jump to navigation

Graphic Novels, Manga and Anime: What’s New and Cool for Your Library July 2, 2006

Posted by asteinberg in : ALA2006 , 1 comment so far

Presented by YALSA’s Graphic Novel Taskforce and the Great Graphic Novels Committee.
Panelists: Jackie Estrada, Kat Kane, KristinFletcher-Spear, Robin Brenner, Kevin King and moderator Michele Gorman

The popularity of all forms of graphic novel are growing exponentially. You name it, it’s being put into the comic format. The old favorites are still with us and the new favorite Japanese manga are growing but with that we are also seeing comics coming from Korea (called manwha), India and Egypt. Titles are emerging for the classroom and for younger children. Even popular childrens fiction titles like Goosebumps and the Baby-Sitter Club are being turned into graphic novels.

What do all the terms mean?
- Anime are animated shows usually based on manga. There are a lot of new anime being produced.
-VOYA will be coming out with an article on how to get free anime, there are less restrictions then other movies and cartoons because the companies want us to show the kids as much as we’ll allow.

- If you want to know what’s popular the best thing to do is watch Cartoon Network and ask your students.
-Manga reads left to right, it is more authentic to the original Japanese production and it is cheaper for Japan to produce the English version when left this way. Kids don’t have much trouble with it, it’s like a secret language.
- Shojo is the term used for manga that is geared toward girls.
- Shonen is the term used for manga that is geard toward boys.
- Many publishers are putting readers advisory on their books such as age level and genre.

- Manga novels are becoming more popular. They are true chapter novels that read from front to back but they can be hard to distinguish by the cover art because they look virtually same.
- Yaoi (pronounce “ya-oy”) is also known as Boy Love or BL.
- This is a sub genre of manga.
- It is a romance between two male characters aimed at the teen and up audience
- Very popular with girls(actually geared to the female audience). Possibly because the characters are very good looking one student told the panelist “two pretty boys are better to look at than one”.

- Amazon top 25 comic sellers 4 were Boys Love.
- Yaoi (or BL) tends to have more plot.

Programs
- Find out if there is a comic book artist in your area. You can do this by going to a comic book store and asking. Have the artist come to your library. If you promote it well they will come in droves and you won’t have to pay for travel and housing. - Mini-comic workshops. They make their own comics out of stapled paper, it is cheap, easy and fun.
- Many publishers have free library clubs that will send you manga and anime regularly. They want you to show off their product so it is a win win.

- The presenter started a “JPop Club”. It is for the Japanese pop culture experience so everything Japanese can fit in depending what the kids want.
- Cosplay is when people dress as anime characters. People love to dress up. There are actually Cosplay conventions and magazines so the kids may already be excited about it.
- Writing and art workshops and contests. Remember the writers, some kids don’t like drawing. The two can work together.

Audience Questions
Q: A public librarian asked about buying and shelving adult graphic novels.
A: It is important to buy graphic novels for both children and adults. They should be shelved in the appropriate section. If you house it they will find it. We should promote graphic novels to all ages just we do with our other books.

Q: A public librarian asked about starting an anime club for younger patrons.
A: This was encouraged for a couple of reasons. 1) Appropriateness of material 2) the older kids don’t want to hang out with the younger kids but the younger kids are really excited about the material too.
Q: Are there audio book versions of manga
A: It is a very visual media so it doesn’t work very well. In Japan they have drama CD’s which are dramatizations of Manga. It would be a fun thing to tape with the kids as a program.
Q: How do I know if a title is Boy Love?

A: “Go with the Hair” if that fails look on the back of the book.
Q: There are a lot of hand outs, will they be available somewhere else?
A: The YALSA sight will have hand-outs on their site after the conference.

YALSA will also be making the hand-outs for the childrens’ graphic novel session available.

John Wood: Room to Read

Posted by asteinberg in : ALA2006 , 3 comments

He has written a book called Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: an Entrepreneur’s Odyssey to Educate the World’s Children.

His professional title used to be Director of Business Development for Microsoft Greater China Region. Now he is called the “bring books on a yak guy”. Why? Because he went to Nepal in an attempt to Trekk away from all electronic ties for a few weeks and found his calling in a little school in Nepal. The school had a dirt floor and could not be used during the wet season. The library was an empty room with a cabinet that was closed with a rusty lock. Inside the cabinet was a haphazard collection of books that trekkers had left for the school. The titles were what the trekkers had on them like Daniel Steele and travel guides, not appropriate for children. He knew he could help and eventually quite his job to start the non-profit Room to Read.

