My collection is small, and getting smaller. Mind you, when I say “collection” I mean my print collection. I have electronic resources both wide and deep, and those do form an important part of what the library offers. But strictly speaking I didn’t collect those as much as I acquired access to them. There are ebooks that I have purchased singly, that’s true, but as all of you can attest, ordinarily one buys access to bundles of materials that have been collected for us. But this isn’t a screed on the removal of the librarian from that curation process – it’s really not.

Instead, it’s a celebration of what it means to really know your collection well, inside and out. I’d love a bigger collection and the budget that goes with it, but let me demonstrate with this charming anecdote:

Last week I was giving a talk to a ninth grade class about the Acropolis in the age of Pericles, chiefly its architecture and architectural sculpture. (Really this mostly means the Parthenon, but time permitting I work in the Erechtheion too, if I can.) As is usual, they were full of questions about life in fifth century Athens, and I did my best to oblige while trying to steer them back on track. At the end of class one boy was urged forward by the teacher. “Ask her!” she said. Yes, ask me. Please ask me – I’m just here waiting to be asked. Aren’t we all, fellow librarians? ASK US.

“So, you know a lot about music, right? I saw you singing in the practice room the other day.”

I actually don’t really know all that much about music – I was in there practicing for my Bat Mitzvah 2.0, per last month’s article. Sheepishly I owned up to this, and then I asked him what I could do for him nonetheless.

This student is a seriously accomplished violinist and the son of our choral director, and it turns out he was really interested in what ancient Greek music was like. The bulk of the collection lives in the library space, but I myself occupy our new student center with a small print collection nearby. Luckily, everything I needed was close at hand. I have weeded, inventoried, packed, unpacked, shelved and shifted that collection so much I could probably feel my way through the stacks blindfolded and still find the right book, so it was small work to lay hands on just what I needed.

In less than ten minutes I was able to grab an article from the Oxford Classical Dictionary, find a chapter on music and dance from Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean, check out an audio recording of a re-creation of ancient flute music, and print off a description of a hydraulis from Oxford Music Online.

I don’t know a single librarian that wouldn’t love more books, more DVDs, more databases, and a bigger budget to buy them with, but there is such a thing as being spoiled for choice. Briefly I worked in the downtown branch of our public library, and what I noticed was that many patrons preferred to browse the carts of books to be shelved rather than the stacks themselves. Looking at forty or so books means you only have to rule out thirty-nine others (OK, thirty-five!), but looking at an entire row of authors just in the B’s is overwhelming – the brain shuts off and the patron leaves empty-handed.

My small, friendly collection means that I can usually fill a request on the spot at the moment when interest is high, and I rest easy in the knowledge that I probably really did offer all we locally collect on a particular, narrow subject without drowning the student with too much. If I didn’t quite satisfy his request, or if he were writing an expansive paper on the subject, we could sit down and really comb through EVERYTHING we have in Questia, EBSCO, Gale ebooks and so forth. But for now, violinst and librarian are both quite happy.

This post is about books. Sort of. It’s about The Book. Yes, That Book. It’s not about religion per se (at least not in the way one might be thinking.)

I am having my second Bat Mitzvah on the 23^rd. It’s a quadruple adult Bat Mitzvah – to be truly grammatically correct, it’s a B’Not Mitzvah. What’s a second Bat Mitzvah and why am I having one? Didn’t the first one take?

It did. I had a very usual Bat Mitzvah the first go-around. I’m going to go ahead and assume my library peeps are worldly enough about cultures that I can forego an explanation of what it is, if that’s all right. When I was 12, I had been through five years of Hebrew school twice a week, learned all the prayers, gotten a new dress, had a cake and a party and gleefully cashed in my numerous gift certificates to Camelot Records (pretty sure you can all figure my current age out now!) and bemoaned the number of trees that had been planted in Israel in my name by my less-cool aunts and uncles. And it stuck: I continued going to synagogue on the days of obligation, had my wedding performed by a rabbi and now I have two little boys who are on the same path. Which leads me to why I’m having this second Bat Mitzvah.

When I was young, Hebrew instruction was notoriously terrible: it was disorganized, torturous and ill-suited to the task. I am very good at languages, but still needed an expensive and unpleasant round of tutoring just to get me to limp through my passage of the Torah. My mother wondered aloud to the rabbi what the deal was, and even he didn’t have an answer. I made, it, but even seeing printed Hebrew in a prayer book in the intervening years gave me a slight frisson of terror at the memory.

