Summer Reading Loss

With summer around the corner, our minds turn to sunshine, gardens, barbeques and beaches. At the library, we have our minds on summer reading loss.

Students and teachers work diligently during the school year to improve vocabulary and literacy skills. Once school stops, though, that learning can also halt. Research has shown repeatedly that a summer without reading often means starting from scratch when school starts again in September. There is an estimated three month achievement gap between students who do and do not read during the summer. Between grades one and six, this works out to approximately 1.5 years of lost reading development (Cooper, Nye, Charlton, Lindsay, & Greathouse, 1996).

So how do we encourage summer reading?

For starters, let’s remind ourselves that reading should be fun! During the school year, student may have “required reading,” but summer should mean recreational reading. Comic books, graphic novels, magazines and newspapers may not be traditional formats, but we’re still engaging in literacy when we read them. During the summer, let your children read what they gravitate towards, even if the format or content isn’t considered “high brow.”

No matter how old your children are, our core early literacy concepts still prove valuable: read, talk, write, sing and play. Encourage your children to keep a journal during the summer. Read aloud to them at the beach, or keep books on hands at the family cottage. Listening to Taylor Swift in the car can expand our vocabulary too – sing along!

Finally, you can register your children in the TD Summer Reading Club at the library. Participants simply record how long they read during the summer for their chance to win free books. We’ll also be building a Tower of Books this year: for every piece of literature a child reads, a book will be added to the tower. Can the kids of Collingwood read more than the staff at the library?

There are all kinds of ways to encourage literacy during the summer. We want everyone to read ahead, not fall behind.

Happy summer reading!

--Ashley Kulchycki

References:

Cooper, H., Nye, B., Charlton, K., Lindsay, J., & Greathouse, S. (1996). The effects of summer vacation on achievement test scores: A narrative and meta-analytic review. Review of Educational Research, 66, 227-268.

Library Surveys

If you have entered the library recently, you will have seen a large box on the circulation desk asking you to "Take Our Survey."  What's that all about? Well, the Library Board of the Collingwood Public Library is seeking community feedback to help prepare a strategic plan to guide the library’s progress in the coming years. As part of that process they are asking library patrons to complete a survey.

Why now? Well, the last strategic plan was published in 1991, and much has changed in the library world since then.  For example, many traditional services are now found online. We have eBooks, online research databases, and downloadable audio books.  People are also using libraries in non-traditional ways: to hold public meetings, to create their resumes, to fill-in their tax returns, or to book airline tickets.  As well, the library is doing more community outreach than ever before, extending our services beyond the four walls of the library. 

The timing is right in other ways too. We can build on what we learned last year from creating the Town of Collingwood’s Community Based Strategic Plan. We have a new library board and their four-year plan, once published, can be revised and updated by the next board, which will be appointed after the next municipal election, thus setting a precedent of good management for the years to come.

 

A good library listens to the community it serves, and we want to hear what you have to say.  What are we doing well? What new services would you like to see?  Are there things we are doing now that you feel are no longer necessary?  This is an opportunity to have your say and to help us continue to provide first rate library service to the citizens of Collingwood.

Please take the time to fill out a survey. Surveys can be found at the library, at town hall, or can be completed online.

Literary Coffee House, May 7

In an earlier post, I wrote about the formation of our writers' group here at the Collingwood Public Library.  We are approaching our third anniversary and have decided to mark it with a flourish.

First of all, we have published our first anthology of work by the collective, MUSINGS, which is free to download from our website: here.  Check it out in epub, mobi or PDF.

Secondly, we are holding our first literary coffee house on Saturday, May 7 at 1 p.m.  Everyone is invited to attend and read their work.  You don't have to be a member of the group to participate. We ask that each reader bring a piece that would take no more than five minutes to read (perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 words).  There will be free coffee donated by our excellent neighbours, the Creemore Coffee Studio.  We hope that this will be the first of many such events, helping to nurture and encourage our local writing talent.

Berets and goatees are optional.

Seed Library Re-Launch

I spent the afternoon sorting garden seeds into smaller packets in preparation for the spring launch of our Seed Library on April 1 (no fooling). This marks the fourth year that we have had a lending library for garden seeds here at the Collingwood Public Library. A Seed Library, for those of you who are new to the idea, is a community-created library of garden seeds that are free to loan to anyone interested in growing their own garden.  Obviously, a seed library is a lending library only in the most extreme sense of the word “lending,” since you can’t return a seed once you’ve planted it in the ground.  But you can save some seed at the end of the growing season and return it to the library for use the following year.  That is how a Seed Library is supposed to work.  In practice though, it doesn’t, …or rather it hasn’t, and that is something that I’m hoping to change.

