Well, we are deep in History Final Projects season once again! I have an in-box full of research assistance requests, so I am going to share the joyous discovery I made through a new collaboration this year.

One of our History teachers moved to 9th grade, taking lead on curriculum — basically a completely new one — for that class. About half of this term has focused on ethnic studies, mostly using historical thinking skills to weigh multiple perspectives, and doing close reading of primary source material. The teacher came to me with the idea of having students make a museum exhibits, feeling there was something about the storytelling — the human experience — that she wanted students to strive to capture with their final project. Their topic is a social movement from an ethnic group living in California in the 20th Century or earlier.

Of course, that gave me a perfect rabbit-hole to go down! The available materials on exhibition design are wonderful, and I quickly discovered that it offered a fantastic framework that allows the development and demonstration of many historical thinking skills. Not only does it allow students to chose a voice for their writing, but the strictures and low word counts push back against writing in curlycues to try to “sound smart” that so often plague our 9th graders.

Some of the excellent sources I drew upon for lesson planning purposes included guides from the Smithsonian and the BC Museums Association. (NOTE: Debbie Abilock just pointed me to the classic work that almost every guide I read talked about, but the Internet Archive was down when I was designing the project.) Students will be making a digital exhibit with Thinglink. (Here is my very in-process example.) I’ll be vulnerable and tell you that I am due in class now, even though I have citations missing from pretty much everything at this point. The links here should point you to most of what I used to build the curriculum, if not the exhibit.

In any event, here is our first draft of class materials. I’m very, very open, as always, to ideas and feedback. (Please NOTE: We decided we absolutely want to keep this project in the curriculum, and we would definitely take more days to do it next year.)

I’m off to support storytelling about the Chicano Tattoo Movement, gospel music in Los Angeles, and more!

Greetings, all, and happy almost-end of the year. Winding down these final weeks, the students’ and teachers’ brains are all but toast, so for our final visits with grades 3-6 we host our annual Library Olympics: a series of games reviewing skills and concepts covered throughout the semester (we do one before Winter Break and one before Summer Break). Below are a few of the events we play, remixed and revamped every year. Enjoy!

Mini-Shelves

We play this game to review organizational strategies. 7-8 books are set up at each table, and students simply rearrange the books in call# order. (Fun fact: there is ALWAYS one team who arranges the books in reverse order.)

Catalog Relay

So that I don’t have 24 9-year olds storming the stacks, this is a true relay: a small stack of cards are placed on each table, with either a title, author, or subject for each student to search in the catalog. One student from each table scoots to the shelf and brings back their book, and then tags a fellow table-mate who then retrieves their book, and so on until either time or cards run out. We play this game to review organizational strategies and location & access.

Codebreaker Word Scramble

This game involves a bit of prep on my part, but it sure is fun (and it usually takes me longer to explain than it does for the kiddos to actually play). This game reviews text features, and if we have time, students must find the correct book on the shelf first (location & access). Each book has a corresponding worksheet, and students must use the table of contents, glossary, and/or index to find the correct words. One letter from each word corresponds to a blank on the whiteboard (prepped before-hand), and once every team has filled in their letters, the whole message unfolds.

Kahoot!

No Library Olympics would be complete without a Kahoot! game. Depending on the grade level and concepts covered, these questions can range from simple catalog screenshots (“Is this book available?”) to fill-in-the-blank questions (“A digital subscription source with articles edited by experts is a ____”). Madness ensues. It is spectacular.

What about you? What games / activities do you use to review concepts with your students? Thanks for reading!

Up until recently, I was fine with acknowledging that while our students don’t know how to use a print encyclopedia (it’s just sad to watch, really), that searching in our online reference is what they will use mostly now and in the future and that keyword searching is fine for that.

