Book week is nearly upon us!

We've chosen next week as our book week because the 3rd of March is the official World Book Day.

We will be celebrating book week here at Harrow International School Bangkok with many fun activities, including a launch party, games day and limerick competition.

Come and visit the library, take part in the activities and read and borrow books!
Most of the activities will take place during Primary lunch time, starting at 12 noon each day.

Parents and families - please remember that you are welcome to use the school library too - we have lots of great books in our secondary library which may appeal! Of course, there are many wonderful kids books available too. Why not check one out? It might be your new favourite! We are open Monday - Friday 7.30 - 4pm during the school term.

Next Friday is Primary book character dress up day. If you happen to visit school you will find all kinds of characters wandering around.
With so many books to choose from it's difficult to decide who to be for the day so my costume is still undecided, but it's so much fun trying to choose. Tinkerbell could be fun, or maybe Sophie from Howl's moving castle. Or what about Snow White, or Blue Kangaroo, or maybe even the Gruffalo...

Sharing fantastic learning experiences with the students

Today the most amazing thing happened to me - I held a snake! This may not be something which is a big deal to some of you, after all many people who are reading this probably grew up in a country where there are snakes. But in New Zealand, we don't have snakes (at least not wild ones). So they are a relatively uncommon thing. As a child (and as an adult) I always thought they were something to be scared of, but I've just seen how awesome they really are.

I was so excited to see a snake - and it was great to see the children enjoying it just as much as I did. Thank you so much to Mrs Riley and Pre-KR who let me come along, and Mr Beer who let me hold Tango the corn snake.

It was nice to share an experience with the children - snakes are something I know very little about and Mr Beer had some great facts to share.
What a wonderful thing to see at school - it makes me feel so lucky to work here.

For me, this was a great chance to see more about what the children do on a day to day basis outside of the library. I have really been enjoying visiting the Pre-K classrooms from time to time. Now, I'm off to find some great stories about snakes for this weeks' library session!

The Yes Library

Quietly, amongst ourselves, without gigantic ticks on the wall or slogans on the door, our workplace philosophy is that we are a Yes Library. Meaning, simply, that we say Yes: to book requests, to requests to use the library, to lead assemblies, to go on camp, to take extra classes, to mend someone's torn book, to put on sticking plasters, to make lists, to deliver, to join committees, to use the library for sleepovers, to do anything and everything we are asked.

Why? Because it is a constructive culture to have - library as the positive place. Because libraries are dispensable in some peoples eyes, storage units for topics loan books and computers, a job anyone could do. To get on with it, to get the job done, to suspend the prolonged use of Why. To please people - librarians love to satisfy a user's information need, and the Yes Library is an extension of that ideal. To add value to what we do, books and electronica and lessons plus, a kind of library philosophy 2.0.

This is underpinned by two beliefs: it is not my library, but the user's library - I am the caretaker; and the sense that if a user's first tangible approach to the library is met with a No, then at best they will leave with a negative perception of the library, and at worst will never come back.

There is no branding. Instead, every now and then, we discuss it at staff meetings, reinforcing that this is the library philosophy. Do staff buy in? Most of the time, sometimes with a query - sometimes it is workplace nature to want to say I have too much to do, it is not my job, this is not my beautiful life. I understand that, and attempt to encourage and reinforce through doing, by example, by passing on positive comments, by explicitly following the philosophy, by using it as a guideline when making tricky decisions.

There are exceptions. There are still rules. I won't be there at 9 o'clock at night; no you can't watch that on the library PC. But where possible, where reasonable and logical, our library mission is straightforward, positive and constructive. Yes?

Jonathon Safran Foer's Tree of Codes

I am both frightened and stimulated by Jonathon Safran Foer's Tree of Codes. Cutting up books is, instinctively, a facist and not artistic act; making something whole and with meaning out of somebody's book is creatively challenging and interesting. He is finding hidden (or never was) meaning in a classic text; he is challenging conventional concepts of fiction and creativity; he is asking the reader to step out from the traditional one book one writer paradigm. What is fixed and finished? Who is the maker? Is there meaning in these words?

So, this video illustrating the creation of Tree of Codes stimulates the creator within me. But this only balances the sense of loss the reader within me feels. Foer's stated argument, that there are plenty of other copies of the original book that he hasn't cut up feels slightly facile, because it is not like he is cutting out the crossword from a newspaper, or doing collage using magazine photos - he is disfiguring a book, a precious container, each one that I have ever held being the original.

