Week 9, #23

Wow! How to summarize this program in one word or sentence? Challenging! Eye-opening! School Library Learning 2.0 provided me with the kind of professional development and learning experience that previously has been available only through CSLA, AASL and ALA annual conferences or weekend workshops. Breaking the tools to learn into manageable pieces reduced the material into a format that became approachable and less intimidating. My personal gratitude goes to Connie Williams, Jackie Siminitus, Rob Darrow, Jamie Boston and all the other CSLA members who give their time and expertise so generously and graciously.
Setting up the program so that the participant completes each element with a blog post creates the kind of learning experience we recommend for our students: looking back over the process to reflect on what was learned and how to capture the positive parts while trying something different for those that weren't satisfactory. This reminds me of the last item in the Big 6, which is the evaluation part. Most often students and teachers do not devote any time to either evaluating the actual process that helped the student develop the final product or to examining how to do the research differently the next time. Keeping these thoughts and reflections in a blog enables the learner to go back and remember each piece of the learning puzzle. I plan to redo several of the elements that I would like to improve, like my librarian trading card "mashup." In addition, getting feedback from others through a blog gives both good suggestions and a friendly boost to the learner. I am interested in looking at other blogs in this program to see the same "things" through other eyes. In addition, the reflection process in creating each blog post helped me think of applications for the tools I was learning. I already have several projects I have reviewed with my district's technology director, and have received the okay to move forward. One is a wiki for students to interact with each other about books and genres they like, and the other is a school history wiki.
Having been a teacher librarian in California since 1973, I am glad to keep learning; this is what keeps the profession up to date and vital!

Week 9, #22

Audiobooks and ebooks present an opportunity to make literary works available to students in a format that fits into their lives, by listening while traveling or during a time when they might be listening to music. Many school libraries have embraced this technology, buying books on tape, CD and playaways as the delivery system advances. Being able to access books free from sites like Project Gutenberg expands on titles that might not be in their school libraries, in either print or audio format. Another advantage is the languages that are available, both for students whose first language is included in those available, or for students who are studying languages for which free ebooks are accessible from these sites. Some titles I saw listed that might appeal to ELL high school students are childrens' books like those by Beatrix Potter or the Wizard of Oz series, not usually found in a secondary school library. One disadvantage is that students will not be able to download titles still in copyright. In addition, I did not see any books listed for either Arabic or Urdu, languages which some of my English language learners speak at home.
Readers who prefer the tactile aspects of reading, browsing physically through library shelves, holding their books and turning the pages, might not adjust easily to the audio component of listening or "hands-free" method of reading the computer screen. Learning styles can also determine which patrons eagerly adopt this format. Those who need the visual experience of seeing the words could still read from the computer screen, but might not absorb the content by listening. However, whether patrons check out audiobooks from their libraries or find them free on sites like the Gutenberg Project, the expanded ability to access material presents an advance .

Week 9, #21

Since my chief experience with podcasts has been watching and listening to those made by my son, who lives outside the United States, I enjoyed using this assignment to do more searching that is library-related. I had great good luck with Yahoo Podcasts; I searched "libraries" and found two treasures. One is an interview from NPR with the author Anne Lamott on how much there is in libraries: what a gem. The other is an interview with Keith Curry Lance from several years back, on his studies showing the positive correlation between the quality of a school's library and the students' test scores. The interview originally played on a program from Colorado called "Colorado Matters." I especially liked that the interviewer asked basic questions about the study and its significance, so that the audience would understand how important this research is. I think the library world always thinks of Keith Curry Lance as "one of us," but in this case the intended audience was the state of Colorado.
I found some "fun" results when I searched "reading" on Podcast.net. Included in my results were Bible readings, poetry readings and tarot card reading, not quite the context I had in mind. Goes to show exactly what I tell the students: the machine needs as much specificity as possible in your search terms, since it can't read your mind, at least not yet!
As with several of the other applications I've learned with these lessons, the challenge will be finding the time to do the searching, listening to podcasts and then working with students to create some of their own.

Week 9, #20

While I've looked at YouTube occasionally for a particular video, I've never spent time searching the site for videos by specific subject. I viewed the videos listed in the lesson, some of which I've seen before. I was really happy to see that the library cheer is posted, since I've been at library conferences and events where Margaret led the group in the cheer. In fact, I found out that my school district, which blocks both YouTube and Google video, won't unblock a specific site in YouTube when I asked to show students several library-related videos, including the cheer, the book cart drill team competition at ALA, the March of the Librarians and the Mercedes Benz commercial with the blonde wanting to order food at the library counter. I wanted my students to see some library/librarian-related humor, since I tell them what fun library folks have when we go to conferences. I did enjoy following the links to related videos from some of the library videos listed.
I also searched for "school library" and "high school library," found a grand assortment of videos posted and looked at some of them. However, I can see how easy it is to start by looking for one subject, follow the links of related videos, and spend a huge amount of time watching videos. On the positive side, I like the ability to post ideas and viewpoints in videos like the Library 2.0 Manifesto, since reading text posted on a screen interspersed with photos from Burning Man, the annual gathering in the Nevada desert, makes much more of an impact than printing the same words in a professional journal.
In my search for high school library videos, again the results were an eclectic mix, including videos from school libraries around the world. The entries from the "I love my library" contest were the most interesting to me, and my favorites were from Niles North, which used a stop motion technique, and South Carroll High School in Sykesville, MD, which used animation. Here is the link to the South Carroll video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=HyrTDryzEzE
I would appreciate the ability to post videos to our library website, detailing hours, services, etc. However, until our school district works out the technical details, I would not be able to do this using YouTube. An alternative might be to use TeacherTube, which is accessible.

Reading quotations

I am copying below a list of reading quotations I have saved from CALIBK12, and added to over time. While this is not directly related to School Library Learning, I received a request from Jackie Siminitus, one of the creators of the program, to post them on my blog. Feel free to enjoy them.


CALIBK12 Quotes on Reading and Libraries Note: there are mistakes in dates, wording, and attribution in this list. Please check sources.