Fast forward 30 years. My older son is nine, and one of these days he’ll be getting ready for his turn. Hoping to spare him the agony and me the expense of the same journey my mother and I took, I signed up for a basic adult Hebrew class and decided I would be his tutor and eat the grief myself.

My older son is doing just great, because the quality of Hebrew instruction offered now is from some other planet than what I experienced. I also did just great. The women in my class, denied the opportunity for their own celebrations at the traditional age, elected to celebrate collectively. I anticipated only waving from the audience and wishing them well, but they insisted I stand up too, so here I am, nervously practicing at odd moments to prepare for next week.

And now, The Book. It’s customary to ask the Bar or Bat Mitzvah to consider his or her portion of the Torah seriously and write a short speech relating the passage to a current event, to an episode in his or her life, or in some way make a very ancient text relevant to modern existence. (That’s a tall order for a 12-year-old.)

Approaching this as a scholar, I wanted to consult multiple sources, and wanted to start with foundational texts. The canonical place to start is the Midrash, which is a collection of commentaries written by learned rabbis over centuries on the chapters of the Torah. Perfect!

Except I couldn’t find one. Surely this is a thing that would be online. You can get the entire Torah online in Hebrew and English in multiple iterations, and I found many variations of certain portions of Midrashic texts, but I was looking for the entire definitive one, to no avail. I looked in my online databases and in collections of ebooks. I looked in the collections of college libraries. Nope. Maybe it’s me, I thought. Or maybe it’s how I’m approaching the subject.

“Is it like the Egyptian Book of the Dead?” I asked the cantor at one of my rehearsal appointments. “That was varied to fit each person, so there’s no single text that’s considered the ‘right’ one to read. Is there a different Midrash for different purposes, or from different schools of thought, and I should be looking in some other way?” I was perplexed, to be sure.

“You want the Midrash?” he said. “I have one right here.” He did. It was a large hardbound book with a decorative dust jacket. Being who and what I am, I immediately opened to the second page and copied down the bibliographic information before consulting the necessary passage. (Just in case someone asks me for a Works Cited page after the service, I guess?)

It actually didn’t solve my real problem – the passage I read shed no real light on the subject I was mulling over – but it did highlight this salient fact: when in doubt, I reach for books, and moreover I aim for the most authoritative and fundamental sources on a subject. I’m not a very spiritual person, actually, but I would call that a kind of faith.

Photo courtesy of TNT

I know – I’m a librarian, I’m supposed to love books. And I do, but . . . I also love TV. I mean it. I looove TV. I watch a lot of TV. Usually I’m reading something at the same time, but nevertheless – I love TV. I will never be one of those people that boasts they haven’t seen a TV show in 20 years because it’s a total wasteland, a mindless pastime designed to sell us Snuggies in between catfights on whatever iteration of the Kardashian show is running at that moment. For anyone who claims that books are always superior to television, I offer up any Harlequin romance novel as evidence to the contrary, and would present virtually anything on BBC, PBS, and the indie film channel in support.

There are, though, some programs that are more entertaining than edifying. Thus, gentle readers, I give to you . . . the first TV review to appear in this blog.

The Librarians airs on TNT at 9 p.m. EST on Sunday nights. It is a spinoff of a trilogy of made-for-TV movies starring Noah Wyle released last year. The gist of it is that the world is full of magical objects, collected in an even more magical place called The Library, and this is under the curatorship of the Librarians (I love that this gets a capital L. Really lends some gravitas, doesn’t it?) These objects include things like the sword Excalibur, Pandora’s box and the lance of Longinus. There is a definite Indiana Jones and The Something of Something flavor, and I’m sure that’s intentional. Also intentional is the hiring of unusually attractive actors as the cast, although I will share something with you: during my other graduate degree program I spent a lot of time working with and around archaeologists. They are all very good-looking. I was quite surprised to discover this, because I assumed Hollywood had filled my head with some fantasy myth of Harrison Ford/Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft and presumed that serious academics would be pasty, myopic and awkward, but every day in class and on dig sites I was surrounded by very handsome, stylish people. So that part’s not fictional, strange as it seems. But plenty of the rest of it is, and I don’t mean “fictional” so much as “straining the limits of credulity.” Among their number, the Librarians count a counter-terrorism expert played by Rebecca Romijn, a genius art historian (hey! That part must be true!) who keeps changing identities, a woman whose sensory hallucinations allow her to “see” whatever magic is in the air, and a fellow who is a master thief and hacker. The magic hallucinator gets a free pass, because that’s fantasy, but who gives the master thief the job of safeguarding precious objects? Fox guarding a henhouse. Not gonna pass the HR screening. Also, who pays these people, and how? Someone’s keeping them in designer clothes, such as the denim jumpsuit Rebecca Romijn wore to take a canoe down a river. Evidently she planned it to be a short, beverage-free excursion.