This is not me as librarian, asking students to use bookmarks rather than dog ears - rather, it is I as reader, a man who holds books as almost holy, almost a life source, who is torn up. If it was my tv he was tearing apart and putting back together as a transmogrifier, or the Google code as a page of scripture, I'd be thrilled. But my books (and my cricket bat and jar of vegemite) are whole, finished, complete, precious and inviolate in their original form.

That said, today my students are cutting up photocopies of Carl Sandburg and Prufrock to create their own poems. Librarian as hypocrite? Or the fine line between real, whole books and what they mean, and a faded facsimile on A3?

Book Review: The Secret of Annexe 3

The Inspector Morse series is an interesting entry in the mystery book cannon. Morse, who lives and works in Oxford, is the archetypal detective as outsider: a bachelor, he has no identifiable close friends, listens to opera in the dark, sits alone in a myriad of pubs, is brusque with everyone else on the force, and engages really only with the crossword compiler of The Times. His Watson is a Welshman named Lewis, whom we see buying drinks for his boss, doing the donkeywork and eating a daily ration of eggs and chips; and usually one step (at least) behind Morse.

The Secret of Annexe 3 is one of the least stellar entries in the series, with an unlikely crime committed by an unlikely pair, underpinned by an unlikely psychology. The setting is low (town), rather than high (University) Oxford during a rather loveless Christmas and New Year period - all of which is rather tawdry.

But why it is notable is that Morse, in the end, does not get his man (well, not completely anyway). Which makes it a relatively unsatisfying example of a mystery book, even if the author is merely attempting to subvert the genre, as Christie did famously with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Because why do we read them, if not for the satisfaction of the murderer being caught, of the detective's triumph, and of our complicity as readers in that success?

Which leads me to my point - why do I read mystery books? Is it this sense of  triumph in the resolution that draws me to them? Partly, I think it is, because I am left feeling distinctly deflated when the murderer eludes Morse. And with that resolution comes a sense of order, and the notion that the world has been righted.

But I feel that it is more than that. I also identify with the detectives in mystery books and possibly, subconsciously, want to be them - all seeing, all knowing, clever, fearless, confronting death and killers. But I also do not want to be them: odd, finicky Poirot; the alcoholic Dave Robicheaux; the divorced, slightly slovenly Inspector Wallander; Matt Scudder, alone and observing questionable morality on New York's mean streets. In isolation, I don't want to be any of them, but as a reader, I love all of them.

Is it the puzzle, then? The superior intellect that can untie the Gordian knot? Again, I'm not convinced. I'm not sure how most people read mystery books, but I am a somewhat passive reader of them: I don't try and solve the mystery as I go along, although I am glad when the solution is announced.

Am I Watson? Do I feel like Poirot's confessor, or Scudder's companion down the Deuce? Not really, because as much as these books take me to a different place, exotic, troublesome, I am able to remain grounded in my more prosaic reality: on the skytrain, in the library, between the sheets early on a Tuesday night, nothing on the telly.

Which leaves, I feel, murder, and human fascination with it. I can't do fantasy, struggle with comic novels, and like my literature best in the form of Dostoyevsky, underpinned with a good psychological killing or two.

Which is why I'll keep reading the Inspector Morse books, despite the anti-climatic entry that is The Secret of Annexe 3. Yes, I'm annoyed by the lack of resolution, yes I admire Morse's intellect and wit, yes I wish I was Lewis, yes Oxford sounds like an interesting place, yes there is a puzzle, but mostly yes, blood has been spilt, crime has been done, and the game is afoot: great stuff, as long as its only between the pages of a book.

Library Events

This Thursday we will celebrate Secondary English Week with cut-up and stick-it-on poetry, at lunchtime in the Secondary library.

Reminder: Making Stuff Day is each Wednesday at lunchtime, and the Storyteller is on Fridays. Both are in the Primary library, and everybody is welcome.

Also, it is not long until World Book Week, which will be in the first week of March. We will have a number of special events and guests during that week, as well as the book fair.

Storybird and Xtranormal

Storybird and Xtranormal are two open source sites we have been using as presentation tools lately.

Storybird is a site that allows users to select from a range of artists, and then write words to accompany the pictures. We used this as a straight story site during Creativity Day, but also with a Year 6 class who were doing research about famous people. They wrote a narrative incorporating their famous person - it was successful both with advanced students, who wrote complex narratives, and with less focused students who were the most interested they had been in class all year!

