Books + Arts = Book Arts

Photo source: Jr Korpa on Unsplash I've been reading Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children  series this summer as I come across them at work. They are small books and don't seem to require reading in any sort of order so it's easy to grab one and read it over a series of lunch breaks. I like them because they are folk and fairy tale variants - something I got to really enjoy exploring last semester in my History of Folk and Fairy Tale class. The books essentially focus on kids who are seemingly lost somehow in their own work and doorways are opened to them that take them to a new place where they become heroes of sorts. When their journey is up, the doorway opens and they return back home, changed, but willing to faces their original lives with new perspectives. At least, this is the situation in the ones that I've read so far.... My Doorways This summer has offered me multiple changes and doorways to explore as a youth librarian. One path would've moved me 8 hours ...

The other day at work, I was surprised to get an actual Facebook friend request and not just another of their friend suggestions. This one came from an ex who I haven't seen or heard from in at least 10 years. We broke up almost 20 years ago after I moved back home, states away. They'd reached out not long after our break up but they were going through AA and in the apology part of their therapy. Then another time years later after they'd gone through a divorce. We'd talk for awhile and they'd vanish again into whatever they were doing wherever they were. So when I got this friend request, my immediate thought was "what now?" I told my mom about it and she was very much "oh how are they? what are they up to?" and all those southern endearments. So she was surprised when I told her I didn't know because I didn't know if I wanted to accept this friend request. My mom accepts any friend request she gets, including her own exes, so it hadn...

Image from Online Writing Jobs I remember being in elementary school and having to write my name in the bubbles for standardized tests and always asking the teacher, "what do I do about the apostrophe?" Some told me to leave a space and others told me to ignore it. Then as we got more into the digital age the apostrophe turned into &#39 or something similar when trying to type my name into websites. From my medical provider login to the salon where I get my hair cut, my name is misspelled and there are multiple versions of me in their system.  So when going on a digital deep dive of myself this week it was nice to see that none of that has changed! In most instances my name was changed from O'Neill to Oneill along with my associated family members. My family's genealogy goes back to 1232 Ireland with our first king whose last name was spelled O'Neill - so this spelling has been around for awhile and it really irritates us when it's spelled incorrectly. It ...

Before becoming a librarian I worked for my hometown chapter of a national nonprofit, The Arc , that supported children and adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (I/DDs). One part of my job was creating and developing inclusive programming for kids and adults with and without I/DDs - mostly it was a lot of sports and arts programming and all the fun things. Swimming was a big time event hosted in the summer because it gets real hot down in bayou country. I was even the head aquatics coach for our chapter of the Special Olympics and over 40 athletes competing on our team, The Krakens: Photo provided by blog author Another component to my job was running what was called The Inclusive Network, a community wide gathering of anyone interested in sharing their information or looking to learn how to be more inclusive. We had everyone from Parks and Rec to the Catholic Diocese to the bus operators and we would meet once a month to lunch and share together. This network helped...

Maybe it's all the information and emails I'm getting about the ALA's Annual Conference coming up, but I've been having a lot of dreams lately about being in large rooms with lots of people talking about things. In my dreams, I walk up to each group and they're saying something interesting and I agree and move on to see what the next group is chatting about.  via GIPHY I also realized that that is exactly how I see Twitter. It is a platform I've avoided for a long time because I'd rather see pictures ala Instagram or Pinterest. Once I had a Twitter account about 10 years ago but it someone had created a fake account on behalf of a very large snake that had escaped in New York and the feed was all about it's adventures. Over the last few weeks though I've returned to Twitter (as LaurenHasBooks ) and have been exploring and, though the user-friendliness of it isn't awesome, I am seeing where I've been missing out.  This past Sunday night I pa...

  Ben Franklin as an Edward Gorey Illustration created by blog author using Stable Diffusion 2.1 AI Last week I talked about my love of putting my family's faces into vintage album covers, but this week I fell down the rabbit of hole of the ever-growing world of AI. It's a hot topic these days especially in the arts community in regards to copyright and Name Image Likeness (NIL) law. I've never used it and this morning I spent waaaaaay to much time on www.playgroundai.com  finding situations to put Ben Franklin into that might appeal to my tween/teen patrons at the public library.  Common Sense (Media) Why Ben Franklin though? As you might've noticed, all my blogs are titled off of books that I come across at work in relation to what I'm learning about in school. Today, I'm going to break down the website Common Sense Media  (and not Franklin's book) and how I can use it as a public youth services/school librarian. They are a non-profit that specializes in w...

Photo provided by blog author Active Learning As a visual learner, I will only really learn the most effectively by being hands-on, creating, and sharing. I cannot sit in a lecture room and just listen to information nor can I just read something. I have to put pen to paper or at least be able to highlight something in a handout to be engaged. In group project settings, I've always been the person to build the volcano or make the poster for the presentation.  This week I watched Nicole Zumpano's book notes on Tim Gillmore's book Generation iY. Something that resonated for me, and I'll have read on further, is that we are energized by our strengths and exhausted by having to play to our weaknesses. In my LIS 708 class I am collaborating in a group to write a research paper and I've felt very overwhelmed in this class. I couldn't understand why - I've read so many papers now in grad school, I'm smart, I love working in groups... so why does this class make...