A book is a friend. American proverb
A book is a gift you can open again and again. Garrison Keillor
A book is good company. Henry Ward Beecher
A book is just a way to remember a story, like a photograph is a way to remember a friend. Anne Lindbergh
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. ~ Chinese proverb
A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold. - Henry Miller The Books In My Life (1969)
A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance. A book is...the chariot that bears the human soul. Emily Dickinson
A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum. -- of both books and money! But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money. –Henry Miller, novelist (1891-1980)
A book must be an ice ax to break the frozen sea within us. - Franz Kafka
A book's not worth a shit if it hasn't been banned in at least a couple of places - Richie Partington
A child must make a fort for him or herself in a bed and read, read, read. Gary Soto
A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
A closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood. -Chinese Proverb
A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators. Malcolm Bradbury (b.1932)
A culture gets what it pays for, and if we think democracy depends on people who read, write, think, and reflect - which is what literature advances - then we have to invest in what it takes to promote that. -- James Shapiro, Columbia University
A culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas, and without ideas, well, where are we? --Neil Gaiman (Sandman: The Kindly Ones)
A friend once asked what I'd do if I had to choose between reading and breathing. My answer: I'd hold my breath.. - Ashley Nissler
A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever. ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper ~
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. – John Milton (1608-1674)
A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. Margaret Fuller
A house without books is like a room without windows. ---Horace Mann
A lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools. Thomas Jefferson
A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window. Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn (1994), p. 33.
A library is an arsenal of liberty. Unknown
A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life. Henry Ward Beecher
A library is thought in cold storage. -Herbert Samuel, politician and diplomat (1870-1963)
A LIBRARY IS...history's home and freedom's harbor, all the world's dreams in one little room.---Michael Malone
A library should be like a pair of open arms Roger Rosenblatt
A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas—a place where history comes to life. Norman Cousins:
A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people. -Will Rogers
A man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. W.H. Auden
A room without books is like a body without a soul. - Cicero
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. ~~ Henry B. Adams
A truly great book should be read in youth, once again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. Robertson Davies (1913-1995)
A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you. Daniel J. Boorstein
Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. Toni Morrison
After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality – the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape. Arthur Christopher Benson
Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. P. J. O'Rourke, US humorist & political commentator
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. – Benjamin Franklin
And he reads to them, as he does every night, as if watering them, as if turning earth at their feet. --James Salter
And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations? --Lewis Caroll
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him. Richard McKenna
Any book you haven't read is a new book.
Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book. (Anonymous)
Anything can happen when you open a book.
Anyway, here's a story from my childhood, which I tell every year at this time: My father warned about the TV Monsters. These creepy creatures lurked in a dark forest, waiting to catch and chew up an unwary kid. But there was a way to get safely through those sinister woods. The TV Monsters couldn't hurt you if you held a book in front of your face. You know what? It still works. Give the Gift of Reading. Dan Gillmor's eJournal, 3, 2006
As a child I was a very shy little blonde kid that didn't speak at all to anybody...And what was wonderful about the library was that you didn't have to say a word. So it was my oasis. And you didn't have to ask for things in full sentences. You could just point to a shelf and say, '18th century dolls,' and the librarians would lead you there. It was amazing. I felt like a queen. Adrienne Yorinks, award-winning illustrator and quilter.
As a child, I loved to read books. The library was a window to the world, a pathway to worlds and people far from my neighborhood in Philadelphia. Ed Bradley (60 Minutes correspondent)
As a general rule, the most successful people in life are those who have the best information. ---Benjamin Disraeli (a 19th century British politician)
As I walked through the vast corridors of knowledge, I realized that life is like the library and the books can be read only one at a time, and each one will reveal something new. Temple Grandin
As one man said, We're Marines. We improvise, we adapt, we overcome. And we read. (an American soldier in Iraq)
At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better. ~~Barack Obama (from a speech to the American Library Association 25, 20)
The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, The children are now working as if I did not exist. -Maria Montessori, educator (1870-1952)
Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as by the latter. Paxton Hood

Be good to your librarian – the next one might be worse.
Being in the library is so addictive for me that I really have to exercise self-control so I can get some writing done at home. Janet Fitch, Author of White Oleander The library ( in the migrant community) I grew up in was my only link to the outside world. Playwright and filmmaker Luis Valdez
Books and marriage go ill together. Attributed to Molière, French playwright
Books and reading saved a very lonely childhood. At the library I found people who took interest in me. From books, I learned about people and compassion. Nancy Slonim Aronie, Author of Writing from the Heart
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them. -Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902)
Books are like shoes; you have to pick the one that fits. - Michele Shepherd
Books are like truth serum ---- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.
Books are not full of men, yet they are alive. Stephen Vincent Benet
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. Henry Ward Beecher:
Books are one of the best things that happened to me. — Johnny Depp
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. - James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat (1819-1891)
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, the worst. What is the right use? What is the end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Barbara Tuchman
Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life. -Jesse Lee Bennett
Books are the holes in the fences of life. Peg Kehret
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. Charles W. Eliot
Books are the treasured wealth of the world, the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Henry David Thoreau
Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more. John Harington (1561-1612)

Books invite all; they constrain none. --Inscription at the Los Angeles Public Library

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future. --Jim Bishop

But despite the meek, shush-shushing stereotype, librarians are largely a freedom-upholding, risk-taking group. In the name of the First Amendment and anti-censorship, they have championed the causes of provocative writers and spoken out against banned and challenged books. Writer Linton Weeks, Washington Post
Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. --Potter Stewart
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there. -- Clare Booth Luce
Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.-- Emilie Buchwald
Children know that if they have a question about the world, the library is the place to find the answer. And someone will always be there to help them find the answer-our librarians. (A librarian's) job is an important one. Our nation runs on the fuel of information and imagination that libraries provide. And they are in charge of collecting and sharing this information in a helpful way. Librarians inform the public, and by doing so, they strengthen our great democracy. ~~ Laura Bush
Children learn about literature from what the adults around them do about it. - Zahnleiter, 1985
Children's literature may be the most important literature you ever read. This is the stuff that you read before you've figured out who you are, before you've made up your mind on all sorts of subjects. This is the literature that shapes you more than anything else. Professor Philip Nel, Kansas State University
Choose an author as you choose a friend. Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723)
Come, take choice of all my library, and so beguile thy sorrow. William Shakespeare
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. -Arthur Koestler
Definition of FICTION and NONFICTION: Nonfiction can educate the mind, Fiction can educate the heart.
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; -they are the life, the soul of reading. Laurence Sterne
Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal. Lenore Hershey:
Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life. -Giorgos Seferis, writer, diplomat, Nobel laureate (1900-1971)
Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they never existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...Dwight D. Eisenhower