Then while doing an activity with some of my 9^th grade history classes that asked them to look in a print encyclopedia I realized that the added research value of a good index is something that is missing from the digital reference we have. For example, if you look for maroons in our Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, the index provides not only the page numbers for for several entries, but also the cross-reference cimarrónes, and the “see also” terms: Palenque, Quilombo, and Miskitos. For the thorough researcher who ventures to those terms in the index as well, they will find valuable information. Under the Miskitos heading is a subheading for “enslavement of African fugitives” that isn’t otherwise referenced in the “maroons” entries, and quilombo leads to subheadings for the specific community of Palmares. 

For digital subject encyclopedias in history, we use InfoBase’s History Research Center. Taking my search online, “maroons” yielded 69 results that are encyclopedia entries, with the leading entries being “maroons,” Maroon’s rebellion,” “Maroons in America,” and “Brazilian maroons,” before continuing on with headings that don’t contain the word maroon. None of the 69 results includes the entries for “quilombo,” or “Palmares,” which the print  index pointed us to, despite HRC containing articles for both. Throughout this process, there are no suggested terms provided the way you would find indexed terms that cross-reference and nest within larger headings. Reading through the individual articles, you will come across those terms, but they are not flagged, linked, or indicated in association. What HRC does provide is a box with unstructured tag clouds for each entry, and it is unclear how they are determined. 

As a side-note, I tried asking ChatGPT for help with the prompt: I’m interested in researching maroons and maroon communities. What are some other terms I should use for searching, beyond “maroon?” ChatGPT provided 20(!) additional terms to search, some of which would be too broad on their own to get me good results (“Creole societies,” “African diaspora,” “guerrilla warfare,” “underground resistance,” and “ethnogenesis”) and some that mirrored the cross-references and subheadings from the print encyclopedia index (“Cimmarones,” and “palenques.”) However, Quilombo, Palmares, and Miskitos did not appear. 

Reference sources, to me, require the ability to utilize an index, but indexes are incredibly helpful in other works as well. While Command F and other “search within” search features will find words in your text, these searches can lead to at least 3 less-than-desirable outcomes:
*An over-abundance of results if the term is ubiquitous to your topic,
*A dearth of results because you have the wrong term,
*An incomprehensive set of results because there are places where your topic is discussed but without using the search term. 
A good index ameliorates these issues by directing you to the topic where it is discussed in the text regardless of the terms used in that part of the text, as well as providing alternate terms, and where the topic requires nuance, with more specific sub-headings.

To pull back out of the weeds here, a good index provides advantages to a researcher that are distinct from full-text searching. And yet, my 9th graders came in with no idea what an index is, much less how to navigate and leverage them. Convincing them of the nuanced advantages of an index when they are so accustomed to full-text searching may be a challenge. Particularly as I myself was ready to capitulate to the ease of digital reference sources (which I still prefer for their currency in many cases). 

My take-away isn’t necessarily that I need to keep print reference works just so students can practice researching with an index. Rather, now that I’m aware of the skill gap and reminded of the important role a good index can play in effective research, I can target my instruction to specifically teach students how to use an index and why they will want that skill. I’ll also bear in mind this gap when working with students on identifying keywords recognizing they may need to work harder at that without the useful suggestions of an index at their pre-research stage. Beyond the instructional elements, I’ve also realized an important piece to look for and advocate for in our digital reference sources so we don’t lose something useful in the translation from print to digital.

I’ve continued to build on my “Christina’s Highlight’s 2024” playlist since my last post. Yet several times this fall when music was playing in the background while I worked, a seemingly unfamiliar song would disrupt my focus. I’d turn to my phone and scroll through Spotify looking for the title highlighted in green. But there was none. Like any librarian, that led me to the random wisdom of the Internet, where a targeted search showed that hundreds of Threads and Reddit users shared my frustration.

Vindication. Except, is it?

I know that I’m typically solidly in the “majority” camp for adopting new technology, so I try to step back and ask myself if I don’t like something because it’s new or if I don’t like something because I actually don’t like it. Or, perhaps, semantics.