As a service to you, and to myself, I decided to try and watch them all in a single-day marathon, a luxury of on-demand service. I was deep-cleaning the bedroom and I needed some light companionship, and I don’t know any librarian who could resist an entire TV series called The Librarians, so I pushed “OK” on the remote and away we went.

I am regarded as having a good memory. I could not relate a single plot line to you if there were money or honor riding on it. I have a vague sense that in one episode, some fictional characters in books actually come to life and start wreaking havoc (Moriarty, Dorian Gray) and have to be corralled back into their pages, but other than that and a giant tentacle whacking somebody on the head on a picturesque college campus – nothing. Wait, that’s not true. There was this one short passage of dialogue between two characters desperately trying to get a scrap of information to solve an urgent situation, using “ancient technology,” har.

“Dude, can’t you go any faster?”

“Uh, it’s not like this thing has a search engine!”

“Are you telling me you’re a Librarian and you don’t know how to use a card catalog?”

“It’s the twenty-first century! I also don’t know how to shoe a horse!”

Hang onto that, fellow librarians. Every time we are accused of being irrelevant, outmoded, superseded by Google, I want you to remember that somewhere some TV writer thought librarians were fascinating and intrepid enough to go down into Solomon’s Mines or retrieve Judas’ cup from the Last Supper. Are we dusty cardigan-wearing fact-finders fiddling around with databases? No! We are hottie superheroes saving the world from ultimate destruction by the force of our search skills. Watch with me this Sunday night (and forget with me by Monday morning.) I will also be knitting something and petting my cats while I drink tea, but I am glad the world realizes that I could be out there lifting the curse off the Hope Diamond or interviewing the shadow image on the Shroud of Turin instead.

At this point I don’t know if I’m super-late for my October post or super-early for my November one. In either case, I am too excited to keep it under wraps. And, I’m pleading for help.

December is Read a New Book Month. December 4 is National Cookie Day. I love both of these things, possibly in equal measure and certainly in their infinite variety. I don’t know that I’ve ever met a cookie I didn’t like, and I’ll read pretty much anything that holds my interest after more than a minute. So, I’m combining the two during a joint programming event with our Student Activities Director. Details are still hazy but I believe he offered to buy a Cookie Monster suit if I would agree to wear it. (We’re still negotiating. Check back here for photographic evidence that this actually occurred.)

So, for promoting this event I’m leaning towards something like, “Read a bookie, eat a cookie!” You get the idea. But then I wondered if a picture of Chewbacca, you know, a Wookie, would lend some emphasis; and then I remembered I had the whole Charlaine Harris series of books about Sookie. I’m probably not going to offer a selection of books about family planning, so the other obvious rhyme* is out. Books about Kentucky will only work if read in a Scottish accent. Books about playing hooky? Am I encouraging delinquency?

What else rhymes with cookie? Librarians and wordsmiths, I need you!

*It’s nookie. You did not hear me say that here.

For the second time in four years I am tasked with the job of weeding a very large portion of the collection, packing what is left, storing it and then moving it back onto the shelves at a future point. The first time I did this, I weeded, then boxed, then unboxed, then shelved. What else did I do? I listened to a whole bunch of complaints about all the wonderful books I was just throwing out and some subtle questioning of my professional judgment. (I also took a lot of ibuprofen and shredded the knees of several pairs of Dockers. Librarianship is way more physical than the general public imagines.)

Anyone who’s ever done more than the gentlest of weeding is right now nodding along in sympathy. “You know,” I said, at a faculty meeting when I faced some oblique criticism, “I didn’t go into this profession because I hate books. I love them. But you have to prune back the dead wood to stimulate new growth. If you want them, give them a home.” And at that point the naysayers kind of scuttled back into their lairs and mumbled something about not having space, the books were outdated, et cetera and yadda.

So it was with some trepidation that I am facing this second round of weeding, but I determined to stay firm in my resolve to create a lean, perfectly curated physical collection to complement our expansive digital holdings and avoid the psychic toll that kind of criticism can breed.

At present I am tagging the whole collection with colored stickers to indicate their destiny: green stays on the shelf in the high school collection, yellow means I need to check the books against our curriculum or to see if it has a digital equivalent, blue goes on the shelf of the new middle school space, and red means it will be finding a new home somewhere else. That “somewhere else” can take a variety of forms. Some books will be donated to a new private school that’s just opened up and needs resources, others will be sent to Thrift Books for reselling, some must by necessity be pulped for their paper content, and some can go to faculty who want to adopt them into personal or *classroom collections.

