Category Archives: Events

Over the weekend, our large school district experienced a “cyber event” which prompted them to kill the internet for at least three days. Most of us didn’t know until we arrived Monday morning that everything would have to be done without any kind of technology. So after momentary panic, plan B was put in place including the image I’ve been waiting to share on our library’s social media for a while now:

In addition, running an after school club, especially one like my Japanese Culture Club that usually runs about 40 students each week, would look a little different too. But I had fun playing (and losing) a chess match with a newer club member, coloring a page out of a Japanese-inspired coloring book that I keep for club, and doing way more connecting than I normally would. It reminds me of the joy of chill.

I’ll certainly try to channel this chill when I take a busload of them to a Comic Con this weekend. The complete opposite of chill as the adult in charge!

This past Thursday, I was a featured co-presenter at a conference for school librarians in the area I grew up in. Their one-day event was in its thirty-seventh year and my co-presenter, Stacey Rattner and I had been recruited over the summer to talk about books. With three sessions, we could divide them up or co-present, or both and because we often concurrently present, we chose to co-present all three sessions which was especially useful because many of the librarians in the audience work in small districts where they are the K-12 librarian.

Working with a partner is not new to me. As a high school librarian at a large school, I have always had a colibrarian. I’ve also presented at other conferences with librarians I’ve been on committees with (here’s to my Great Graphic Novels ladies!) and my colibrarian. Collaboration is not easy because you’re meshing two people, two opinions, two styles together. With Stacey, we often joke about how polar opposite we are in life and work yet together as librarian presenters with a passion for books and reading, it works, but we need to get on the same (pun intended) page. This means early morning coffee house meet ups or after dinner ciders.

And there are the countless hours I spend stewing in my head to wrap my head around preparing for a presentation from setting the right tone to celebrating book creators to eliciting collegial conversation. Plus the preparation of aids and tools to present and share.

I am a paper and pencil gal. The first ideas and concepts are always handwritten scribbles and lists. Then there’s days of thinking. Then maybe a Slide or two, then back to mapping it out on paper. I’ve come to love my process and rely on it because there are moments of panic that I’m not “there yet” but I trust the process. And the content embeds itself like a rehearsal for a play, though I have never acted before.

Ultimately, it was a valuable scaffold for this past Thursday’s conference because my co-presenter had a death in the family that didn’t allow her to present and I shared for the both of us. Thus, the entrenched preparation and rehearsal felt like second-nature and provides a level of comfort on the day of the event. I have always said that one of the reasons I say yes to presenting whether it be local, state, or nationally is because I have to learn so much more to feel comfortable sharing which makes me a better librarian overall. (And I have an excuse to read as much as I do).

What kind of process do you have for events or activities you do?

Nervous energy pulsed through me on Wednesday morning, but I wasn’t really affected by it since I was exhausted by an almost three-hour end of the school year party with my Anime Club on the last day of school the night before. The nervous energy was that the moving company smartly hired by our district to move our books from the old library to the new library was arriving that morning. It was going to take two days. And we were ready to roll up our sleeves, directing and organizing as they moved them back and forth.

What should have taken two days ended up taking a little less than one because they sent extra guys and our collection of around 15,000 was tiny compared to others they have moved using their custom made rolling bookshelves. So maybe it was the speed of what was happening or that it’s been 15 good years in that space that I couldn’t stop for more than a few minutes in the old library before I began to tear up.

This same exact thing happened when my husband and I started a home renovation that included knocking down the back half of our house. Yes I knew it was happening, heck, we paid people to take the wrecking ball to it and it was still a powerful few moments of emotion actually seeing it happen. We knew we were on to better things. And this is the case in the library. We are returning to a library fit for 2,600 students after being chipped away for more than a decade leaving it a shell of what it was when it was originally build in the 1970s. Yes, it had been rehabbed once about eight years ago when the floors and ceilings needed to be redone, but then the capital project began to build a campus for our students on the property.

And as we spend the next two weeks moving everything else over now that the books are moved in addition to cleaning up the books themselves, there have been moments over the last two days and will sure enough happen today, when I stop and take it all in. We are still waiting on the furniture and computers, including in our office so I know another wave will take me when that comes in.

I’m also filled with genuine pride when staff (who see the open construction door and walk over to take a look and then tell more colleagues to come over too) say things like “You deserve this” and “I have to take pictures, no one will believe how beautiful and big it is”. It’s what the students deserve after years of having the walls literally closing in on them. In addition to four study rooms, there are bathrooms and water fountains inside the library, space to spread out, and an updated look that everyone says makes them feel like they’re in a college library. It certainly does look like one and I look forward to retiring- still many years away- out of this spectacular space with so much natural light, I could probably grow a full garden inside!

More pictures to come and a final post when everything is in!