Don't touch it! That's MY book! Roy D. Levine
Educating a child is like lighting a candle. The match is struck and for a moment, the match and wick burn together. When the match is removed the candle glows alone. - Source unknown.
Education is a vaccine for violence. --- Edward James Olmos
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. - G. K. Chesterton
Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one – Malcolm Forbes
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writing so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for. Socrates (469-399 BC)

Every person who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make life full, significant, and interesting. - Aldous Huxley
Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion. - Barry Lopez, from an interview in Poets & Writers Mar/ 1994 (first encountered as the epigraph to Charles de Lint's lovely novel about stories, Someplace to be Flying)

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library. ~ Jim Rohn ~
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't. - Mark Twain
Finding information is easy; finding knowledge is more difficult.

Finding information is easy; finding knowledge is more difficult.

For a well-rounded education, you could try curling up with good books and bad librarians. Richard Needham
For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on the bus. Francine Prose
For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time. Louis L'amour (1908-1988)

Getting my library card was like citizenship; it was like American citizenship. ~~Oprah Winfrey
Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one. - Birrell
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. Mark Twain
Good prose is like a windowpane. -George Orwell, writer (19-1950)
Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading. Rufus Choate

He believed aliens were sending him messages through the Dewey decimal numbers on the library books. He was trying to work out the code ~~Catherine, Proof
He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library TEMPEST TOST Robertson Davies

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men. John Aubrey (1626-1697)

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary. -William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
He is wise who knows the sources of knowledge -- where it is written and where it is to be found. - A.A. Hodge
He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes. Barrow

He who has a garden and a library, wants for nothing- Cicero
Here everyone will find something with which they strongly disagree. (unknown)
Hibbidy, skibbidy, flibbidy poo ... try to read some books with big words too. — Adam Sandler
How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first? George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Reading, 1854

Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. Saul Bellow, Him With His Foot in His Mouth (1984). p. 11.
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog. -- Sandra Cisneros
I am a part of everything I have read. - John Kieran
I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future. - Sonya Hartnett
I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future. Sonya Hartnett
I cannot live without books. -- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
I cannot think of a greater blessing than to die in one's own bed, without warning or discomfort, on the last page of the new book that we most wanted to read. John Russell (b.1919)

I don't fancy the next two weeks trying to get Librarian out of the carpet. -- Spike, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals. Denise Levertov
I dream away my life in others' speculations. I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me. Charles Lamb (1775-18

I fell in love with libraries when I first walked into the school library in Falls City, Texas, population 462. It was tiny and I quickly read through almost everything, but it was a lifeline for a child starved for a larger world. In many ways I owe great chunks of the life I lead to libraries. Jane Chesnutt, Editor-in-Chief, Woman's Day Magazine
I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book. Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977)
I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking something up and finding something else on the way. --Franklin P. Adams
I find that when I come out of the library I'm in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life. Tracy Chevalier, Author of Girl with a Pearl Earring
I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books. ~~Ann Richards, former Governor of Texas
I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books. Ann Richards
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. ---Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
I have depended on books not only for pleasure and for the wisdom they bring to all who read, but also for that knowledge which comes to others through their eyes and their ears. Helen Keller

I have depended on books not only for pleasure and for the wisdom they bring to all who read, but also for that knowledge which comes to others through their eyes and their ears. Helen Keller

I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified by what he had read about the effects of smoking that he gave up reading. Henry G. Strauss
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. ~ Malcolm X
I imagine heaven's like this, I said. Perfect surroundings and angels wafting in with tea. Miss Read/Farther Afield
I knew at a very young age that reading for me was the ultimate source of freedom. With knowledge, you have the potential to reach great heights in every phase of life — from childhood to adulthood. — Oprah Winfrey
I liked reading and working out my ideas in the midst of that endless crowd walking in and out of the (library) looking for something. I, too, was seeking fame and fortune by sitting at the end of a long golden table next to the sets of American authors on the open shelves. Author Alfred Kazin

I love to lose myself in other men's minds. Books think for me. Charles Lamb
I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter, Mr. O'Connell, but I am proud of what I am...I, am a librarian! The Mummy
I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge,
unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading?- John Adams
I often feel sorry for people who don't read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life. ~ Scott Corbett ~
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. T.S. Eliot
I READ: because one life isn't enough, and in the pages of a book I can be anybody. Richard Peck

I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. --Michael Moore, from BuzzFlash.com interview 3/12/02 http://www.townhall.com/columnists/richlowry/rl200922.shtml
I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had to wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.
Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself. -- Isaac Asimov
I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture, and our concern for the future call all be tested by how well we support our libraries. - Carl Sagan, Scientist (1934-1996)
I thought I'd be a librarian until I met some crazy ones. Edward Gorey (Boston Globe article, 1998, as quoted in Salon)

I used to go to the library all the time when I was kid. As a teenager, I got a book on how to write jokes at the library, and that, in turn, launched my comedy career. ~~Comedian Drew Carey. Carey appeared on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, where he announced that all of his winnings would go to Ohio public libraries. Carey donated nearly $600,000 to the Ohio Library Council.
I was borrowing so many books from our school library that in the third grade, our school librarian told me that I should write children's books when I got older. – Beverly Cleary
I was the pride of the public library... until I discovered Smirnoff. -- 1965 advertising slogan
I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. --Anna Quindlen
I would walk into the Carnegie Library and I would see the pictures of Booker T. and pictures of Frederick Douglass and I would read. I would go into the Savannah Public
I'd best head to the library. Research beckons -- Rupert Giles
If a public library is doing its job, it has something in it that offends every single person. -- Phyllis A. Salak, American Libraries
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Emily Dickinson
If students are to be the 'workers' they absolutely require endowed libraries and the time to use them. [Theodore Sizer]
If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all. Francois FéNelon

