I will be actually working in a real library!

Just a quick post to let you all know that I may be M.I.A over the next two weeks. I doing a two week work placement at Wyong TAFE library as part of my Master of Education (Teacher/Librarianship).

This is a screen shot of the library's website. To check it out for yourself, head to http://www.hunter.tafensw.edu.au/library/Pages/default.aspx

While I'm there, I'll be experiencing what it is like to work in a TAFE library setting. The Wyong TAFE (Technical and Further Education) Campus offers many different courses including general education (literacy and numeracy, English for speakers of other languages, high school equivalence), hospitality (kitchen and catering), health and community services (first aid, aged care), business administration and electical trades.

The library supports both teachers and students with access to the information they need to successfully teach and learn. Library staff provide facilities and services to ensure that every member of the TAFE community has the support they need to teach and learn as effectively as possible.

The first week I will have an opportunity to acclimatise and find out as much as possible about how everything works as the students will still be on holidays. My second week, however, will be the first week of semester, and my supervisor tells me that there will be plenty of action! Students will be keen to get started on their courses and teachers will bring groups to the library for orientation tours and tutorial sessions covering skills such as catalogue and database searching and referencing. 

I'm looking forward to my visit, but not so much writing the 2000 word report that goes with it. I have to discuss how successfully I feel that the library meets the needs of its users, and reflect on what I have gained from my experience and how it will contribute to my development as a teacher librarian. Of course I have to refer to the current literature, not just ramble out of my own head!

So, I may not be blogging a whole lot over the next two weeks.

In other news:

I have an iPhone, I have an iPhone *doing the happy dance*!!!

The Twitter Trio (7) - I'd follow you anywhere

Here are three of my tweeps that I'm so glad that I follow:

1. Tess Alfonsin @ReadingCountess

Reader, Writer, Mother of all boys, Teacher of tweens, Dreamer

Tess has a blog called Recycle Your Reads, and I'm also Tess' friend on Goodreads, where she is very active. She lists lots of books about teaching reading - I'm going to pilfer from her bookshelves whenever possible!

2. Bobbi Newman @librarianbyday

I'm not that kind of librarian

Bobbi has a blog called Librarian by Day and also writes on the Libraries and Transliteracy blog.

3. Steph Westwood @2sparkley

mum, wife, infant school teacher with a SMARTBOARD, author

Steph has a blog called Bits and Pieces Place. She tweets lots of great links that are applicable to me, being Australian like I am.

The Twitter Trio is a weekly feature at my blog, where I highlight interesting things that I have found via Twitter.

Dead in the Family (with pictures of Eric!)

Once upon a time there was a newbie blogger who didn't know much, but knew she loved reading.

While clicking from blog to blog, she discovered Beth Fish Reads. This (primarily) book reviewing blogger was about to host a challenge - the Sookie Stackhouse Reading Challenge.

What was involved in this reading challenge? Simply to read all the books in Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series, post reviews, and link them up.

Well, the newbie blogger thought that it sounded like fun; she'd never read anything by Harris, and thought that the challenge might be a good way to discover some new blogs and make some bloggy friends. And so the journey began...

I've just finished reading Dead in the Family, the latest installment in the series. I guess you can say that I got exactly what I expected.

I love these books, to me they're a fun, slightly trashy read (I mean this in the nicest possible way!) that guarantee a fast moving plot and some hot sex :) They're just right for in bed or in the bath, and I'm sure they'd be equally entertaining at the beach, or on a plane, train or bus!

Ever since jumping on board with the TrueBlood TV series, I have the perfect face (and body!) to put with Eric as I'm reading...

Sorry, where was I?

Anyway...what can I say about Dead in the Family? As usual, Harris throws as much plot and intrigue at the book as possible - a little too much for me to completely understand on my first reading. We have Bill recovering (or not) from silver poisoning and needing an infusion from a blood sibling, Eric's maker arriving in town with an unruly vampire child in tow, and vampires attempting to kill, or at least overthrow Eric to gain power. And that's just the vampires.

In addition, the government is making moves to introduce a werewolf register, and the local pack are having issues. There also seem to be some fairies on the loose, not to mention a fresh body buried on Sookie's land.

When will Sookie ever be able to relax and enjoy a normal life? No, I didn't think so...

This episode explores the idea of a blood bond, the bond that exists between vampires (and their human companions) who exchange blood, in greater detail. And for the first time, Sookie toys with the idea of what it would be like to become a vampire.

It's very difficult to review this book without including spoilers, and to be honest, it's hard to find anything that makes it stand out particularly from any of the other books in the series. I guess that's part of the appeal of reading series fiction, we don't have to work too hard as each of the books is fairly similar to the others.

So, a year on, I have fulfilled the requirements of the Sookie Stackhouse Reading Challenge, have discovered an author that I enjoy, and have "met" many new bloggy buddies. And now I'm off to link up this challenge wrap up post at Beth Fish Reads link page, so I'll leave you with another picture of Eric...