Xtranormal is not completely open source, but it does have a free component. It allows users to select animated characters, read text for them, and then will create a short film using those characters - again, a great literacy and creativity tool. I have only used it at home so far, but will use it as an option for my Year 9 classes as a presentation tool for their Leaders study.

Copyright on the internet

Each year, I incorporate a component into classes for Y6-Y9 students instructing them about how to create bibliographies, why they are important, and why they should present information using their own words, not (notably) by cutting and pasting. This is an essential part of leading those students towards being information authentic - finding the right source is great, but so is presenting completed work in an original and honest form.

The project where students struggle most is when classes work together to create a wiki. Each group researches a topic of their choosing and then posts their findings on a wiki - a project that will be replicated in most schools in some form or other. A requirement of the project is that students must use books as two of their sources - I want students to utilise the collection and to develop their skills as users of non-fiction. But they can obviously use the internet for other sources. I point them towards EBSCO, Britannica, CIA World Factbook and other authoritative resources, and they will use those, but they will also by default almost universally eventually head back to Google, their comfort blanket.

And often, information they find using Google will end up cut and pasted into their final posting, sometimes attributed, but not always. Images and videos they have found decorate their postings, again sometimes but not always attributed.

Partly this is my fault. I discuss attribution, forms of bibliography and copyright with the classes, but often the overwhelming urge for these students is to discard the rubric and accept the gift the internet is offering them - attractive, easy to use information and images, that makes it easier for them to complete their work.

My point is that this ease of access and copying has created a generation of users who have come to view the internet as a catch-all resource - the information is there, it is attractive, and easy to use. It is difficult, often, to determine an exact author, or the origins of a photo or video. With a book, an author has their name on the spine label; a website has a coded address that means very little to a 10 year old.

I feel, then, that the onus, yes, does lie with librarians and information professionals to ensure that their students are information authentic; but because our contact with users of the internet is fleeting and our advice not always adhered to when we are not present, some of the onus also lies with the internet itself.

Which means, to my mind, that for copyright to have any lasting meaning on the internet, the internet community needs to support a from of copyright regulation that extends beyond the opt-in philosophy of the Creative Commons - all sites should have a universally recognised symbol indicating the level to which they can be used by internet users. If the symbol is not evident, the posting should be regarded as not being bound by copyright.

The last point is the biggest change and the most important, as it means that people who post information of any type are equally responsible (with the user) for ethically managing the copyright for that posting.

Why? Beacuse the internet is a different container than a book, or a newspaper, or first-run Hollywood movie. It is instantly accessible to billions of people, some of whom use the information they find on there ethically, some of whom don't, or don't know what that means, or don't care - or just view all information on the internet as theirs. It is not like they are taking a videocamera to the cineplex - they are just copying a photo of Hitchcock into their email, after all. The overwhelming sentiment I identify in users is that there is no owner of the information, so they can do what they want with it.

To some extent, the toothpaste is out of the tube, and it would take some expert stuffing to get it back in. But if there was a regualtory site (or if Creative Commons became universal) offering three options for internet posters (1, no use  2, use with credit  3, free use without attribution), it would be clearer how that site could be used.

The internet doesn't want to regulate, but it does want rights management. These positions are irrenconcilible, and until there is a shift, copyright on the internet will continue to be ineffective and confusing for the vast majority of users.

The free internet

When The Times of London began charging for access to its daily online edition, it was a watershed moment for my life as an internet user. The ethos of free and social and the commons was shown up, as with most things from Silicon Valley, as carefully constructed spin, half the conjuring trick leading us to a state of chronic and compulsive electronic consumerism (the other half of the trick, of course, is the creation myth as pronounced by its prophets - Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, the Google dudes).

I cannot use sites like Hulu, because I have the wrong IP address; I must pay for apps; I need to buy a life on Farmville; ESPN wants 10 dollars a month to read the good stuff - plus ads; now, I need to pay to read The Times. 

The internet, therefore, is moving away from an ideal information state, where that information is free and available to all, and moving towards the state of a mobile, electronic mall, open, blaring and neon, 24 hours a day. The second generation digital divide is not that the citizens of Africa cannot access the internet, or electricity. Instead, it is the three card trick that internet companies are playing on the West - increasingly, we the users are being channelled towards a pyramid where our few cents are becoming a hill of millions (or billions) for the savvy and clever and entitled.

A commie rant? Maybe, or maybe a lament from a jaundiced information idealist, who bought into the opening day publicity - free for all, free for ever, access to everything, anywhere, anytime, until the end of time. If I can't even read the paper now, how long is it until the search engines become fully monetized, a cent a time - surely the rub-your-hands-together end goal.