If we didn't have libraries, many people thirsty for knowledge would dehydrate. (Megan Jo Tetrick, age 12, Daleville, Indiana)
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? - Albert Einstein

If you can read this, thank a teacher. --Anonymous teacher

If you can read, you hold the secrets of the universe. Imagine. — Kathy Bates
If you don't find something here that offends you, please see a librarian. (Library sign proposed by Dorothy Broderick).
If you drop gold and books, pick up the books first, then the gold. Anonymous
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. ~Cicero
If you read a lot of books you are considered well read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well viewed. Lily Tomlin
I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved. --Barbara Kingsolver.
In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leather boxes. Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish. -- S. I. Hayakawa

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future.
The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no
longer exists. -Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)
In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. – S. I. Hayakawa
In books one finds golden mansions and women as beautiful as jewels. Chinese proverb
In hard times, libraries are more important than ever. Human beings need what books give them better than any other medium. Since ancient nights around prehistoric campfires, we have needed myth. And heroes. And moral tales. And information about the world beyond the nearest mountains or oceans. Today, with books and movies more expensive than ever, and television entertainment in free fall to the lowest level of stupidity, free circulating books are an absolute necessity. They are quite simply another kind of food. We imagine, and then we live. For those without money, the road to the treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library. ~~Columnist Pete Hamill, New York Daily News
In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.--Andre Maurois

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern. Lord Edward Lytton (18-1873)

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. -Mortimer J. Adler
In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us how to swim. -- Linton Weeks, Washington Post 1/13/01

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass. --Eudora Welty
It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own. ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds... In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most previous thought, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. William Ellery Channing
It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind. Sydney Smith (1771-1845)

It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. - Rene Descartes
It is not true we have only one life to love, if we can read, we can live as many lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish. S.I. Hayakawa
It is the sort of ideology that you expect to find among naive college students and destitute Latin American peasants. Rich Lowry
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything. Lord Henry P. Brougham (1778-1868)

It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement. Author Ray Bradbury on the writing of his classic novel Farenheit 451 over 50 years ago.
It's an essential fight librarians are making, an age-old fight; yours is a battle for civilization. It's a fight for our country's founding values. Radio talk-show host Jim Hightower
It's not having knowledge, but knowing where to get it.

It's not that I'm so smart; it's just that I stay with problems longer. Albert Einstein
I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage. Charles de Secondat

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes the day happier. Kathleen Norris

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it. Samuel Johnson
Learn five new words a day, because a book is written one word at a time. Richard Peck
Learning is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily. ~ Chinese Proverb
Learning to Read is Basic, Loving to Read is the Plus

Leaving a child alone to savor a book, to get from it what he or she will, and then holding your tongue when the child closes the book, requires a tremendous act of faith--faith in children and faith in books. Susan Ohanian _One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards_ 1999
Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people. -- John Adams
Librarian is a service occupation, gas station attendant of the mind. In an earlier age, I might have made things. Now I only make them available. Richard Powers *The Gold Bug Variations*
Librarians are at the heart of opposition to foolish, dangerous, misguided attempts at censoring human expression in our free country. I thank God for their efforts. ~~Clyde Edgerton
Librarians have recently let down their hair -- usually wrapped in a tight bun, of course -- to become some of the most vocal opponents of the Bush administration and the USA Patriot Act, prompting Attorney General John Ashcroft to take a public swipe at them. Librarians now constitute one of the country's main centers of thoughtless and unreconstructed leftism.
Librarians. I give them all the credit in the book. The Mormon Family Library...was so generous and so kind to me. They are amazing... I would call them and say, 'Would you look up in the 1840 census the Henry family around Milton, Virginia?' And...they would... Librarians at Hunter College, the University of North Carolina library, and the Library of Congress as well. Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who edited a manuscript he purchased entitled, The Bondswoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, the first known novel written by an African-American woman who had been a slave.
Libraries ... where you learn to learn.
Libraries ...house our dreams. Nikki Giovanni, American Libraries, may 1996, p. 56.
Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open. - Laura Bush, First Lady, 2002
Libraries are community treasure chests, loaded with a wealth of information available to everyone equally, and the key to that treasure chest is the library card. I have found the most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card. ~~First Lady Laura Bush
Libraries are my passion in life. Before I became mayor (of Los Angeles), I used to sneak out here during lunch time...and I'd go to a corner and take a book--any book almost--and read it for a while, and then feel rejuvenated. Richard Riordan
Libraries are not made; they grow. Augustine Burrill

Libraries are places where we writers go after we die, if we're lucky. We going to live on through libraries. But there is also something more. In addition to being a place that we go after we die, if we are lucky, libraries are also the place where a great many writers are born. Joe Klein, author of Primary Colors and The Running Mate
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark...- Germaine Greer
Libraries are the great equalizer. A library can be the difference between the haves and the have-nots. Used properly, they can help bring a student up from any socio-economic level. Nancy Matz (Tulare Union High School Library Media Teacher) quoted in Tulare Advance Register 9/8/05
Libraries in the stacks and see all of the newspapers from all over the country. Did I dream that I would be on the Supreme Court? No. But I dreamt that there was a world out there that was worth pursuing. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
Libraries keep the records on behalf of all humanity...the unique and the absurd, the wise and [the] fagments of stupidity. -Vartan Gregorian, former president, NY Public Library
Libraries promote the sharing of knowledge, connecting people of all ages with valuable information resources. These dynamic and modern institutions, and the librarians who staff them, add immeasurably to our quality of life. ~~President George W. Bush
Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better. Sidney Sheldon

