Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Librarian Role in Kids' Searching Skills

There has been quite a bit of buzz this month about Clive Thompson's November 1, 2011 Wired article Why Kids Can’t Search.  Mostly it seems to be a great argument for school librarians:

Consider the efforts of Frances Harris, librarian at the magnet University Laboratory High School in Urbana, Illinois. (Librarians are our national leaders in this fight; they’re the main ones trying to teach search skills to kids today.) Harris educates eighth and ninth graders in how to format nuanced queries using Boolean logic and advanced settings. She steers them away from raw Google searches and has them use academic and news databases, too.

Works great if you get classloads of kids visiting your library regularly, but what can those of us in public libraries do to help kids master “crap detection 101?”

Monday, November 14, 2011

Should Ghosts Own the Night?

Came across this great little article from last month on Wired.com:

Ghosts Are the New Vampires by Mary H. K. Choi  

Think about it: Ghosts are just extra-emo versions of us. They are forlorn and lousy with issues—attention whores, the lot of them, caught up in personal dramas and pining for an audience...Ghosts are the millennials of the monster pantheon. They need to get it together, be more self-sufficient, stop seeming desperate for so much workshopping. They’re constantly trying to outsource their dirty work—make the living talk to their loved ones, avenge their untimely deaths, move out of their house (no matter how underwater the mortgage). Rattle your chains off my lawn...

With next summer's teen reading them being Own the Night, what better focus that GHOSTS! Some much fun non-fiction and great fiction out there. What are your favorite ghost books for teens?