lessons. The Web site features feedback, photographs, student work, and testimonials of their experiences.

Our goal was to publish Gamers . . . in the Library?! in time for the Gaming, Learning and Libraries Symposium, where author Eli Neiburger was a keynote speaker. To the right is a carton shipped to the symposium. Hats off to Managing Editor Christine Schwab for making it happen. Yeah, I guess Eli deserves some credit too. Authors will tell you that a book project can shift the domestic workload and diminish attention space for family and friends. At the symposium, I saw Eli’s family and thanked them for letting us borrow him for a while. Eli assured me though that the book was written at Denny’s while the rest of the family slept. Eli is a funny guy. He also speaks truth. I chuckled when reading in the book’s introduction: “My son will surely cherish his memories of the first time he camped out with his dad . . . on the sidewalk in front of Toys R Us, the night before the Wii launch.” Eli used the same line at the symposium then clicked to the photograph documenting it. He is an unabashed gamer.

In short, I’m one of them. You know who I’m talking about. The thumb twiddlers. The cathode-ray zombies. The strung-out junkies who can’t even wait for the bus without staring at some sort of screen. I am a gamer.

In the spirit of confessions, I’m one of them too. That is, one of those parents who don’t let the videogame consoles or the gameboys into the house. We were afraid it might hinder the kids’ creativity; you know, turn them into thumb-twiddling, cathode ray zombies. We might be wrong. My teenage son was arguing the point just last night at dinner. If he had known of Eli’s work at Ann Arbor Public Library and in his book, it might have been Exhibit A.

After seeing the vibe gaming tournaments have created at the library, as shown in Eli’s keynote, it’s hard not to be a convert. A word of caution though. I often hear the argument for gaming in the library of getting kids in, especially that hard-to-reach teenage boy demographic, so that you can show what else the library has to offer. No, the gaming is the thing. It’s not a hustle for pushing books. Eli repeatedly warned against the bait and switch.

Karen Schneider stimulated lots of discussion with her post to the TechSource blog on the Maricopa (AZ) County Library District’s use of shelf labels derived from BISAC codes. Many commenters debate the relative merit of organization systems of the bookstore chains and libraries. I was most interested in Karen’s comments regarding use of Library of Congress Subject Headings in navigating OPACs or Web collections because the issue has come up in the development of Guide to Reference.

In developing Guide to Reference’s product concept, editors saw a value in using Library of Congress Subject Headings as an index to the entries. When NCSU’s Endeca catalog took the library world by storm, we considered using the subject heading for faceted browsing. We came to the conclusion that a few obstacles made it impractical, at least for our launch version. Most prominently, whereas we could use MARC to gather subject heads for print, Guide to Reference will also include Internet resources, most of which would lack LC Subject Headings. Instead, we decided that the subject assignments within the Guide to Reference taxonomy, a sources place in the reference landscape, would be sufficient for our users.

In describing the work of Jesse Haro of the Phoenix Public Library, Karen Schneider asserts that neither LC Subject Headings or Dewey is suitable for Web record sets.

However, Haro encountered a problem I discussed in an earlier article about NCSU’s implementation of Endeca. I commented that while adding facets (guided navigation) to the OPAC was a huge plus, in the end, the usefulness of the facets was limited by the browsing language used to generate them, and I added that Library of Congress Subject Headings are “not designed for browsing collections on the Web.”

John Blyberg noted in a comment that Karen hit the nail on the head with these words.

Pouring a nineteenth-century inventory system into a twenty-first-century search engine can lead to–shall we say–interesting results. Haro comments that “Endeca exposed our catalog in ways that were for better and for worse.” Once of the “worse” ways was the clunkyness of library-generated metadata for topic browsing.

Karen considers the BISAC codes to be superior and calls them “pragmatically user centric.” Booklist Online uses BISAC for its subject organization and cross-referencing.

Neal Wyatt takes readers’ advisory beyond its origins in fiction with The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Nonfiction. Neal notes that as publishers have brought out wonderful nonfiction books that read like the best of novels, professional literature, such as Joyce Saricks’ Readers’ Advisory Service in the Public Library, has begun to weave nonfiction into its guidance.

Neal devotes a chapter in the book to her concept of whole collection readers’ advisory, described as follows.

This approach includes not just fiction and nonfiction and not just books but everything we own or have access to, in the broadest conception of our collections, including audiobooks, movies, music, art, images, databases, and websites.