Know me, know my books

My current "squeeze" is Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris, the latest release in the Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampires/TrueBlood series.

I bought it on a recent shopping trip with Alana while the boys were at footy. She had some vouchers to spend from her birthday (in April! She's a careful shopper.) and one of the vouchers was for a bookstore, a very dangerous place for me :) I decided that I simply couldn't leave the shops without a copy of this book, so I searched high and low for the best price, which happened to be at Big W. Hooray for discount department stores!

I've been rationing it out very carefully, but I'm nearly finished :( I hate the feeling of getting to the end of a book that you're really enjoying; you want to keep going to find out what happens, but you don't want it to end.

At the same time I'm also reading Organising Knowledge in a Global Society: principles and practice in libraries and information centres by Hider & Harvey for ETL505 - Bibliographic Standards for Education.

I like to call this page-turner "death by acronyms". Here's a list of the acronyms that appear in the first chapter - "Definitions and introductory concepts":

OPAC - online public access catalogue

ERIC - educational resources information centre

PAIS - public affairs information service

RILM - abstracts of music literature

AEI - australian education index

ISBN - international standard book number

AACR2 - anglo-american cataloguing rules, 2nd edition

DC - Dublin core

DDC - Dewey decimal classification

LCC - library of congress classification

KWIC - keyword in context

KWOC - keyword out of context

MARC - machine-readable cataloguing

UBC - universal bibliograhic control

UBCIM - ?

IFLA - international federation of library associations and institutions

ICABS - IFLA-CDNL alliance for bibliographic standards

ISBD - international standard bibliographic description

Whew! Is it any wonder I had to read chapter one twice? After my first read through, I was heard to mutter "I don't understand anything..."

On my bedside table for after Dead in the Family, are these two:

Every Secret Thing by Lila Shaara is a psychological thriller set in a college. The protagonist, Gina, is a single mum and college professor. I must admit I had started this when I bought Dead in the Family and abandoned it partly read. Bad reader! But I'll get back to it soon.

the Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson is simply the latest in a long line of books that I've read on this subject. I'm a happy person with a very blessed life, and generally I know what I want and where I'm going. But I'm still searching for deeper self-knowledge; that elusive self-discovery that will make everything fall into place and make sense. I very much want to live my life with passion. I want to radiate love and joy and energy and positivity. I want every day to be meaningful. I don't want anything about my life to be mediocre. I don't want to "just get it over with".

Given that I have a wonderful husband, two beautiful children, a puppy, a house that we're paying off, friends, meaningful work...and so on and so on, you may think that I'm just a little bit greedy, or that I expect just a little bit too much from life. Maybe, but I don't think so.

Also "To Be Read" for uni are Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature by Clare Bradford and Books in the Life of a Child: Bridges to Literature and Learning by Maurice Saxby.

These are for ETL402 - Literature in Education, and yes - it's kinda funny that I'll be reading about reading.

So there's me in a nutshell. Know me, know my books.

Minor Identity Crisis

You'll notice that I titled my blog "a reader's random ramblings...". And I meant it.

By using this title, I was trying to convey a few things about me, and about my blog.

Firstly, I'm identifying myself as "a reader". Not a mum, wife, teacher, student, writer, or future librarian, though I am all those things. My identity, as far as this blog goes, is as someone who reads and reads and reads; voraciously and eclectically and enthusiastically. Someone who enjoys reading because I can be transported to another place or time, because I can learn new things, because I can connect with the experiences and knowledge of others, and because reading stimulates me, relaxes me, and makes me feel truly like "me".

Secondly, I'm admitting that I don't really know ahead of time what I'm going to write about. The topics are not pre-determined. The format is not set. I don't pretend to really know what I'm doing.

Thirdly, the ... implies that I'm open to possibilities, and to change. My blog is not static, but evolving.

And that's all been working for me OK. Up until now.

But recently I started wondering whether I'd been blogging long enough now for my blog to have achieved an identity of its own.

Looking down the list of blogs that I follow, there's quite a mix. Lots of book review/literary blogs. Mum blogs, crafty blogs, fashion blogs, inspirational blogs, review/giveaway blogs, writing blogs...

And somehow, because I love all these blogs, I've been allowing myself to try to be all things to all people. My blog has been a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. And I don't think that I've really been doing any of it justice.

So, where does that leave me? I'm not sure, but I'm going to think about what I love to write about the most, and what I write about the best. So stay tuned...

The Twitter Trio (6)

Twitter has led me to many educators and librarians that write fantastic, informative blogs. Today I'm going to feature three that I have found particularly helpful.

1. librarified

A recent interesting post was Women in American Librarianship and Valuing Women's Work. An excerpt:

The answer is that there were women leaders and that their values (not some sort of womanly deficiency they all had) shaped American librarianship. I also just finished WOMEN AND THE VALUES OF AMERICAN LIBRARIANSHIP (Ide House, 1994) by Sydney Chambers and Carolynne Myall and they provide tons of examples. Here are just a very few:

•Public libraries were formed out of community libraries that were originally started by women in most cases. In 1933 the ALA “credited women’s clubs with the repsonsibility for initiating 75 percent of the public libraries in existence at that time” (p. 17).