Google: Good or bad?

Google lights up my life. I get sports scores in real time, know what the weather is going to be like in Rome tomorrow, convert my baht to euros, book flights and hotels, read the paper, blog. Google doesn't necessarily do all these things itself, but it does facilitate straightforward access to them. When I was young, growing up in the South Pacific, I sometimes wouldn't know who won the World Series until the following year, when the new season's preview magazines hit the bookstands - now I know the same moment that someone in New York or San Francisco or, less likely, Kansas City does.

I use Google in class a lot, teaching students how to use it effectively, primarily through using straightforward search strategies, but also using Google Maps, and Blogger, and Youtube, and as a starting point for research in numerous projects. Like a public library once was, Google is the place we head by default when we have a general need for information.

And, like a librarian, Google interprets our query and attempts to return the best possible result - not by in depth questioning of the user, or years of experience, or conversational nuance, but through use of an algorithm that is more secret than the recipe for Coca Cola. This does put the onus on the user more than the facilitator - to get the best results, our searches and keywords need to be carefully chosen. But Google is intuitive enough for most users to understand this to a basic level, and we can all usually find something we want on the first page of results.

So that is my perception of Google. I view it not as a great storage unit of information, but as a sort of robotic librarian - it knows where to go to get the information I want, even at 3a.m.

But a great deal of the information that Google can go and get would not have been in the public library of 1976. In some ways, Google is a library of iniquity: pornography, paedophelia, bomb making, terrorist tips, racism, gambling - these are all growth markets, partly because of the accessibility to these type of sites, as facilitated by Google.

Of even greater concern, I feel, is the deadening effect of Google. As in a casino, the world becomes timeless as we surf the net. Instead of great novels or poems, great pop songs or even great TV advertisements, Google encourages output in the form of blogs, or tweets, or email, or videos of our dogs bodily functions, or Facebook, or more usually - nothing. At least watching a TV show in the middle of the day, even if it was a rerun of Kojak, represented a linear event. Time passed, notably. Narrative occurred. There was a beginning and an end.

Now, using Google, it is possible to pass whole afternoons without even that minor achievement. Cricinfo scores flick over. Farmville swells, grows, recedes, swells again. 1979 is still on Youtube, and so is Benny Hill. I blog, I email - and at the end, I am pretty much at the same point at which I began. I want the man who ate McDonalds every day for a year to sit in an apartment, Googling from 8am-5pm, and find out which was worse for his health.

I'm overstating my case? Perhaps, but when 200 of the richest people in America get together to discuss brain-computer interfaces, it is time for people to dissent. Grow potatoes, write a haiku, wrestle with your son - anything. Take an hour a day that you would spend online and do something human instead.

I love Google. It is the advance of my lifetime that has most changed the way I carry out that life. But none of that change has been creative, none has been physical, and none has made me a better parent or husband or person.

Censorship in a school library

When I first started in my role at this library, a teaching staff member went to the shelves, found a copy of Ben Elton's Post Mortem, opened it to an explicit scene and brought it to show me. She wasn't outraged or offended, but felt the text was unsuitable for students at the school.

I read the page as she watched. It was explicit, as she had said, and contained high level obscene language. I agreed to consider the place of the book in the collection, put it in my desk, read it again, put it back in my desk - eventually, the next time we weeded, I included it in the deselected items. We had other Ben Elton that students could read, I told myself. It was old, and dog-eared. It had to go.

What I was doing, in effect, new to my job, eager to please faculty, was placing myself in the position of censor, whatever rationale I was using to justify my actions to myself. I read a page of a popular novel, and judged it to be unsuitable for students using the library, and had thus withdrawn it from circulation.

Is that appropriate? In Kentucky, it was not appropriate for library staff to withhold The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from an 11 year old library user who wanted to read it. My context is slightly different, as my salary, at a high-end private school, is paid by parents, not by county taxes; I work under Thai law, which has a different commitment to information than American law; most of my library users are adolescents, or younger; I was removing the text from circulation, rather than refusing to let a specific user borrow it.

My rule of thumb is to not purchase texts which will be offensive to users. This is reflected in the library purchasing policy. But I know that there are advanced students, leaving for Unversity later this year, who may benefit from reading American Psycho (they are studying sexuality in the American novel); the graphic novel collection would be richer, and probably better, if I was willing to select items that contained challenging content. I also feel that I am imposing my interpretation of 'social conscience' on the library and its users.