To me, a playlist is a personal creation. Radio/Stations are where I want to be introduced to new music in keeping with a genre or theme. I’ve spent hundreds of hours on curation for my personal playlists; it’s not where I’m looking to meet new music. But so many words have changed over time. Technology makes it easier than ever for meanings to morph and spread and morph again.

The AI Overview, however, agrees with me that playlists are human-created and radio stations are driven by algorithms. Not that I exactly trust the Overviews for accuracy, but I do tend to note when responses match what I already believe.

This leads me to my bigger takeaway about how the information landscape has changed since I graduated from library school, back when people were already asking about the value of the degree when information had become so much more readily available.  

Theoretically, there is a world of music within arm’s reach most of my waking hours. In practice, I’ve just gone deeper into the same genres I’ve been listening to since Middle School. Ironically, most of the music that’s intrigued me outside of those genres in recent months has been discovered through the radio. The Radio radio. Shaboozey, anyone?

Even when the radio is on in the car, for most stations I can now see the artist and title as songs play. I can’t be the only one who remembers a childhood of waiting through commercial breaks for DJs to announce a new artist or title? Perhaps this is why I am so much better at music trivia or games like Podquiz now- with the visual representation of what I’m hearing constantly reflected on my screen. But there’s also still so much I don’t remember. That I don’t know. Or that I didn’t even realize I didn’t know. Simply having information available doesn’t mean we access it or that we can remember it elsewhere. I feel like there is a never-ending promise from technology companies that improved access to information will improve human quality of life. Frankly, sometimes that’s overwhelming. That’s why it can be easier to retreat to the playlists we know, the ones created by our labor, the ones that don’t distract us while humming away in the background. But there is something to the serendipity of the radio/station – the opportunity to discover something we didn’t know we’d like but that has been curated for us by an outside source, whether it’s a librarian or an algorithm. Just not through Smart Shuffle on my playlists.

I recently posted a question to the listserv asking for ideas on how to track the invisible work I do in the library. Recent changes in the structure of library services at my school confirmed that the higher levels of administration do not fully understand all of the tasks that go into making the library run. Part of this is on me – I tend to let my work speak for itself and after a building level administration change several years ago, I did not advocate for myself or the library as much as I should have done.  My increased advocacy efforts were too little, too late and library staffing and services were cut. The positive side of these events is that my elementary colleague and I are working together to highlight the instructional and enrichment activities that we lead within the library program, and we have increased our communications with all of our constituents. Advocacy is our joint goal for the next few years.

Meanwhile…. about that invisible work. I know I’m preaching to the choir, but there is a lot of invisible work that happens in the day to day running of the library.  My breaking point, so to speak, happened a couple of weeks ago when I spent the better part of 3 days physically preparing books for the shelves.  There was a backlog of books, due to the loss of our library assistant position, and it took me longer than normal to complete this task.

Through conversation with one of the administrators on campus, I discovered that the perception of the libraries is that when students are not in the room, we are not really busy and have time to “sit on the computer”.  My computer time at work is filled with updating the library pages, curating book lists in Overdrive and our catalog, reading book reviews, searching for relevant databases and resources, preparing research guides, cataloging books, etc.  The conversation with the administrator again highlighted the lack of visibility for much of the work that fills my day.

As a first step I took time to make a shared spreadsheet for both librarians to track the work that must be done behind the scenes for the library to run. We are going to try this low-tech version of tracking for the rest of this calendar year while we investigate other options that we can share with administrators.  I am also adding this “invisible” work to my quarterly updates to administrators because it is important information they need to know.  I’m working on an infographic format that isn’t as text heavy but will still get the message to the right people.

I feel like I have the best job on campus, and I suspect that I have taken it for granted because of course everyone knows how important the library is to the school. This year, I am going to show my community all of the ways we impact student learning and school culture.  What are some of the ways that you highlight your work and library within your community?