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries. - Anne Herbert, Whole Earth Catalog
Libraries, places of buzzz, not shhhhhh...!
Library - where they keep the truth serum and the magic carpets. Freak the Mighty
Life is short. Learn fast.
Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books. --Bell Hooks
Listened to a good book lately?
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the sense shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. -Helen Adams Keller, lecturer and author (1880-1968)
Love books, love to read, write every day and don't ever give up. Betsy Byars
Madam, a circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the year! And depend on it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last. (from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's _The Rivals_)
Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature. Fran Lebowitz
Man builds no structure which outlives a book. Eugene Ware
Many librarians perform their duties with a profound sense of responsibility: supporting the foundations of democracy by ensuring free access to information. New York Times reporter John Schwartz
Many of the greatest adventurers of our age...didn't travel much further than...a library. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (1991), p. 225.
Most people don't realise how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement, but a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we ? Lucien the Librarian of the Library of Dream
Music (especially the blues) cheers him, as do people who behave decently. Librarians, too — not famous for their physical strength — who resist having books removed from shelves and refuse to give names of people who have checked out certain books in the era of the Patriot Act.
My alma mater was books, a good library. — Malcolm X
My childhood library was small enough not to be intimidating. And yet I felt the whole world was contained in those two rooms. I could walk any aisle and smell wisdom. U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove
My encouragement to you is to go tomorrow to the library. Poet Maya Angelou, during a speech to a college audience that encouraged students to read voraciously and never stop learning.
My guess is (it will be) about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in search. --Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology, Google.com
My home is where my books are. (1909) ~ Ellen Thompson ~
My library /Was dukedom large enough. William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), The Tempest, Act 1 scene 2
My two favorite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library. -Peter Golkin, museum spokesman (1966- )
My very identities as a reader and a writer began at the Walt Whitman branch library. Paula Spencer, Woman's Day Contributing Editor
Never judge a book by its movie - J.W. Eagan
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other people have lent me. - Anatole France
No book is worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally and often far more worth reading at the age of 50. - C.S. Lewis
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance. Atwood H. Townsend

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure. Noah Porter (1811-1892)

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library. Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)
No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded. -Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901-1978)
No story ever really ends, and I think I know why. -- George MacDonald
Nonfiction can educate the mind, Fiction can educate the heart. -Michael Cart
Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors. Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

Oh, I am just a student, Sir and I only want to learn But it's hard to read through the rising smoke from the books that you'd like to burn --Phil Ochs, I'm Gonna Say it Now
Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness. Anthony Marcel

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free Frederick Douglass
One of my favorites is from a sign posted on a wall at Bubba Gump's Restaurant in Monterey, CA. Never let a few facts get in the way of a good story.
One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures. George W. Bush, President of the United States Graduate of Yale and Harvard
One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer. ~~Caroline Kennedy
One should not read to swallow all, but rather see what one has use for. Henrik Ibsen (1828-19)

One should, each day, try to hear a song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words -Goethe
Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers. -- Steven Spielberg (b.1947)
Only the educated are free. – Epictetus
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson (18-1882)

Our libraries are community treasure chests, loaded with a wealth of information available to everyone, equally. — First Lady Laura Bush
Our whole American way of life is a great war of ideas, and librarians are the arms dealers selling weapons to both sides. -James Quinn
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. Groucho Marx
People become librarians because they know too much. Their knowledge extends beyond mere categories. They cannot be confined to disciplines. They bring order to chaos. They bring wisdom and culture to the masses. Librarians rule. And they will kick the crap out of anyone who says otherwise. --librarianavengers.org
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)

Perhaps the two most valuable and satisfactory products of American civilization are the librarian on the one hand and the cocktail in the other. -- Louis Stanley Jast
Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. A.E. Housman
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? -Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual. ~ Socrates
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should Ezra Pound

Question Authority... Ask A Librarian!
Read as much of the best literature as you can. Walter Dean Myers
Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life. Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948)

Read books. They are good for us. Natalie Goldberg

Read in order to live. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Read the great writers, write something every day and believe in yourself. Madeleine L'Engle
Read, read, read and then read some more. Avi
Read, read, read and try to write for your own enjoyment every chance you get. Joan Lowry Nixon
Read, read, read. --William Faulkner

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman 'other' or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader. Terry Eagleton

Readers are made by readers. - Aidan Chambers, 1991
Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare. Harriet Martineau
Reading -- the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay. William Styron (b.1925)

Reading a really good book is like reading a part of the author's heart. (Kevin Frederick - my 9 year old son, after reading the last of the Indian in the Cupboard series)
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are. – Mason Cooley
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. --Mortimer J. Adler

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. Mortimer J. Adler (b.1902)

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere. - Mary Schmich

Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind; it forces you to stretch your own. – Charles Scribner Jr.
Reading is like living and dying; you must do it by yourself. – The Frugal Librarian
Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable. Augustine Birrell (1850-1933)

Reading is seeing by proxy. -- Herbert Spencer (1820-19)
Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of your own. The child that reads is one who succeeds.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. -Joseph Addison, essayist and poet (1672-1719)
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch. Augustus Hare (1792-1834)

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch. Augustus Hare (1792-1834)

Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Francis Bacon

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere. Hazel Rochman

Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That's why it's a comfort to go hand in hand. -Emily Kimbrough, author and broadcaster (1899-1989)
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- Wernher von Braun
Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year. Horace Mann

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion. Jean Rhys (1894-1979)

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain. Louisa Alcott:
So many books, so little time.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested. Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Francis Bacon

Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered. -- W.H. Auden
Some books leave us free and some books make us free. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some of us are story makers, others are story sharers. One way or another we provide stories for kids that will entertain, move, engage, and teach, stories that say again and again that yes, life may be hard, or funny, or perplexing, always risky, but in the end --worth the living. Avi in his 20 acceptance speech for the Newbery Medal
Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding. -- Stephen King
Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater comprehension. Jimmy Calano

Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself. Chinese Proverb
Teachers who rely on textbooks for their curriculum guarantee that their lessons will be obsolete… Marvin and Kimberley Cetron