To that end, we have invited Jaden Calvert to the library on Saturday, April 9, at 1 pm, to run a seed-saving workshop.  Jaden was one of the founders of the Meaford Seed Library and is very knowledgeable about how to save garden seeds. I am hoping that he will instill some confidence is those of us who have never done this before, and we will see an overflowing seed library collection for 2017.

If this is something that interests you, please feel welcome to attend.  The workshop is free…just like the seeds. 

Comfort is our enemy

I recently had the good fortune to attend the annual Ontario Library Association conference in Toronto.  The keynote speaker was R. David Lankes, a professor at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies and one of the most frequently-cited thinkers on modern library service.  Lankes stated that innovation was essential to library survival. There was no longer any room for “worker bees” in the library world. He warned that if we didn’t take leadership for innovation into our own hands and create homegrown ideas, then innovation would be imposed from without, by governments looking to cut services or by technology giants looking to control information services. He is an advocate of community-led libraries, where direction is taken from informed citizens.  What services do your communities want you to provide? asks Lankes. (Lankes is famous for saying, “Bad libraries build collections; good libraries build services.”).

There were some surprising local initiatives on display at the conference.  Edmonton Public Library, for example, has created a website for streaming locally-made popular music, called Capital City Records, which is curated by the local music community.  Libraries in Denmark are now being run, in-part or in-full, by self-service, with no staff! 

One topic that came up again and again was that many public libraries were developing services for the homeless and the marginalized, for the simple reason that the public library has become the de-facto shelter for so many people in reduced circumstances.  John Pateman, the CEO of the Thunder Bay Public Library, noted that the presence of so many homeless people in the public library could be disconcerting to the traditional middle class library user, but he emphasized that, if we are to provide equitable service to all sectors of our community, some discomfort would be necessary.  He quoted Jean Vanier, stating, “To comfort the afflicted you have to afflict the comfortable.” Comfort is the enemy of good library service.  "We've always done it this way" is no longer good enough.

On the other hand, the bloom seems to be off the rose for library makerspaces.  Lankes noted a recent Salon.com article that reported:

 According to a survey conducted by Maker Media, 8 out of 10 Makers are male. Their median age is 44. Their average household income is $106,000. Nearly 83 percent are employed, and 31 percent have job descriptions that fall into scientific or engineering categories. 97 percent are college graduates and 80 percent have some post-graduate education.

In other words, makerspaces are preaching to the choir and not addressing the needs of the underprivileged.  A 3-D printer, said Lankes, isn’t really an answer to anything.

--Ken Haigh

Green Electronics?

At the library we actively promote the use of Smartphones, tablets and eReaders, because many of our library materials are now available in electronic form. We also offer courses on how to use these electronic devices. But I sometimes worry that our dependence on these devices is not doing our planet any good. E-Readers, for example, are touted as being "green" because they save trees, but we know that the manufacturers expect us to replace them every eighteen months.  So how green are they really?

Here is a nice video that sums up the problem of planned obsolescence:

On top of this, we are all increasingly aware that many of the components needed to create these devices, minerals like tungsten, tantalum, and gold, are mined in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where profits from the sale of these minerals are used to finance longstanding regional conflicts.  We also know that many of these devices are manufactured in Third World sweatshops under poor working conditions.  Taken all together, that new Smartphone in your hand is not looking so smart.

But what if we could buy a phone that was repairable and up-gradable, where the manufacturer did his best to ensure that the components were sourced from reliable suppliers and manufactured under safe conditions, and where the employees were paid a fair wage?  Google is promising something of the sort with its much-discussed but still-to-be-released, Ara.

One company in the Netherlands has just released the Fairphone 2.  It looks promising.  The problem is that it is very expensive.  My other concern is this: Will Fairphone sell enough product to guarantee its survival, or would I be buying the cellphone equivalent of the eight-track tape?  I do hope that this is the model of the future and that other companies will follow suit.  Imagine buying a phone that was this simple to repair or upgrade.  It could last for years.

See a review of the Fairphone 2 here.

--Ken Haigh

Book Donations

Libraries welcome donations of books. Our budgets are limited, so donations help to fill in the gaps in our collections and help to replace copies of existing books that are worn out through constant use. But we are discerning in what we accept.  What we ARE looking for are recent titles, published within the last five years, that would appeal to a wide readership. What we don't need (and I say this in the nicest possible way) are old magazines, encyclopedia sets, textbooks, Reader's Digest condensed books, or anything that has been stored outside (in a garage perhaps) or in a basement and that smells musty.

Below are a few recent examples of donations we cannot use:

The truth is that many books have an expiry date beyond which nobody wants them or needs them anymore.  The best thing to do with these books is to recycle them.  Paperbacks and magazines can go in regular household recycling.  Even hardcover books, if you cut the covers off, can be put out with your paper recycling.  I know this sounds heretical coming from a librarian, but it is a sad fact that most books eventually end up being recycled.