Back to School!

It's hard to believe it, but registration starts next Tuesday, part of which is in the AHS Library, so this is the week school starts for me. We just got the word that the water will still be shut down next from the construction going on for the 2 new buildings on campus and that will be difficult. It will be great when the buildings are completed and they get to the renovation of the library, but it will be several years before that happens. It's going be an interesting year as we all, students, teachers, staff, parents and community learn to have school with so much disruption and so many budget cuts, but I have to say that we have a wonderful spirit of making sure the students succeed. That's an encouraging atmosphere for us all to work in. Here's to a great new school year!

My First Library

This is a picture of the Arcadia Public Library in the 1950s. It's the first library my parents took me to, and the first I remember. I'm sure I still have my first library card, one of those small cardboard ones, with the little metal insert with my number on it. I'm sharing this piece of my personal history with you because I retrieved this picture from Calisphere, that great resource for pictures and pieces of California history. I use the site with students and teachers here at the high school, and we have found some amazing primary sources. This is such a wonderful example of what is available to us now in this digital age.

Recently I heard that our public library had contributed a lot of digitized pictures to the collection, so today I just searched Arcadia on the site. The very first picture was this one of the public library from my childhood. Have you tried searching the name of your city on the site? If you haven't tried Calisphere, I highly recommend it. There is usually a Calisphere workshop and booth at the annual CSLA conference, so you can catch up with the latest info about it there too.

Picture link:
(http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt7v19r287/;jsessionid=cEEx63mk7j6z4YeZ?query=arcadia&brand=calisphere)

Uploading pictures from Flickr

DSCN0663,
originally uploaded by Librarymum.

I'm exploring how to post pics from Flickr on this blog. One of the participants in SLL2.0 Winter Fun was having trouble with this. It seems to have changed somewhat.

One thought I had - with Flckr now blocked at school, my pics on Flickr won't show on the blog when I open it at school. It seems like it would be best to only use things I upload from my own computer if I want to use them at school for now. I certainly hope that we can figure out a way to use some of these tools (Flickr, YouTube, etc.) when presenting lessons, even if we can't open them up for unlimited use at school by students. I know the reasons, but it is a shame.

LibraryThing - week 8, thing #19

This was so easy to use. I heard about this awhile ago, but I hadn't tried it for myself. This whole course has been so good to make me follow up on things like this. LibraryThing could be the easiest thing to add to the school library site to highlight new books, and I will go on exploring other ways to use it. Meanwhile, I can get those new books out there one more way!

Below you can see just a few of my favorites by Anne Perry in the sidebar. These are the Christmas books she has written that involve some of the side characters in her other series and one of the books in her World War I series.

LibraryThing has one of the lowest learning curves of anything we have done in this course, and it has so much potential.