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Part 2 in a series:  I develop a library-skills curriculum for second grade. (Part 1)

I went to my neighborhood branch library this afternoon while Mark watched the kids, armed with a notebook and a camera.  After returning some books and paying my six-dollar fine, I walked around and took notes about the layout, since that is the library I will teach my son to use.

There is a children’s room, suitable mostly for reading to little ones.    Shown here are some picture books and readers in bins, alphabetized by title.  On the shelves are more picture books alphabetized by author.

Videos and audiobooks are kept there, as well as a collection of children’s periodicals.

Outside this little room are the juvenile stacks.  The fiction is alphabetized by author and the nonfiction is arranged according to the Library of Congress system, which pleases me.  I spent seven years in a library that contained almost nothing but Q-QC and TA.

Mental note:  must find info on the rest of the LC system.   GV?  NC?  What’s that?

Juvenile reference is a single shelf at the beginning of juvenile nonfiction.  I write down some titles we might find useful:  Lands and Peoples — social studies encyclopedia.  Children’s atlas.  Ox. Comp. Child. Lit.  Science encyclopedia — 2 of them.  Encyclopedia of Life Science.  Int’l Wildlife Encyclopedia.  Wildlife and Plants. 

Where’s the kids’ regular encyclopedia?  I find it in the main reference section with the Encyclopedias Brittanica and Americana.  Also dictionaries and phone books and other atlases.  It’s the 2007 World Book.

What else might we need to know?  There are three library desks:  checkout/returns, reference desk, and children’s librarian.  The children’s librarian is not there, but the other desks are staffed. 

There are a few comfortable places to read and also study desks:

There are, of course, computers for using the library catalog and web browsing.  One thing I like about our neighborhood library is that there are not any children’s computers at brightly colored tables with a bunch of games pre-loaded onto them.  What computers there are for web browsing are always packed with teenagers.  I suspect that this is due to low funding and I hope and pray that nobody comes through with funding earmarked for preschoolers’ computer games. 

I sit down at one of the terminals and do a catalog search for juvenile nonfiction about libraries.  I click on one entry, which isn’t actually at this branch, read the call number, and walk over to the corresponding shelf in JUV NF.  I choose a handful of books to take home, maybe to incorporate into my curriculum, and run them under the express checkout scanner.

Posted next to the scanner are the library rules.  I make some notes:  no loud speaking, no playing audio, no running, fighting, noise, games downloading, annoying people, eating, drinking is ok if cup is covered, no loitering, don’t break the law. 

I wander around some more.  Today’s newspapers are in the adult fiction section.  There’s a copier there too.  It accepts coins, which is good for children.  I forgot to see how much it charges per copy.  Under the clock are shelves of tax forms.

I can’t really take any more pictures unless I start asking people for permission — the library’s pretty crowded.  But my hour’s almost up, and my baby’s at home, so I put my books in my bag and head out to the car.  That should be enough information to get started.

One of my favorite bloggers passed away today:  Cathy Seipp. 

Ms. Seipp fought the same type of lung cancer that killed my mother.  They were diagnosed around the same time, it turns out, at the same stage; my mother had already succumbed to her cancer by the time Ms. Seipp started writing openly about her disease. 

My mother, unlike Ms. Seipp, was a smoker; but I learned during her illness that half of all cases of that type occur in nonsmokers, and so no one could say that her tobacco use caused the disease.  I shared Ms. Seipp’s frustration with the stigma of lung cancer and the comparative publicity that, say, breast cancer gets.   This post from 2005 says it well.

I didn’t read Cathy’s World every day, but would check in from time to time to catch up on her and see how she was doing.  For some reason I never put her on my blogroll or bookmarks list — I always clicked through from the VC link.  Never met, exchanged email, or even commented that I remember.  But especially after she started to write about her health, maybe because of my mother’s illness, I wanted to check in with her.  And always enjoyed her trenchant writing.

I’m proud to say I never wondered “Why me?” Because that’s philosophically incoherent. But I do have a list of people that I consider every now and then, thinking: Why not you instead?

She tended to go a few days between posts, so checking about every week seemed right.

For months after my mom passed away, I would suddenly think that I needed to give  her a call, and then a beat would pass before remembering — oh — can’t do that.  I keep expecting at the back of my mind that if I click through to Cathy’s World, after a few days have gone by, there’ll be  a new post from Cathy, letting us know how the funeral thing went, how she’s adjusting to the afterlife.  It’ll fade, but it’s strange nonetheless.

If you never read her, it’s not too late — her stuff is all still there.  Daughter Maia has been posting updates for a few days.  Spare them a thought and a prayer if you can.

My computer had to go into the shop this week, so I abruptly became unable to post.  Should be back to normal today or tomorrow.

A friend suggested I find a compounding pharmacy that will re-formulate Mary Jane’s medicine.  I called a local place this morning and found out that I can get her antibiotic in a more concentrated form, so I only have to give her one mL/day instead of four; and that it can be made colorless, so it won’t stain her clothes any more.

So — thanks, friend!

She had her kidney radiology this morning — we should get  all the results tomorrow.