There are five programs: Reading Room (which creates the libraries), School Room (which creates free schools for children that are created by the whole community), Language Room (which teaches languages to the children, being bi-lingual is very important), Computer Room (which begin low tech but advances as they do) and Room to Grow (which helps girls get an education, these girls are on scholarship because education costs money in places like Nepal and families spend what little they have on the boys education). The non-profit has grown, no-longer are they helping only the children of Nepal they are also helping the children of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka, India and newly Africa.

He runs Room to Read on a business model and uses clever ways to keep things running without spending donations on unnecessary items (like Land Rovers). He hires people who live in the countries housing the programs, he uses donated frequent flyer miles to travel, he gets publishers like Scholastic to donate overstock and works with many community groups like the Lyons and Rotary club. Room to Read has an extremely low overhead. John Wood believes in optimism as opposed to the “weep-a-thon”. There is an intense focus on results, every quarter they report results to investors.
- They endow 210 schools on-time and on-budget.
- They created 2 new schools per week but this number has grown to 16 new libraries per week.
- Over 1,700 girls are on long term scholarship and they are adding 700 more this year.
- Over 1.5 million books have been donated this year
- They have over 2,500 reading rooms

- Their over arching goal is to have 10,000 libraries created by 2015.

He likes to compare his growth success to Starbucks. They are growing fast but for every Starbucks you see Room to Read has opened two libraries. He has helped over 800,000 children to date.

John Wood is a genuine and eloquent man. He stayed and spoke with every person who wanted to say something to him (making him late for a book signing in the exhibit hall). He is not yet 40 and clearly has made his mark where it counts. As we waited In line there was talk that this could be a cause that many of our retiring librarians might want to help with. It is certainly worth keeping on our radar.

Tag:

Reading With Your Ears

Posted by asteinberg in : ALA2006 , add a comment

Reading with Your Ears a full day, preconference, workshop put together by YALSA about audiobooks. This workshop hit all aspects of audiobooks in the public and school libraries as well as the new technologies and the intricacies of production.

Panel 1: Connecting audiobooks to curriculum was made simple by the first panel of presenters: Sharon Frover of Hedberg Public Library in Wisconsin and Mary Stump of Arlington Virginia Public Schools.
- They were able to weave the use of audiobooks into the standards for fluency, comprehension, decoding, creating proficient readers, rhymes, repetition, patterns, characteristics of culture, narrator description…It became clear that audio books could do much of what the written word could do particularly with auditory and second language learners.
- They also discussed which books lend themselves to being read aloud; plot driven and those with highly developed narratives were recommended.

Panel 2: Audiobook Producers. This was a panel discussion with Daniel Bostick and Bruce Coville of Full Cast Audio, Tim Ditlow of Random House/Listening Library and Eileen Hutton of Brilliance Audio. Here are highlights:
- Releasing audiobooks at the same time as the hardcover is becoming increasingly important however some producers like Full Cast Audio are unable to manage it because they truly use a full cast of readers and sound effects. The manuscripts simply do not get to the producers fast enough to create the production.

- Full Cast Audio is geared toward the Young Adult audience. They grapple with profanity and appropriateness as many of us do when developing our collections. They have recently put a “strong language” icon on the cover of an audiobook that they did not feel a family would be comfortable listening to together in the car. Profanity has a much bigger shock value when listened to then when read.
- They often consult the authors but the authors do not have rights with the audio production.
- They feel the cassette is dead. Many retailers will not take them only libraries drive what little need is out there.
- 15% of Listening Libraries titles are now downloadable and many other publishers are following that trend.
- Fisher Price is coming out with a childrens iTune Player created to play MP3 files.
- Two exciting new technologies on the horizon are; a bookchip the size of a postage stamp made by audiofy that can be put in everything from PDA’s and phones to iPods and laptops. It holds an entire audiobook. Also they showed us the Playaway. This was called the “hardback book of audio”. It is a little box that holds and entire book and can be manipulated like an MP3 player with the addition of audio bookmarks. It is self-contained and therefore levels the technology playing field because you do not need to own anything ahead of time. It cannot be copied and other items cannot be loaded into it. All you need is earbuds and batteries (which come with it along with a handy lanyard).

Panel 3: Recording Artists: Spencer Murphy and Carmen Vivano-Crafts of Full Cast Audio
- These two charming young people explained what it is like to record an audiobook. We also watched as Daniel Bostick of Full Cast Audio walked them through a first run of a scene that they will be recording soon.

Keynote Speaker Junko Yokota
- Spoke to us about multiculturalism and the importance of hearing language and culture through audiobooks. A good reader can give authenticity to a good book which is more than we can give to it ourselves when it is a culture we are unfamiliar with.
- The importance of hearing the pronunciations of non-English words and names was also stressed.

