Welcome To The Mystery Building

[bloodyrosemccoy]

School's back in session, and you know what that means for the library!

That's right: we've been completely overrun by kids who look like they've never seen the inside of a library before. Some of 'em hit that fine line between not academic enough to have been in a library, but motivated enough to follow their teacher's recommendations. Others have been dragged there by well-meaning parents, who incidentally also look as if they've never been in a library before.

It's fascinating to me. I picked up Librarying at a very young age,* so it's a little weird when you get a 15-year-old coming up and saying "My teacher wants me to read a novel. Are these novels?" I keep coming across parents trying to help their kids find good books staring at the middle grade in dawning terror as they realize they are in way over their heads. And I forget they're easily confused by library jargon--you know, obscure terms like "fiction" and "picture book."**

It can either be awesome or terrible to be the one helping them. Yes, my soul dies a little every time I see a Required Reading List, but if the kid doesn't even try to find a book on the list they like--if they shove the list at me and say "I need one of these books" and when I say "Well, what kind of book do you like, so I can find one you might enjoy?" answer with a surly "Iun't care," they get Les Miserables, because WORK WITH ME HERE.

On the other hand, it's really fun when they ask what I'd recommend, and actually are interested in an answer. "Well, what kinds of books do you like? Dragons? History? Aliens? Egypt? True stories? Vampires? Mysteries?*** I've got something for that!" And when a kid comes back and loved a book you got 'em, one that you loved, then by god YOU ARE THE KING OF EVERYTHING! Makes me glad they--or their parents--were motivated enough to check out the strange new building their teacher mentioned.


*I still remember the first book I deliberately found on the shelf. I wanted to read Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and I knew it was by Roald Dahl, so I went and looked under "D." I was maybe seven.

**Although some of the little kids come up with some clever ways to describe things when they don't know the term for it. I had one little girl (the Boss Princess, no less) quite deliberately declare "I'm looking for a book that opens things." Took me a while to suss out that she was looking for lift-the-flap books.

***I have to specify like that because sometimes when I just ask "What kinds of books do you like?" they literally have no idea. My other strategy when that's the case is to ask what kind of movies they like.

Comments

[marag.livejournal.com]

::shakes head:: I can't imagine not spending a lot of time in the library as a kid. I knew every single inch of my local library and took out as many books as I could carry (or more if I could con my father into carrying them for me).

Which reminds me that the kids and I need to hit the library this weekend...

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

That's...yeah. I remember getting my first library card in first grade, when we would walk the two blocks from school to the local library on our library days and we'd get to check out books and that was like the highlight of my life as a first-grader. Took me a while to wrap my mind around the fact that not everybody did that, thus they have no idea of the Awesome.

Like people who are absolutely Shocked when they find out you can--get this--check out movies from the library. For free. And they've done that for years!
I'm like "...that's where we got all our movies when I was growing up." Mind = boggled. I have to remind myself that some people have absolutely no idea wtf a library is.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I get asked all the time how much it costs to get a library card. If you pay taxes, you're already covered!

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

Heck, I've managed to get library cards even where I don't pay taxes :B.
I try to help them out in other ways if I do that though.

[cougarfang.livejournal.com]

I was going to link this one Sesame Street book I remembered growing up (I could've sworn it was "[Someone] Goes To The Library" where the [Someone] was probably Grover but could've been Big Bird or Elmo) and declare that it should be required reading for everyone... but I couldn't find the book on Google or Amazon :( I do remember Grover (or whoever) being amazed! that you could check out videotapes and records from the library! because it's not just books!

(So that was my exposure to American library culture; I didn't do much public librarying when I was a kid, because I grew up in Taiwan back when there wasn't much in the way of English books (which was all I was interested in reading) so I had to make do with my bilingual school's library and build my own personal book collection with Scholastic book order forms.)

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

I spent as much time as possible in the school library as a kid. When I was a wee moppet the "library" was just the shelves in the back of the classroom (which held three grades), and we each had two big decorated name cards that we'd slot into the spaces of the books we checked out, so that they could be shelved again easily. Then in fourth grade we moved to the city, and I got to go to a school where the library was a whole separate room! Two rooms, even, for the primary and secondary libraries! Awesome!

