Whew - MAME 37, the conference of the Michigan Association for Media in Education, has come to a close, and I need a nap!

By request, here are the presentation slides/handouts:

- ELEMENTARY ROUND-UP was a team of us presenting on different genres of books for elementary readers. Here’s my handout on graphic novels.

- REDEFINING THE SCHOOL LIBRARIAN IN THE 21ST CENTURY discusses different roles librarians can play in order to discover and further define their roles.

- CURRICULUM MAKEOVER: LIBRARY EDITION looked at three factors impacting school libraries: the inquiry focus of the Standards for the 21st-Century Learner, new building-specific initiatives and priorities, and the onset of the Common Core Standards, then asked participants to brainstorm a PD plan to take to their principal on Monday morning. If you didn’t get a copy of Cassandra Barnett’s table aligning the AASL Standards with the Framework of the Partnership of 21st Century Skills and the ISTE NETS, you can get it here (it’s part of AASL’s new Building-Level Toolkit!). The BPS alignment chart is available here. You can find the general statement on the Common Core Standards for ELA here.

I was also delighted at the contributions Elizabeth and Julie, two of our school library students at SI, made to Laura’s AASL Best Websites for Teaching and Learning preconference. Julie was back with her SI colleague Addie for Friday’s roundtables — they had big crowds!

A big thanks to MAME for awarding me the Margaret Grazier Award for Service to the Profession. I was deeply honored.

I’ve mentioned my fondness for TOON Books’ comics for emergent readers before herehere and here. They are doing terrific work making comics/graphic fiction that is age-apppropriate and suited to the reading levels of our youngest patrons. Their online work continues to grow, too. The Benny and Penny blog and the online full-text access that reads aloud to students in multiple languages give our students online destinations that meet students where they are.

Today I learned about TOON Books’ online CarTOON Maker, which lets kids create their own one-panel comics featuring characters from the TOON Books list. This could be a great way to help students create dialogue, use computers in elementary fixed schedule as literacy centers, or much more.

TOON Books - Easy to Read Comics via kwout

Yesterday, I attended the Kids Read Comics convention at the Henry Ford Centennial Library in Dearborn.  It was expertly planned and organized and featured lots of great folks who are creating great stuff for kids.

I sat in on two great panels, one on comics created from personal experience or real events (as opposed to those featuring superheroes, mythological creatures, legends, or other fictional), and one on planning comics-centric programming in your library. 

Here’s what was weird.  Neither panel focused on cataloguing or shelving practices in libraries, but the topic came up both times. 

Here’s what bugs you about us librarians: we might all agree to call Garfield a comic, but we librarians do love to call everything else a graphic novel.  Even if it is not a novel.  Laika, about the Soviet dog in space? We call that a graphic novel.  It’s not. It’s non-fiction.  Smile, a memoir? We call that a graphic novel, too.  Myths? Legends? Bring ‘em on. We’ll call ‘em all graphic novels.  Part comic, part text, like Diary of a Wimpy Kid? Absolutely. Graphic Novel.  Frankly, if it has a story that goes on beyond four panels, we graphicnovelize it.

That bothers you. A lot. I heard you loud and clear. 

When I got to my library five years ago, we had a few battered copies of Garfield. They were catalogued as 741.5 (741 being the general Dewey number for drawings; 741.5 being for comics AND graphic novels AND sequential art).  So as my collection grew, I kept adding to 741.5.  And technically, 741.5 is the proper location for sequential art meant to “delight.”  Our librarian mistake comes if/when we label that section Graphic Novels, because that is more specific than what the Dewey Decimal Classification calls it.

Meanwhile, if I bought a biography in graphic format, it went in biographies; and it if was a Max Axiom book about energy, it went in the 300s.  And that’s technically correct cataloguing, too — if the book’s primary purpose is to “persuade or inform,” it goes into the subject area to which it belongs.

Guess which titles circulated? The 741.5s.  Guess which ones didn’t? The biographies and 300s.  Guess which books I moved into 741.5 so they’d start getting kids’ hands? Yup.

Some of my colleagues, who had no 741.5 section, or whose shelving and/or preferences leaned toward having a separate section, labeled that separate section Graphic Novels.  They used that nomenclature, in part, to fly under the radar screen. Sometimes, they worried that “Comics” didn’t sound like something that a lot of taxpayers or school administrators would approve of, so they worried that a “Comics” sign would draw negative attention and impede their implementation plans.  Or they legitimately started the collection as a gathering of graphic novels, adding comics and memoir and non-fiction when they realized that GN was the hottest real estate in the library.

So, being the subversive lot of MLIS-holders they/we are, they called it Graphic Novels and threw out the sayings that make you cringe: visual content would lead kids to love text later; visual content helps translate content for English Language Learners.  (And yes, your stuff sometimes does have that effect; we’re not lying, just not leading the evening news with the top story you’d prefer — that they’re worthy in their own right.)

Having relatively small collections to start off with, they threw all kinds of books-with-panels-and-word-balloons together.  It made the collection look less puny and more robust and appealing. Power in numbers:  Garfield, Babymouse, Bone, memoir, non-fiction, you name it, all mashed together.

I hear you.  You feel like that oversimplified your genre. My first book was about drama integration and “seatwork” was one of my LC Subject Headings.  I didn’t like being miscategorized, either.

But here’s the thing. The 741.5 Club, the GN Brigade and you, the creators, have the same objective: to get your works into users’ hands. All librarians are trying to do is put items that are visually similar into the same place, because our users/patrons/students are currently choosing what to read based on the format it’s in.  If we put T-Minus next to the space books, it’s not going to get into users’ hands as much as if we put it next to Bone.  We’d rather have your stuff get read.  And so do you. 

So help us out. Give us some time to build our collections until the point that graphic content / comics / sequential art / books with panels-and-balloons can be further subdivided (or the economy improves and we aren’t so frightened of taxpayer/administrator backlash).  In the meantime, try not to fret. And keep writing. Our kids love what you do. That’s why we put it where they can find it.

PS - If you are a glutton for punishment, or are a closet cataloguer, you can check out this documentation or this 28-slide PowerPoint.  You’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know.  (We had to pay tuition to learn this cataloguing stuff — you get it for free!)