So what is the solution? I don't think it is to have a drawer of controversial texts that are issued to users signalled as mature enough to cope; or even to mark the due date sticker with 'Year 10 and above only'. It is not appropriate, to my mind, to extract a book from the collection because it has a passage of writing that may revolt or horrify or titillate the reader. But is it correct operating procedure to, alternatively, fill the shelves with mature content?

My compromise is to not buy every book I feel I should, and to take the middle-ground, motivated by the context of the library, and my perception of the requirements of the library stakeholders. If there are disputed texts, I now consult with those stakeholders before making a decision. However, if a student requests the library purchase a text, I will almost always approve that request.

But I still feel that my selection hand is too heavy, and that rather than facilitating straightforward access to information, my caution is in effect a form of defacto censorship - and that leaves me feeling just a little bit grubby.

The Bookless Library

Do libraries need books at all?

Cushing Academy, in Massachusetts, has made the decision that they don't, and that the future for school libraries is digital - ebooks, databases, portable devices, the web.

The result? Their new digital library is the hub of the school, with increased use and the need for more librarians to help students effectively navigate the digital world. Cushing hasn't thrown away its paper holdings - they have been redistributed to relevant departments within the school. But the library itself has been reborn, digital.

I admire them for so completely accepting the challenge of technology. One of my primary goals with Harrow students is to have them being information independent (and information authentic) by the time they leave school. I define this as their being able to access, interpret, present and acknowledge authoritative information - which increasingly means, electronic information. By exposing students so fully to digital information, and scaffolding that exposure with thorough, expert advice from information professionals, Cushing Academy is surely going to meet that goal in a way that is highly relevant to success in the 21st Century.

But I also agree with the dissenting voices in the debate. I believe in, and love, the stillness of the page. Reading a book is, I agree, a singleminded process - there is only one tab open. Books are not, thankfully, connected to the grid. Tactile, silent, pleasurable, lovable, dog-eared - books are the primary reason that I am a librarian.

They are not, however, the primary reason that all students come to the library. Some want to read The Hunger Games, or Bear Grylls, or Charlie and Lola. Some want to game. Some need to print last night's homework - now. Some want to watch Youtube, go on Facebook, browse car image sites. Some want to do research. Some want to talk to their friends. Some like the air-con. Some feel happy and safe sitting alone in a chair reading Asterix. Some read the papers, or Time magazine. Some need help. Some want to do Mathletics. Some want to....

Which I guess is my point. I think Cushing Academy, with an end-goal of information independence in the digital age, has done the right thing. But I want Harrow library to not just be about Electronica, with a capital E. I don't want it to just be for research, or even research and ebooks. I want it to be for research and reading and being social, or being alone, for surfing or lying prone in a beanbag, reading Meg Cabot or The Great Gatsby for the first time. I want you to come here and connect, charge up and fearlessly onwards. But I also want you to be able to come here and disconnect, to power down, to look, slowly, quietly, longingly - backwards, or sideways, or yes, even forwards.

Database Training

In the second term, library staff will be offering database training to teachers at Harrow. The main focus of the training will be on EBSCO, and how to use it effectively in the classroom. Other resources that we subscribe to, including Britannica Online, Issues Online and Netlibrary will also be demonstrated.

The training will take place one day a week during term 2A. Each week's training will be on a different day from the previous week, so that teachers with activities have the opportunity to attend.

An email, with dates and locations, will be sent out early in the new term. Teachers who are unable to attend but would like to learn more about the school's electronic resources can contact library staff - we will be happy to arrange a time that suits.

We are also happy to demonstrate the databases to Harrow parents.

Does 2 + 2 = 4?

Not always, according to the boffins at New Scientist.

The Last Word is a useful site hosted by that magazine, where you can search for answers to those scientific (and mathematical) questions that have always baffled you.

So, if you added two librarians to two insurance underwriters, would the answer be four? Or a quiet night in? Or chaos theory?

Japanese Films

The SF World Cinema at Central World is showing a retrospective of the master Japanese filmaker, Akira Kurosawa. The films run from January 6th - January 19th, and will be in the original Japanese with English subtitles. Entry is free, and made possible by the Japan Foundation of Bangkok.

Here is a link to the schedule.

Kurosawa was the pre-eminent Japanese filmaker of the 20th Century. He won the Palm d'Or in Cannes, and was awarded an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1990. The film he is perhaps best known for is the epic Seven Samurai.