•Isadore Gilbert Mudge built Columbia University’s reference collection and taught library school students her methods of conducting a reference interview. (p. 29)

•Adelaide Hasse was a founder of special librarianship, developed a classification scheme, and helped form the US Government Documents service. (p. 31)

•“[O]f the four insitutions established before 1900 which later became charter members of the Association of American Library Schools, the founding directors of three were women,” Katherine Sharp, Mary Wright Plummer, and Alice Kroeger. (p. 36)

•Mary Wright Plummer was the head of the library school at the Pratt Institute Free Library from 1895 to 1911, the Principal of the library school at NYPL from 1911 to 1916, and was President of ALA from 1915 to 1916–years before women were even allowed to vote! (p. 35)

•The director of the LA Public Library from 1889 to 1895 was Tessa Kelso–and this was decades before women got the vote. (p. 43)

While women who held leadership positions often did so at local or state or regional levels, women were also library founders, innovators in their fields, library directors, library school founders, and even served as the president of ALA before their country trusted them to vote.

2. Librarians Matter
 
A recent interesting post was How does Google work? Infographic.
 

3. The Unquiet Librarian

This blog is written by the teacher librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Georgia - Buffy J Hamilton. Isn't that an awesome name for a librarian!?! To me, it sounds like she might be slaying vampires during lunchtime :)

Trust me, READ HER BLOG! It is just as cool as her name sounds.

Uneasy Relations by Aaron Elkins

Uneasy Relations by Aaron Elkins.

Borrowed from my local public library.

**** "Enjoyable!"

From the inside cover: "Before the sun set on the last Neanderthal around 25000 years ago, was he living peacefully with his smarter, handsomer cousin Homo sapiens? Or did the two always fight? Anthropologists and Paleolithic archaeologists debated these questions for years. Then a spectacular find at the Rock of Gibraltar left everyone speechless... Buried ceremoniously in a cave, the skeleton of a human woman lies clutching to her breast the skeleton of a part-Neanderthal child. Like much of the world, Professor Oliver finds Gibraltar Woman and Gibraltar Boy fascinating - and jumps at the chance to attend a conference celebrating the anniversary of the discovery. But not everyone's in a festive mood. Death has been stalking the excavation site like an ancient curse, rocking Gibraltar. A woman working on the original dig met her end in a landslide. A famous archaeologist at the conference burns to death in his bed. Despite the certainty of the Royal Gibraltar Police force that the two deaths were accidents, Gideon has his suspicions. As he tries to piece things together, Gideon's in for some nasty surprises. Someone has set his sights on the Skeleton Detective, who's about to fall for a few deadly tricks. After all, unlike Gibraltar Boy, he's only human..."

I picked this up from my local library's "new books" shelf, read the inside cover and thought it sounded like an enjoyable read. And it was. I just didn't realise that it's part of a series, and is actually book 15 in the Gideon Oliver novels. Don't you hate it when that happens?!?

1.Fellowship of Fear -- published 1982, the first Gideon Oliver novel.

2.The Dark Place -- 1983


3.Murder in the Queen's Armes -- 1985


4.Old Bones -- 1987 -- winner of the 1988 Edgar -- a coveted award among mystery writers!


5.Curses! -- 1989


6.Icy Clutches -- 1990


7.Make No Bones -- 1991


8.Dead Men's Hearts -- 1994


9.Twenty Blue Devils -- 1997


10.Skeleton Dance -- 2000


11.Good Blood -- 2004


12.Where There's A Will -- 2005


13.Unnatural Selection -- 2006
 
14. Little Tiny Teeth
 
15. Uneasy Relations --2008
 

Anyway, it turns out that it doesn't matter at all if you've read any or all of the previous books in the series. The hero, Gideon Oliver, is a professor of physical anthropology; an expert on bones. He travels to Gibraltar to attend celebrations for the fifth anniversary of the discovery of "The First Family", Gibraltar Woman and Gibraltar Boy. Although he did not work on the dig, he did examine the bones that were unearthed, and is scheduled to give a public lecture as part of the proceedings. He's travelling with his wife Julie, and they are anticipating a relaxing and stimulating time, catching up with old friends and visiting Gibraltar for the first time. Alas, relaxing it is not to be...

 

In true cozy mystery style, Gideon's amateur detective skills are put to the test as he assists his friend, police detective inspector Fausto Sotomayor, piece together the evidence and solve the baffling murders. Which one of the small group of experts is trying to off the others? What secret are they trying to hide?

 

I found Uneasy Relations thoroughly enjoyable! I love science, and learning a bit about foresic anthropology along the way was a definite plus for me.

 

Highly recommended.