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important. --Bill Gates
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it. -Moses Hadas
That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing. Could I have remembered, as some men do, what I read, I should have been able to call myself an educated man. But that power I have never possessed. Something is always left--something dim and inaccurate—but still something sufficient to preserve the taste for more. I am inclined to think that it is so with most readers. Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

…that perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend, and a good library. Aphra Behn, The Lucky Mistake, 1689

That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

The America I loved, he writes, still exists in the front desks of public libraries. Kurt Vonnegut, in a USA Today interview 10/
The answers are there; you just have to know where to look. -- Dana Scully
The art of reading is among other things the art of adopting that pace the author has set. Some books are fast and some are slow, but no book can be understood if it is taken at the wrong speed. Mark Van Doren (1894-1973)

The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1834-1894)

The best example of distance learning is READING
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts. - Wendell Holmes
The best of my education has come from the public library . . . my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents for an overdue book. You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library. -- Lesley Conger
The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. ~ Mccosh ~
The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty. Theodore Parker
The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, The medicines of the soul. Paxton Hood
The child that reads is one who succeeds.

The children to whom we read simple stories may or may not show gratitude, but each boon we give strengthens the pillars of the world. - Maya Angelou
The closest we will ever come to an orderly universe is a good library. ~ Ashleigh Brilliant
The death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. quoted in the Hartford Courant, January 31, 1995, p.A9
The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old age. Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848)

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. Oscar Wilde
The end of reading is not more books but more life. Holbrook Jackson

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one. Sir James Goldsmith (1933-1997)

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you the knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination. Elizabeth Hardwick (b.1916)


The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books; a mysterious order it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. -- Albert Einstein
The humble little school library ... was a ramp to everything in the world and beyond, everything that could be dreamed and imagined, everything that could be known, everything that could be hoped. ~ Lee Sherman, ~ (Editor of Northwest Education)
The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around. --Thomas Merton
The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. Mohammed
The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all. -Voltaire, philosopher and writer (1694-1778)
The Internet may be the world's greatest library, but let's face it - all the books are scattered on the floor. D.C. Denison
The Librarian, whose job is to heal ignorance, to keep life safe for poetry and to put knowledge smack dab in the middle of the American way. From The Philadelphia Inquirer, 9-20-
The libraries have become my candy store. ~ Juliana Kimball ~
The library is a place where you can better your life. And the librarian? Like an angel, wings pressed like white ferns under her sweater. A being close to God. (Johnston, Tony. Any Small Goodness - a Novel of the Barrio. New York: The Blue Sky Press, 2001)
The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world. ~~Rita Dove
The library is cool! Anonymous
The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history. Carl Rowan
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. -Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher (1889-1951)
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. -- Mark Twain
The man who enters a library is in the best society this world affords; the good and the great welcome him, surround him, and humbly ask to be allowed to become his servants.- Andrew Carnegie
The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing. Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

The newest books are those that never grown old. --George Holbrook Jackson

The one who dies with the most books wins.
The part of my education that has had the deepest influence wasn't any particular essay or even a specific class; it was how I was able to apply everything I learned in the library to certain situations in my life. ---Gloria Estefan
The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books. Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior
jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. --Walter Benjamin

The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone. -Ashley Montagu, anthropologist and writer (19-1999)
The Public Library feels more public to me than anywhere else I can think of. The diversity of patrons is amazing, and all of them seem to be thrilled to have the library as a community resource. ~~David McCullough
The public library is more than a repository of books. It's a mysterious, wondrous place with the power to change lives. Chicago Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor
The reader cannot create; that has been done for him by the author. The reader can only interpret, giving the author a fair chance to make his impression. Robertson Davies (1913-1995)

The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them; nay, a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts. Rene Descartes
The richest person in the world. In fact all the riches in the world couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library. You can measure the awareness, the breadth and the wisdom of a civilization, a nation, a people, by the priority given to preserving these repositories of all that we are, all that we were, or will be. ~~Malcolm Forbes
The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind. - Kahlil Gibran
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it. Elizabeth Drew
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read. ~ Abraham Lincoln
The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness. Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948)

The Vigo County Public Library is easy to find. It's the million-story building at Seventh and Poplar streets. (Lori Henson in her Briefcases column, Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 10/8/02)
The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards. -Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)
The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers. Stan Barstow

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. -Clarence Day, writer, (1874-1935)
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts. (Charles Dickens)
There are great numbers of people to whom the act of reading a book -- any sort of book -- is wondrous; they speak of the reader in the tone of warm approbation which they use otherwise when referring to pregnant women, or the newly dead. --Robertson Davies (1913-1995)

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. (Willa Cather: O Pioneers!pt. II, Ch. 4)

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself. Mark Twain
There are those who ask, What about teachers who never use the library? Remember, the poor will always be with us. -- Ken Haycock
There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it. Bertrand Russell
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. ~ Joseph Brodsky ~
There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing. Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848)

There is creative reading as well as creative writing. Ralph Waldo Emerson (18-1882)

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's look on Treasure Island. --Walt Disney

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main ... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life. Walt Disney
There is no substitute for books in the life of a child. ~ Mary Ellen Chase
There is no thief like a bad book. Italian Proverb
There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration. ~~Andrew Carnegie
There is something about that moment, when literature becomes accessible, and a door of the world opens. - Lois Lowry
There's a world of information at your local library, Ray. -- Benton Frasier, DUE SOUTH
They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library. ---Terry Pratchet
This library has something offensive to everyone. If you are not offended by something we have, please complain. -- Dorothy Broderick, YA librarian
Those who declared librarians obsolete when the Internet rage first appeared are now red-faced. We need them more than ever. The Internet is full of 'stuff' but its value and readability is often questionable. 'Stuff' doesn't give you a competitive edge, high-quality related information does. ~~Patricia Schroeder, Association of American Publishers President
Those who don’t read have no advantage over those who can’t – Mark Twain
Time spent reading, like time spent loving, increases our lifetime. Daniel Pennac
'Tis the good reader that makes the good book. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life. W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