Previously I simply took the weeds out of the catalog, then parked the weeded books on a cart in the faculty room for cherry-picking, and that’s where the trouble lay – these discards were the subject of constant questions every time I walked by to get mail or coffee for months on end. How dare I? What was I thinking? Haven’t I read this? This is a really good book! Don’t I understand? I have. I do. And yet . . .

And that’s when I hit upon the idea of reverse-engineering the final weeding process. I’m going to pluck all the keepers and stash them on rented carts in order, to be rolled to their new home and shelved before opening day in August. Whatever is left on the current library shelves gets taken out of the catalog, has a DISCARD sticker placed over the barcode and can then be perused by faculty over the course of three days so they can pick anything they feel compelled to rescue. Then I’m going to pack the rest for distribution elsewhere as I’ve described. This condenses all the criticism and second-guessing into one short window, and then it’s over. I’m also working on greeting this opportunity as a teachable moment for the faculty: outdated science books do no one any good; multiple volumes about a single minor battle in military history take up space better spent on art technique books; kids don’t want to read stained books with worn covers. (I know – all books deserve love, but all librarians make hard choices based on these very criteria.)

In reading this over, I’m struck by how much of my day is spent mostly in the digital realm, and yet the biggest project I have going on right now is the management of the physical assets. There is a romance to books, and I appreciate that, but there are also days when they are things to be dusted, shifted, moved and packed, which makes me a little less dreamy-eyed about saving them and a little more inclined to work harder at converting those yellow stickers into e-book equivalents.

*I have mixed feelings about classroom collections. I’m not territorial – I just happen to think that if a book is valuable enough to several students for a teacher to want to keep it in his or her classroom, it’s probably worth keeping it in circulation for everyone’s benefit. Personal scholarly reference is different, of course.

I wrote this post way back in fall of 2013, but since there has been a lot of chatter on the listserv about pop-up libraries as a way to promote new books, I thought I would revisit it. (As well, I should sheepishly admit I am overdue on a blog post and am too mired in some quotidian minutiae to give a new post the attention it deserves, so I am recycling in earnest.) Also, this time of year tends to lend itself to retrospectives, clip shows, and Best-Ofs, so it seems timely. I hope. So, see below for my first Pop-Up Library adventure, and feel free to get in touch about the details of how I made it happen.

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I have been installed here for six years and I recently joked that I had my first “normal” year in 2012: my first year was my first year and I was still finishing my last two credits of library school, my second year I was expecting, my third year I had a new baby, my fourth year we renovated, and finally in my fifth year the dust had settled and things were basically predictable. But suddenly what was to be my second “normal” year in a row took a detour: the administration assigned me to be a sixth grade advisor instead of working with my usual crew of juniors or seniors.

There is much greater interaction between advisor and advisees in the middle school, so I was suddenly able to witness the middle school program at very close range. It reinforced what I had long believed to be true: the middle schoolers are my biggest potential consumers of fiction or pleasure reading, but they have the least access to it.

In the lower school division, the students have regular, devoted library time each week. In the high school, students can come in before school, at lunch, during study hall or any free time to peruse the collection and check out materials. In the middle school there is no dedicated library time (yet! That’s another post, I hope) but they are not free to wander into the library by themselves. As well, many of them have confided to me they feel gingerly about entering a library full of “big kids.” What to do? All those glorious young adult titles, desperate to find readers, and an equal number of sad readers bereft of great books. And don’t even get me started on how I feel about the potential future impact on public libraries – isn’t part of our mission to build regular library users into college and beyond?

And thus, the Pop-Up Library. If the middle school can’t come to the library, the library can come to them, I thought. I cannot claim sole credit for this particular stroke of genius – it was inspired by a conversation I had with a friend who is a local college librarian.

So the library popped up in the cafeteria later that very week: I gathered a selection of very hot current books like the Divergent series, James Patterson’s Maximum Ride books, the Theodore Boone novels, a brand-new copy of House of Hades, and an armful of titles for Halloween. I parked these on a book truck, added a laptop and barcode scanner and printed up some colorful signs. I made sure to announce the event at the middle school morning assembly, emailed the faculty to encourage them to remind the kids, and notified the communications department of the photo op for the newsletter.

