Book Trailer

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

I threw this animation together using some of my flannel board images from Flickr. It's not really a trailer because it shows components of the entire story (although lots of movie trailers do that, which is why I don't often watch them!), and it's not featuring a book but a folktale for flannelboard. But it was so easy to make and share this, that I suspect I will return to the site and see what else I can do with the simple tools there. (I also love how the song nearly matches the story, especially because I picked it at random without listening to it first!)

A lot of folks at our library, especially children, are totally captivated by Internet video. Sometimes it seems they don't even care what they are watching. So if I could find a way to connect them with some "trailers" from the library, perhaps we could actually advertise storytimes, new books, and other events. A few simple "trailers" like this on our library home page might catch an eye or two, informing current patrons about services they might not have known existed. More exciting "trailers" posted online in the right places or by the right people might actually draw new folks to the library.

I also wanted to share a real book trailer that my mom (a 1st grade teacher) sent me. Warning, total cuteness overload, but also made me want to buy the book for our library and gave me some ideas about how to use it.

Tags, tags, tags, and another plug for my wiki!

I've been working on the flannelboard factory website. I love how it's turning out. The wiki format makes me feel really comfortable with imperfection, though more about that in a minute.

I created a flickr account in order to store and manage my flannelboard photos...and I've been tagging them. So that knocks out a few of these 21 things with one stone. Or whatever the analogy should be.

One of the things I love about tags + the Internet is how this function allows things to be equally categorized (and thus located/found) in multiple places. So I don't have to decide if a story belongs in the file for food, turkeys, Thanksgiving, holidays, my own designs, felt-only designs, designs smaller than 5", et cetera. Something I don't love about tags/labels is that it sometimes seems like so much extra work to come up with tags, and keep them consistent. And I'm saying that as someone who loves creating thesauri and indices! I think I just get a little lazy sometimes when using Web 2.0. It seems more ephemeral, and thus less important to create excellent tagging. But even as I work on my wiki, I realize that good tagging will make the website really easy to use. Since I would like to eventually share it with my colleagues in a formal way, I want to work on making the tags, if not perfect, at least orderly and helpful.

I collected stamps for ages, and although I would generally organize them in albums by country, as is usual, I really wanted a way to also label and categorize them by other interesting features - such as what they depict, unusual size or shape, and so forth. I don't know if I would want to digitize my stamp collection (still too much work at this point in technological history) because it's so fascinating to examine the objects themselves, but at the same time it would be amazing to quickly call up all the stamps with bicycling themes, for example.

But, let's be honest, if I am a serious collector, I'll just remember where all those stamps are and be able to find them in an instant. Same as I can dig through my huge box of flannel board stories (which are each in a ziploc bag, no flags or titles or anything) and easily pick out the ones that fit my requirements. I can't quite do that with library books... that is, pull all the picture books that fit a certain theme without using the catalog first, but I feel like managing the juvenile collection at this branch for 3 1/2 years has made it easier and easier to do that. Just for me though! So I'll keep including tags!

Wiki: The Central Southern Flannelboard Factory

I've been more or less keeping up with our "21 things" but due to another long vacation weekend and a new work schedule, I haven't had time to do much writing about them. And I certainly haven't had time to do clever or insightful blogging, but I want to spew something at least to help stay on track--so huzzah! huzzah! huzzah! for the fight against perfectionism.

I created a wiki--the first I've ever made on my own--and I'm hoping to actually use it in real life at my job! I would like to help children's librarians in my area of the city share flannelboard storytime ideas & materials. I envisioned an online space where librarians could upload photos of their flannelboard creations, and then we could use the wiki all-edit format to suggest stories, rhymes, fingerplays, etc. that would go with each set.

Some thoughts on how it would be useful:

• Sometimes a librarian may unearth an ancient flannelboard set from the library dungeon. After ascertaining that it has no monetary value via the Antiques Road Show, and becoming puzzled as to its educational value since it has no text or title attached, sharing it on the wiki would draw on collective knowledge to figure out just what kind of story would have a goose, a pelican, and a frying pan--for example.
• Some flannelboard sets lend themselves well to multiple stories or uses. Groups of items, such as ten little teddy bears, work with multiple rhymes and fingerplays. Other sets, such as the animals from Brown Bear, Brown Bear, can be used in other stories as well. Wiki editers could add in more rhymes and ideas on the page for each set, or suggest connections to other sets and stories.
• The online format would make it easy to hyperlink to items like youtube videos (to share songs) or other websites with related content.
• Perhaps we could add an informal calendar to each page so that librarians could request to borrow sets on certain days if desired. The wiki could also include the current location of each set, making it easy to see which librarin should be contacted to send it out.
• Other librarians and teachers around the world could browse the wiki to get ideas that they could replicate in their own areas. I've often searched Etsy for flannelboard stories or browsed Flickr to see what others have made.

Now, some drawbacks:

• I may be the only local librarian who will use the wiki, at least in terms of finding time to photograph flannelboard sets and upload them to the website. I work at one of the smallest and slowest branches of a very large public library system, so I just have more time to do projects like this.
• Another hindrance is that our library system prohibits staff from connecting anything to library computers via USB port. Thus, I'd have to upload my photos at home. Hmm... I guess I'm willing to do that.
• Since many of us in this area have already created dozens of flannelboard sets, getting things started would take longer than, say, adding a flannelboard set once in a while when someone makes a new one.

Overall I think it has potential as a way to share, showcase and develop ideas. Feel free to take a look at what I've done so far. (Keep your expectations low. It's very plain and I clearly need to spend more time learning how to make it functional and awesome.)

http://southcentralflannelboardfactory.wikispaces.com/

A little about me... via online Image Editors