Panel 4: Reviewing and Reading Reviews: Editors: Sue-Ellen Beauregard of Booklist, Pam Spencer Holley of VOYA and Robin Whitten of Audiofile and Reviewers: Jeanne Bracken of KLIATT and Kristi Jemtegaard of Horn Book.
- The editors discussed how books are chosen for review and how reviewers are chosen.

- The reviewers discussed how they create a review and how they find the time to review audiobooks.
- Whitten of Audiofile also discussed the next generation of audio reviews. They have created audiopolis which are podcast reviews of audiobooks that are available for free.
- Many editors agreed that it is time for the publishers to send MP3 downloads of the audiobooks for review because they need the review process to go faster. The editors still rely on the postal service to drop off CD’s which they in turn send to the reviewers.

Panel 5: Marketing: Francisca Goldsmith of Berkeley Public Library in California, Sharon Grover of Hedberg public Library in Wisconsin and Mary Stump of Arlington Virginia Public Schools. They presented marketing ideas such as:
- Adding audiobooks to your book talks
- Creating an audiobook club
- Summer of 2005 New York State had a “Tune in @ Your Library” theme. Teens who listened to audiobooks were entered into drawings.

- A public library created mini-selection list of downloadable audiobooks from the school reading lists. The audiobooks could be downloaded onto MP3 players like the iPod shuffle.
- New York Public Library has audioclips on their website for kids to listen to.
- School poetry unit. Take a book like Bronx Masquerade and listen to it, then read it. Have the students create their own book. The cadence and emotion of the audiobook brings the student into the feeling of poetry and increases their enthusiasm.

YALSA also provided us with plenty of great food!

Tag:

AASL President’s Program: The Flattening of the Web

Posted by dlogan in : ALA2006 , add a comment

David Warlick’s presentation made me think of a magic show. The woman sitting beside me joined me in soft exclamations of oohs and aahs as we watched and listened to David “juggle with” blogs, wikis, Web pages, audio files, and digital images. No, these tools are not new, but the ways David used and connected them stretched my thinking about how I work with my students. Of course, I teach students how to find, evaluate, use, and create information, but that is not enough. I need to do more with getting them ready to be contributors to the online world of information. Also, it is not enough to teach students to search the Web; students need to learn more about how to personalize the Web to deliver information to them.

Now, it is time for me to explore the magic more deeply and to learn to do some juggling; I need to figure out to accomplish this in a school system that does not permit students to use email on campus. Also, the district has concerns about publishing student work online. Since David’s presentation, I have identified two teachers who are likely to be interested in embracing these types of projects in order to expand student learning. I am also working out how I will sell the idea to the powers that be. I hope to hear some oohs and aahs this fall as my students uncover more ways to have the Web work for them.
For more information about this presentation, visit David’s Online Handouts Wiki
http://davidwarlick.com/wiki-warlick/index.php?title=Flat_World_Classrooms
or read Joyce’s June 28th “Back and thinking hard about what I learned” entry in this blog.

Laura Bush at Town Hall Meeting

Posted by hweisburg in : ALA2006 , add a comment

I attended the “Town Hall Meeting” on Monday, June 26th, sponsored by Scholastic where First Lady Laura Bush addressed the crowd. It was somewhat exciting knowing that everyone had to be seated by 12:30pm because the doors would be locked and not reopened until after she had completed and left.

After the customary welcoming remarks, there was a well done video on “Rebuilding for Learning” that showed the devastation caused to schools and their libraries by Katrina. Several of the librarians spoke but one of the principals was probably most eloquent on the importance of getting the libraries back. For students whose lives have been uprooted, school and libraries are the reassuring normalcy they need. My favorite bit was the number of students who managed to save the books they had borrowed. Their only concern when they finally were able to return them was that they would owe a big fine.

A recent graduate of Grace King Senior High in Jefferson Parish, Caitlyn Clarke, related what libraries have meant to her and then she introduced the First Lady. Laura Bush spoke about the Laura Bush Foundation and the grants it has distributed and also announced there was money for all libraries affected by Katrina. She was well received being given a standing ovation at her opening and conclusion. While it certainly was a political coup for AASL and ALA to have her there, I wish she recognized that school libraries today are far more than books. Even the logo for “School Libraries Work! Rebuilding for Learning” has only books.

A panel followed moderated by Lester Holt, NBC New Weekend Today anchor, and composed of Norman Francis, President of Xavier University, Jennifer Koehl and Hannah D. Rucker, the school library media specialist and principal of St. Tammany Jr. High School in Slidell, LA (she is a recipient of a Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries grant), Keith Curry Lance, Wayne V. Rodolfich, Superintendent of Pascagoula Schools in MS, and J. Linda Williams, AASL President. The questions and responses reinforced the importance of school library media centers to student achievement. Dr. Francis was particularly eloquent and perhaps we should see if he can be a future speaker for us.
http://technorati.com/tag/ala2006