I set myself up in a corner of the dining commons, arranged the books attractively and before I could even sit down, I had customers – happy, smiling, ready-to-read customers. I circulated more books that afternoon than I had in the entire previous week and there was a ripple effect that lasted for several days, since some students asked about this or that book I had not brought, but could check out and deliver at lunch the next day or to a classroom.

It was so successful I repeated it earlier this month with new titles plus Thanksgiving-related books like Witch of Blackbird Pond, some Ann Rinaldi titles and books about Native American lore and history. The kids tell me they are eager to have it every three weeks or so. To prepare, I have invested in a tabletop poster holder, some book-printed fabric for a tablecloth, sign holders and colorful paper to help merchandise the books enticingly.

Feel free to get in touch with specific questions if you’d like to try launching your own Pop-Up Library – it’s easy, fun, and effective.

I’ve been the librarian here at ODA for the past six years, and one of the things we prize here is maintaining a nimble quality that allows us to be flexible and responsive. We have a constituency that assumes we will fulfill certain expectations of our brand, but part of that brand is being small and friendly enough to try new things once in a while.

Traditionally in the upper school we have had exams in December just before the winter holidays and again in late May. I know there are variations on this theme: some schools hold exams immediately after a winter break, presumably to relieve teachers of the burden of grading over what is supposed to be a vacation. This method seems to shift the burden instead to the students, who must now spend part of their time off studying for looming exams that cast a pall over a festive season.

Our usual method has its challenges too, because it cuts out a few weeks of precious instructional time. The last week or two of the term is spent in review and preparation rather than teaching and assessment; and subsequent to that we have an entire week of exams, one per day, scheduled for three hours at a time, on a rotating docket. After each exam, students are released, presumably to recover and study for the next one. Grades are due quickly, so most teachers breathe a quick sigh of relief, and then put their heads right back down to get them all read and marked before traveling, staycationing, welcoming visitors (or putting their houses back in order after a whirlwind first semester.)

In the middle school it was not much different: the sixth grade has always had end-of-semester projects, but the seventh and eighth grades sat for shorter, but still pretty monumental, exams just like the upper school.

This year we are trying something different in the hopes of reclaiming instructional time; lowering stress levels on both students and faculty; and asking for work that is more collaborative and allows students to prove what they have learned more holistically. To that end, all grades are working on end-of-semester projects. As an example, I offer the ninth grade history assignment. Students were allowed to choose one historical question to ask, and then attempt to answer. Questions were vetted by the history teachers for appropriateness, and then students were paired up to make movie trailers with iMovie that answered their historical questions. Guidelines stated that each student had to help with at least one other pair’s assignment as an actor, cameraperson, narrator, art director, etc. Movie trailers will be presented to the class, and each pair has to submit a one-page abstract of the answer with a bibliography. Other classes or disciplines have assigned oral presentations, traditional papers, mock trials by jury, web page creation, infographic posters and so forth.

I should add here that in either case the library’s role has mostly been supportive: during the traditional exam sessions we provided a good place to study and bottomless office supplies for crafting flash cards, study packets and the like (the idea of library as “makerspace” at times like these being rather more established than we often recognize); in the new approach I conducted research-skills workshops four to six times a day across all grade levels throughout the fall, and also created LibGuides by discipline or project to support these collaborative projects. By now most of the research work has been done and it’s presentation and movie trailer time. So, for the last week or two I have been concentrating on things like weeding, budgeting and planning for my new space. It almost feels like a parallel to agriculturalism: a flurry of frenzied activity at harvest time, then a measured readying for a season of inward-looking hearthside solitude.

Reviews have been surprisingly mixed on both sides. All that extra instructional time teachers were hoping for? Well, they got it. And now they have to fill it. The students who were wishing for a way to obviate the pressure of proving everything they knew in a single three-hour exam? That cataclysm is over, but instead they’re accountable for proving their knowledge to each other and their teachers in projects that take two or three weeks and require collaboration and creativity.

So, naturally there has been some water-cooler discussion burbling here and there: teachers are exhausted by two or three more weeks of instruction, students preferred “getting it over with” and enjoying a week of half-days, et cetera. At one point I said this aloud:

Just because we don’t like it as much doesn’t mean it isn’t better for us. I do not enjoy broccoli as much as I like ice cream, but I recognize that one is clearly more beneficial to me than the other. As neither current classroom teacher nor student I don’t feel like I have a right to weigh in on which approach is ultimately better, but as a citizen of the world with more than four decades’ experience I know that “liking” a thing is not always based on its actual merit. This was an experiment, and I have no insight into whether we will return to our usual arrangement or not. If your institution has variations on this theme or has similarly experimented and come to a conclusion, please feel free to share in the comments below.