Professional reading; "FIfty fabulous fables: beginning readers theatre"

News December 28, 2007 (mp3 file: 3.84 MB, 4:05 min.)
Professional reading; "Intergenerational Programming"

At the top of the ‘cast today: reading.

It’s funny how many people think that we librarians spend most of our time at work reading. Perhaps it’s because we do seem to spend a lot of time reading outside of work and they make the wrong assumption about when we read. And because we have little or no time to read at work, and prefer to read at least mostly for pleasure during non-work hours an important part of our reading can get lost in the shuffle—professional reading.

In an age when we never seem to have enough time to keep up with what we already know we have to do it’s difficult to find time to read about what we need to be thinking about doing tomorrow (or later today??) but it’s important that we take at least some time to keep current with what’s happening in the profession. In the new issue of “Public Libraries,” for example there are articles about promoting arts education in libraries (the summer library program theme for 2009 is about the arts…); an Idaho library that uses a 5x8 foot trailer pulled behind their eleven year old Subaru wagon as a bookmobile; part 3 of a series about youth, public libraries and the Internet, describing who visits the library and what they do there; and columns about reader’s advisory for teens (be careful not to try to push your own tastes on teens); and how to encourage participation by readers in your library’s blog.

OK, time is at a premium, there’s not doubt about it, but with the use of tools easily available we can do professional reading more efficiently, keep up with what’s going on and what’s ahead, we can serve our customers better.

Many of you can’t afford print subscriptions of professional journals (and a number of you borrow our copies) but the web offers great resources: blogs and wikis of librarians that you can subscribe to and have delivered to your desktop in an aggregator, and EBSCOhost. The Professional Development Collection database includes American Libraries, Library Journal, Library Trends, Library Technology Reports….and EBSCOhost enables you to set up alerts, so you’ll get an e-mail when articles about particular subjects—that you specify--are added to the database. So you don’t have to remember to go out and search periodically—so to speak. I receive regular alerts on Library 2.0 from EBSCOhost, for example; a colleague gets alerts on reader’s advisory.

We can’t create more time for you, but we can make good use of those tools to help make effective and efficient use of the time we do have. --Karen

Book reviewed by Marcia:
Fifty fabulous fables: beginning readers theatre, by Suzanne I. Barchers. Teacher Ideas Press, c1997.