Library Journal articles adapted from the book are here and here. Also, Neal has posted examples of reading maps here.

In the Preface of Academic Librarianship by Design, co-author Steven Bell describes the transformation of Philadelphia University toward curricula rooted in design. In 2004 banners hung around campus proclaiming “Design Matters.” They got into Steven’s head. During the past few years, he and coauthor John Shank have been discussing and developing their concept of “blended librarianship.” The blend is an integration the resources and services of the library into the higher education’s teaching and learning process. Design is the best tool for achieving this blend. Bell and Shank recommend the book The Art of Innovation, coauthored by Tom Kelley, who was general manager of the Silicon Valley design firm IDEO. I’ll have to add it to my list of books that I’d like to read someday. Along the same lines, I need to someday get to Donald Norman’s Design of Everyday Things.

Bell and Shank host the The Blended Librarian Portal for an ongoing, community exploration of the concept.

I took a few hours away from weeding in the garden yesterday to attend the Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium, which will be heavily blogged, Flickred, and Twittered. (See Michelle Boule’s notes at Wandering Eyre.) Opening keynoter Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT’s Interactive Media Comparative Studies Program, spoke about games, media literacy, and participative culture.

Jenkins shared ideas that are in a MacArthur Foundation White Paper “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.” He made the point that young “digital natives,” who we might regard as advance and adept beyond our help, in fact, badly need the guidance of adults—parents, teachers, librarians—in social skills and cultural competencies. Students need help with research and critical thinking skills, particularly those with least access to computers. If you only have 20 minutes on the computer in the library for your homework assignments, you’re more likely to take the top hits. Also, students need a nudge to transfer the knowledge or skills from a gaming environment to real life. Finally, young people need help developing ethics in their participative environments.

ALA Editions author Joyce Valenza has been exploring these issues for some time. I recall her concern years ago that students weren’t nearly as good with Google as they thought. Now social software raises new issues. For ideas on guiding digital natives, listen to the podcast of Joyce’s 2007 National Educational Computing Conference presentation with English teacher Ken Rodoff “Information Fluency Meets Web 2.0” (courtesy of the Apple Distinguished Educators series.) Joyce posted an accompanying wiki pathfinder here.

Jenkins mentioned a couple interesting projects for educators. Icue, a collaboration with NBC News, will use blogs, social networks, and games to connect kids to events in U.S. history. As an example of creative mixing, he described a theatrical adaptation of the Moby Dick story created by teens in Rhode Island. See more in the blog post here. Jenkins is looking for partner libraries who would explore new ways of teaching Moby Dick.

See the Project NML website for more ideas on new media literacies.

Everyone who knows me well knows that I am a huge fan of TED talks. They are my addiction, my Monday motivation. After an especially full week of RDA vendor candidate presentations and development planning (which I’ll post on next week), I was happy to find in my feed from TED a talk by slam poet/tech artist/paper sculptor Rives.

“Is 4 a.m. the New Midnight?” is a quick-witted and funny 8 minutes to get you through the last day of your tough week. Enjoy!

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As summer reading programs wind down, here’s a source of supplemental their summer reading programs. ReadWriteThink.org has has assembled a collection summer activities  for children and teens on a site is called Learning Beyond the Classroom.  The goal is designed to help students continue to build on their literacy learning outside of school.  

I always enjoy buying the local paper when I travel. I especially like reading the Washington Post for its political coverage. At ALA conferences, I look for coverage of the library field. I didn’t get a chance to read the paper much at this conference, though I remember a headline in the “Style” section. But Tuesday night, on the plane ride home, I stumbled upon a bigger story than librarian makeovers.

Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus wrote about District Judge Royce C. Lamberth’s presentation Saturday morning, calling it “an unusually open discussion” of his work as chief judge of a special court that supervises applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Lamberth was the court’s chief judge from 1995 to 2002. Pincus called the presentation “probably the most revealing discussion to date of actions by the FISA court, which since 1978 has approved wiretaps and other secret surveillance activities involving foreign intelligence and terrorism cases.” Lamberth descirbed being awaken at 3 a.m. on August 8, 1998, after the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, to approve five wiretaps, including one of Osama bin Laden’s former secretary in Texas.

You can view a video of the presentation on the Washington Office’s Web site.