A few weeks ago, I was in Houston and made a casual reference to Donalyn Miller’s The Book Whisperer, which extols authentic reading and extensive classroom collections. Miller is a Texan, and I was in Texas, but her work was new to many folks I talked with.

Then I remembered that a long, long, long time ago, I asked one of my school library management students if I could share her take on The Book Whisperer on this blog. And I never had.

So, without further ado (because, for heaven’s sakes, there have already been eons of ado), here’s Holly’s take on The Book Whisperer, a la Prezi.

Have you had the pleasure of digging around the National Archives’ Digital Vaults project yet? You can search for images, see images with related tags, make posters and more.

Several months ago, my student Andrew Katz made a screencast about Digital Vaults. None of us in class had heard about it, but after seeing his tutorial, we sure got excited! He graciously agreed that I could share it with you … although he probably thought I’d do so a while back! :)

On behalf of the University of Michigan’s SI 641 / EDCURINS 575 : Information Literacy for Teaching and Learning class, I invite you to download a copy of our 170+ page book, Information Literacy in the Wild.

In this book, we share our experiences doing observations, teaching, and online resource creation related to information literacy in public libraries, K-12 classrooms, K-12 school libraries, college classrooms (online and face-to-face), academic libraries, educational outreach projects, the natural history museum, and more.

As their professor, I couldn’t be more pleased with their honest, unvarnished looks at what’s working in information literacy and what isn’t. So much of library literature is written as if there’s never a problem — everything goes off without a hitch. Ooh, doesn’t that make us jealous? But what I love about the deft hand of these writers is that they lift the veil and show you when the boat rocked and then what they did to right it.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of our classmate Kristel Wieneke, we did a limited print run (shown above) for friends and family courtesy of the the University of Michigan Library’s Espresso Book Machine.

But we’re releasing it for free in digital format for everybody else!

You can download it for your eReader for free here:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/115254

Or you can download it in a formatted-for-print PDF here:
http://bit.ly/infowild

So if you want to know what happened when a bird unit flew into a Physics classroom, what Lady Gaga has to do with synthesis, what it means to use a chainsaw to cut cake, what a Tyrannosaurus rex has to do with information literacy, or what database-a-phobia is, we hope you’ll download our book.

Then share your feedback with us!
informationliteracyinthewild [at] umich [dot] edu

(And that’s not all … they also created some amazing IL online resources … but I’ll save sharing some of those for another day.)

PS – To learn more about the Espresso Book Machine, check out this video!