What to do with weeded books

You could try this with your weedings for the year!  I’m feeling inspired to issue a challenge and wondering what the boys would do.  I think it is awesome.  It is from Cathy Jo Nelson whose blog is always full of good ideas.  I found it as I was reading about censorship here.  Another great post.  I’m just heartily recommending Cathy Jo.

Virtual tour of Australian school libraries

OH WOW!

Judith Way – one of my library heroines (read more about her here) has achieved this grand feat. A fantastic inside view of lots of Australian School libraries.  Just WOW!

I found out about this from here (another great blog I follow called Brave New World – it’s all kinds of awesome too)

Nice translator!

Has anyone ever asked you to translate something into as many languages as possible? This happened today to a school librarian I know, and she turned to our wonderful School Library email list for help. Good thinking! The collective skills, knowledge and experience there is fantastic.

Anyway, I did a quick search (yes OK – I googled it!) and found this rather fabulous website called “Nice translator” that’ll translate text into up to 44 languages! All at once! Awesomeness!

Here’s the short link to “Library” in 44 languages, and here’s “We love reading” (my school library blog banner phrase) as well, while we’re at it.

Something to think about for your next display, maybe?

WordArt: what is it good for?

I’ve been seeing lots of those lovely quote posters around the web lately and wondering how I might make one. Turns out, WordArt is useful after all! It doesn’t have to be all hideous rainbow-words-in-a-circle kind of stuff, believe it or not. And it’s not too tricky to do, either. Check this out:

 

Try these steps:

1. Find a quote you like
2. Open Word, and paste or type your quote so you’ve got it handy – delete this at the end, OK?
3. Choose Insert | WordArt, and select the first – very plain – option.
4. Type the first words of your quote, just as much as you’d like to see on your first line, choose a font and set the font size (I used Franklin Gothic Book and the first line is 36pt), then click OK.
5. Stretch or shrink the WordArt box so that it fits the width of your document.
6. Play with text effects (colour, spacing, shadows) until it looks the way you want. I gave mine a drop-shadow.
7. Copy and paste the first WordArt box into a new paragraph – you will now have two identical boxes.
8. Edit the new box with the text for your next line. If you have more or less words than your first line you should reduce or increase your font size before you hit OK  (you can fine-tune it later).
9. Size the new WordArt box to be the same width as the first. You can alter the height of the box later if you like – but not so much that the font looks weird!
10. Repeat steps 7-9 for the remaining lines of your quote and the name attribution. This could take a bit of trial and error until you get the text into chunks that “work” nicely (trust me!)
11. Add a background by inserting an image, or a shape filled with colour, and send it to the back, behind your words.

Your stats are showing!

via David Lee King’s blog

Their Summer Reading programme sign-up stats screen appears on all the public computers at TSCPL, updated each week with the latest figures. Now, setting aside the fact that we’re in the grips of the mildest winter ever, I reckon this could be adapted to show all sorts of interesting stats for your school library. Imagine it showing the number of books issued by genre (my current obsession – more on that in a future post), or maybe a Boy Vs Girl battle…

1. Grab yourself a cool background – find one or make one yourself
2. Add your title and any decorative bits and pieces you want (got stickers?)
3. Add the stats boxes – the actual size doesn’t matter as long as you have your ratios about right, I reckon
4. Share it! If you’ve got a display screen, bung it on there. If you have OPAC machines, make it the screen-saver.
   You could even – shock, horror! – make a paper version for the display wall outside your library!

Here’s my 5 minute test version made using a Google docs Drawing – why don’t you give it a try?

Got any old books?

Feel like some scissor-snippering? Don’t let the title of this tumblr blog put you off – Fuck yeah, book arts! – it is full of sheer awesomeness! Take this, for example, just stunning:

Paper house mobile

If you have even an ounce of creativity, and some weeded books to play with, check out the blog for some inspiration, get out your stanley knife and get busy! Or maybe you have crafty kids who like to hang out in the library, and are pretty handy with a pair of scissors – show them some pictures then let them at it!

AMM 2010's doodle-a-day #17