To be educated in any true sense of the word, [ a person] must use the library, and master the experiences of mankind. -- William T. Harris, 1893
To be involved with books is to live at the heart of light. ~Mary Cantwell
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. Gaston Bachelard

To look around at a roomful of readers, each bent over a book, was to realize that this posture is among the most beautiful of human transfigurations. Editorial, NEW YORK TIMES, 11/16/98 ~
To my thinking, a great librarian must have a clear head, a strong hand, and above all, a great heart . . . and I am inclined to think that most of the men who achieve this greatness will be women. - Melvil Dewey
To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one. --- Chinese saying
To read is to empower, to empower is to write, to write is to influence, to influence is to change, to change is to live. ~ Jane Evershed
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. -Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)
To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations--such is a pleasure beyond compare. -Kenko Yoshida, essayist (1283-1352)
To those with ears to hear, libraries are really very noisy places. On their shelves we hear the captured voices of the centuries-old conversation that makes up our civilization. -- Timothy Healy
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. ~ W. Fusselman
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. Harper Lee (b.1926)

Vita sine literis mors est.
Walls cannot embrace a library. It is more than a place, more than books and films and records, more even than the people who make it work. Basically a library is a gathering of ideas, of information - put in order and shared. And, the sharing is the whole point of a library. Comptons Encyclopedia, 1986
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages. Ralph Waldo Emerson
We do not state these propositions in the comfortable belief that what people read is unimportant. we believe rather that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours. -from the american library association's freedom to read statement www.ala.org
We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. ~Philip Pullman
We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them. Abigail Adams
We must not think of learning as only what happens in schools. It is an extended part of life. The most readily available resource for all of life is our public library system. ~~David McCullough
We read to know we are not alone. ~ C.S. Lewis
We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate. --Henry Miller (1891-1980)

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. B. F. Skinner (19-1990)

Wear the old coat and buy the new book. - Austin Phelps
Well, all I know is what I read in the papers. Will Rogers

We're Marines. We improvise, we adapt, we overcome. And we read.
What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.
~ Harold Howe ~ Professor Emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a former U.S. Commissioner of Education
What can I say? Librarians rule! ~ Regis Philbin
What greater gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth?
What happens when we fail to read? Well, we know the answer: the mind remains enslaved to ignorance. The great thoughts of the past are undiscovered. Our horizons remain fixed, limited, surrounded by unknown territory. Our imagination is unengaged. Life itself remains narrow and possibilities remain diminished. And we don't have as much fun, because reading is so pleasurable. --- U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, in his remarks announcing an Improving Literacy Through School Libraries grant from the Education Department to Detroit Public Schools, 11, 20.
What in the world would we do without our libraries? ~~Katharine Hepburn
What is more important in a library than anything else than everything else is the fact that it exists. ~~Archibald MacLeish
What is read with delight is commonly retained, because pleasure always secures attention; but the books which are consulted by occasional necessity, and perused with impatience, seldom leave any traces on the mind... Books that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand are the most useful, after all... such books form the mass of general and easy reading.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

What is reading, but silent conversation. Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)

What is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations? Lewis Carroll
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. Samuel Johnson
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. -J.D. Salinger, writer (1919- )
Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation. - Walter Cronkite, Newscaster (1916 - )
When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. - African Proverb
When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes. Desiderius Erasmus 1466-1536

When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began. ~ Rita Mae Brown ~
When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it. - Dodie Smith, _I Capture the Castle
When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it. Marie de Sevigne, O Magazine, 20
When I was a child, I walked into the Birmingham, Ala., Public Library and it seemed to me to be the most beautiful place in the world. It opened my eyes to all the wonderful people and places that had been written about in books throughout the ages. I never could have dreamed that one day three of my books would be sitting in the same bookcases. -- Fannie Flagg
When I was in graduate school, one of my professors referred to Librarians as the tribal elders of modern society. I quite agree. Dr. Gregorian, who is now working for the Carnegie Corporation, spoke at the Whte House Conference on School Libraries on 4, 2002. Two quotes I love from that speech are: ...reading and writing are not merely cosmetic skills comparable to good manners. Literacy, reading and writing are the essence of thinking. School libraries constitute an indispensable introduction to literacy and learning about the world and the universe. They are pathways to self discovery. They are instruments for progress and autonomy.
When I'm home, I read to my sons every night in the hope that they'll grow up to love books as much as I do. — Tony Hawk
When in doubt, go to the library. Kate Charles, A Drink of Deadly Wine (1992), p.116
When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian. -Best Foot Forward by Joan Bauer
When we build a public library, we don't have to pay to get in, but when we build a stadium, we have to pay the owner every time we go to a game. Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura
When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings. Harold S. Geneen (1910-1997)

When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. - Christopher Morley
When you're young you learn how to read. When you get older you read to learn. School libraries are a great place to do that. Nancy Matz (Tulare Union High School Library Media Teacher) quoted in Tulare Advance Register 9/8/05
Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

Wicked people never have time for reading, Dewey said. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness. - Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril (20)
Willow: Gee, maybe we should help Giles. He might be in danger. Xander: Nah, he's like Super Librarian. People forget, Willow, that knowledge is the ultimate weapon. _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_
Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print. -Arthur Schopenhauer , philosopher (1788-1860)
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future. ~ Ray Bradbury
Without the ability to read and argue we're just geese to be plucked. John Taylor Gatto, Eyeless in Gaza
Word of the day: bibliophile: a person who collects or is fond of books.
Words are the voice of the heart. ~ Confucius
Write, read, do. Jean Craighead George
Yeah, I'm a thrill seeker, but crikey, education's the most important thing. Steve Irwin
You are the window through which you must see the world. -Laura Ingalls Wilder

You are the window through which you must see the world. -Laura Ingalls Wilder

You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them. - Maurice Sendak
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. Ray Bradbury (b.1920)

