At least one furry little survivor of the late Osama Bin TeleMouse is still evading Carly and me. We’ve switched the Victor traps over to peanut butter rather than relying on the built-in scented glue or even on cheese.
Perhaps clueful librarians, too, in their never-ending quest to turn children into readers, should try peanut butter, so to speak. A Librarian’s Lament: Books Are a Hard Sell has just appeared in the Washington Post, and now I’m hoping that the librarian Thomas Washington, having not drawn huge crowds with existing bait, will give e-books a shot
I’ll offer specific ideas, but first here’s more on a school librarian’s equivalent of TeleMouse-catching. “A librarian in an independent Washington area school,” Washington cites the 2004 Reading at Risk report and notes that many libraries care less about books these days and more about “information literacy.” Laudably, as his Outlook section piece makes clear, he himself is still an unabashed book-pusher:
Recently I stood Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House” next to the DVD version produced by the BBC. Lady Dedlock (Gillian Anderson) graced both covers. A senior fingered the DVD for a minute, then turned it over to read the blurb. “The book is too long,” she said. “Is the movie any better?”
“You’re right. The book is long,” I said. “But once you start this one, you won’t be able to put it down, right from that first page about the London fog.”
“I think I’ll watch the DVD,” the student said.
And in my library ledger, I’ll register this as a sale.
Hey, every little victory counts. Perhaps, however, Thomas Washington should be thinking beyond DVDs and Denzel Washington posters and also encouraging students to read e-books on their PDAs and mobile phones and acquaint themselves with public domain books on the Net. The senior who didn’t check out the actual p-book version of Bleak House just might go for a public domain e-book of Pride and Prejudice that she could read at her leisure, without worrying about a fine. Similarly a male student might enjoy the works of Jules Verne or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle–or perhaps a free sci-fi offering from Baen.
In a related vein, suppose Thomas Washington talked to a student for a minute or two to find out what he or she really wanted to read; not to mention favorite hobbies, sports, dreams for the future, and other drivers of reading tastes. When a library simply puts up a poster about a book, it’s the equivalent of the broadcast model; instead it should also be trying a many-to-many approach—with students and librarians engaging in genuine dialogs, plural. Yes, students should read the standard classics, not just what they want, but recreational reading will help push them in that direction.
Meanwhile I think Washington is on the right path with DVDs—at least a start. Best of luck to him! I’ll zip off an e-mail and see if he’d like to follow up with an e-book experiment. If glue won’t work, maybe the peanut butter will.
Related: Real Books on the Internet, my Washington Post op-ed from some years ago—as well as a D-Lib Magazine’s piece on designing library catalogs to serve contemporary needs (found via librarian.net). The right books won’t count for squat if the right readers can’t find them. Full-text search capabilities, as I see it, could help. Yes, many copyright holders would be a problem, but why not at least allow FTing of public domain books and those specifically authorized?