...what blew my mind in high school was discovering that one could talk to librarians about specific books. Or even get recommendations. Librarians were the nice teacher-like people who sometimes gave presentations on Reading Is Nice, or explained how to use the card catalog, and checked out books. The idea that I could go ask them questions about stuff, and get help? Now that was a paradigm shift.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I rarely talked to librarians about books--most of them had different taste from me. I was pretty good at ferreting out what I liked myself.

NOW, however, we have a really good time exchanging recommendations at the library. I've got more recommendations than I know what to do with.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

I find that the adult librarians are awesome for helping me research stuff, and the children's librarians are awesome for recommendations. "I'd like a middle grade or YA novel in fantasy or scifi with a female lead that doesn't have a strong romance plot and isn't depressing" got me some good results at one point.

[mister-valiant.livejournal.com]

re: second asterisk: ...She wasn't looking for a book on locksmithing? *gives up*

[gethenian.livejournal.com]

And when a kid comes back and loved a book you got 'em, one that you loved, then by god YOU ARE THE KING OF EVERYTHING!

That's how I feel when I talk to a person who "hates poetry" but will let me explain just enough of it PROPERLY, NOT THE WAY THEIR ASSENINE TEACHERS TAUGHT THEM IN SCHOOL, how to "get" it that I'm able to find a poem and they read it and have that "...whoa. That's amazing" moment. 8D!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[glaikery.livejournal.com]

I have always been amazed by public librarians for these reasons, and I would have loved to encounter you as librarian as a kid myself. (When I was small getting Real Recommendations from Real Librarians made me feel all special. Heh.) That's pretty great.

When I first picked up the Young Wizards books (I mention because I think I recall your having posted about them? I hope this isn't terribly creepy, not intended as such -- I'd remember stuff posted about them, they're one of many book-homes) I was so intimidated by Nita and Dairine having read "all the books" in their local library and wondered if I could. Hah. Oh, man, <3.

Also, I'm slightly embarrassed because when I first read that sentence about 15 y/olds, I read "5", and I thought "well, that is quite young, I think I can understand not knowing that vocabulary yet..." -- clearly without thinking about the pairing of "five year old" and "my teacher wants" and "novel". Right. >_> (Ooh! Writing that sentence made me think of something very interesting that I worked on a long time ago about duals and plurals in English! Thank you indirectly! ANYWAY.) Then I got it. Eep.

Third footnote: that sounds so depressing to me. :| A world I don't live in, I guess. Best of luck with all the librarianship -- I am grateful for people in the world who manage that awesome and that terrible!

[glaikery.livejournal.com]

Though in a way -- I have never been at the desk of a library myself, just a libraryer, and would guess this is highly uncommon if it ever happens -- matching the movies-they-like to books sounds fun with the right customer, at least if you were to get feedback on it. :P Yay, recommender systems, I guess. ANYWAY; sorry.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Hee, no worries--I know how easy it is to remember posts about books you like.

It's actually kind of fun to be able to extrapolate book taste from movie taste. The kids just haven't realized that books can have fun genres. They've been duped into thinking books are boring--finding out you can read about cool robots or sharks or fairies is a great revelation.

[van.livejournal.com]

I have so many fond memories of libraries and book fairs as a kid. I loved the library, but I remember the one thing I hated was that you could only check out seven books in a two week period. (Which was about as often as I could get my parents to drive me to the library, which was like a 25 min drive.) ONLY SEVEN BOOKS? I'd often have them finished by the second or third day. AGONY.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Oh, god, the Scholastic Book Fair. SO MUCH FUN.

Only seven? Dang, I went through withdrawals with the THIRTY-book limit at the county library. ARGH.

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of my middle school library--we were allowed to go once a week and check out one book at a time--a book that I'd generally have finished before I went home that day! (And, as we lived in the forest at that point in time, I did not have access to a public library, either.)

[daiq.livejournal.com]

Do you not have school librarys? We have compulsory librarying here in Australia (well at least my state of australia) i remember spending at least one session a week being delivered to the library as a class en masse from Kinder right through to Year 7 or 8 (high school starts here in year 7). We were read too, we learned how to use the reference cards and the dewey decimal system! I was even a Library Monitor in year 6, i got to spend every single lunch time shelving books! :D

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

That was part of what weirded me out--we DID have Library Time through school, though it was infrequent. And yet kids still didn't seem to know how libraries worked. It was baffling.

I got to be a library aide in junior high. I got to spend one period every day shelving books. And my brother and I spent half an hour there every day after school. It was a pretty central part of my life, but I rarely saw other kids in there.