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel as if you've lost a friend. -Paul Sweeney
You may perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very well worthwhile to be tormented for two or three years of one's life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818)
You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library every day of your life. Author Ray Bradbury
You see, I don't believe that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, and that's been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians. -- Monty Python
You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive. -James Baldwin, writer (1924-1987)
You, as librarians, stand at the door beyond which this infinity resides As the 19th century French writer Victor Hugo said: A library implies an act of faith. You are the keepers of that faith. ~~Rita Dove
You've really got to start hitting the books, because it's no joke out here. ~ Spike Lee


POEMS

For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.
Boston Athenaeum Amy Lowell


All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Sword Blades and Poppy Seed Amy Lowell

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away.
Emily Dickinson

Here is where people,
One frequently finds,
Lower their voices
And raise their minds.
- Richard Armour, Library

I've traveled the world twice over,
Met the famous; saints and sinners,
Poets and artists, kings and queens,
Old stars and hopeful beginners,
I've been where no-one's been before,
Learned secrets from writers and cooks
All with one library ticket
To the wonderful world of books.
~ Anonymous ~

The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
-- Charles Simic


I read because one life isn't enough, and in the pages of a book, I can be anybody.
I read because the words that build the story become mine, to build my life.
I read not for happy endings, but for new beginnings; I'm just beginning myself, and I wouldn't mind a map.
I read because I have friends who don't and young though they are, they're beginning to run out of material.
I read because every journey begins at the library, and it's time for me to start packing.
I read because one of these days I'm going to get out of this town, and I'm going to go everywhere and meet everybody - and I want to be ready. Richard Peck in the voice of a child


The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books
- Longfellow

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky.
My pile of books
Are a mile high.
How I love them!
How I need them!
I'll have a long beard
By the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel ~


The more that you read,
the more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
the more places you'll go.
~ Dr. Seuss ~


Library: Here is where people,
One frequently finds,
lower their voices
and raise their minds.
Richard Armour


Q: How many librarians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A#1: I don’t know, but I’ll look it up.
A32: 643.7

S.R. Ranganathan's Five Laws (alternately, Principles) of Library Science:
1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader his or her book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.

This might be from Pennac's Reader's Bill of Rights.
http://goes.acs.ac/Library/Readerrights.htm
Daniel Pennac's
The Reader's Bill of Rights
1. The right not to read.
2. The right to skip pages.
3. The right to not finish.
4. The right to reread.
5. The right to read anything.
6. The right to escapism.
7. The right to read anywhere.
8. The right to browse.
9. The right to read out loud.
10. The right to not defend your tastes.


Ranganathan’s Five Laws
Books are for use.
Books are for all, or every reader his book.
Every book its reader.
Save the time of the reader (make books easily accessible).


I have a few gathered together at: http://www.asla.nsw.edu.au/quotes.htm

Reading Quotes
http://www.richmond.k12.va.us/readamillion/readingquotes.htm

http://www.useful-information.info/quotations/library_quotes.html

Lots of quotes:

http://www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_books.html
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/books.html
http://www.ssdesign.com/librarypr/past.html for a variety of ideas by
theme.

Library quotes

I am copying below a list of library quotations I have compiled over the years. While this is not directly related to School Library Learning, I received a request from Jackie Siminitus, one of the creators of the program, to post them on my blog. Feel free to enjoy them.

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
-William James

Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.
-S.J. Perelman

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past.
-Amy Lowell

Technology: opening minds with a new set of keys.
-Anonymous

The books that help you most are those which make you think the most.
-Theodore Parker

The newest books are those that never grow old.
-George Holbrook Jackson

Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.
-George Savile

The end of reading is not more books but more life.
-Holbrook Jackson

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
-Henry Adams

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
-Thomas Jefferson

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
-Stephen Vincent Benet

Education is what you get when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get when you don’t.
-Pete Seeger

A book is a most delightful companion. It gives, and does not take.
-Moses Ibn Ezra

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
-Henry Ward Beecher

Without education, you are not going anywhere in this world.
-Malcolm X

Everything you need for a better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.
-Jim Rohn

The librarian’s recipe for long life: keep breathing.
-The Frugal Librarian

Books have the power to make time stand still, retreat, or fly into the future.
-Jim Bishop

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
-Harper Lee

Man is what he reads.
-Joseph Brodsky

He that loves reading, has everything within his reach.
-William Godwin

Every book must be chewed to get out its juice.
-Chinese Proverb

The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.
-Mary McLeod Bethune

Books are the door of escape from the forest.
-E.B. White

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all the time.
-John Ruskin

What you don’t know would make a great book.
-Sydney Smith

What is reading, but silent conversation.
-Walter Savage Landor


Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
-W. Fusselman

Freedom of the press only has real meaning if people know how to read.
-The Frugal Librarian

You don’t have to burn the books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
-Ray Bradbury

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests: just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

As I read, my ears are opened to the magic of the spoken word.
-Richard Wright

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
-Cicero

If I couldn’t read, I couldn’t live.
-Thelma Green

Books are humanity in print.
-Barbara Tuchman

A book may be compared to a neighbor; if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.
-Rupert Brooke

That is a good bookwhich is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.
-A. Bronson Alcott


Books are quiet. They do not dissolve into wavy lines or snowstorm effects. They do not pause to deliver commercials. They are three-dimensional, having length, breadth and depth. They are convenient to handle and completely portable.
-Anonymous

If the riches of the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdoms in Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.
_Francois Fenelon

Some books are to be tasted; others swallowed; and some to be chewed and digested.
-Francis Bacon

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
-Lady Mary Montague

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
-Joseph Brodsky

What better book can there be than the book of humanity.
-Mohandas Gandhi

There are three basic rules about library research; unfortunately, no one remembers what they are.
-The Frugal Library

A real book is not the one that we read, but that read us.
_W.H. Auden

The man ho does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
-Mark Twain

In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.
-H.L. Mencken

Books are not made for furniture. But there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes the home.
-Henry Ward Beecher

I am a part of everything that I have read.
-John Kieran

Doctors bury their mistakes. Lawyers hang them. Librarians put theirs on the book sale shelf.
-The Frugal Librarian

Our concern for the future can be tested by how well we support our libraries.
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
-Elizabeth Hardwick

When the sun rises, nature wakes up; when a book is read, the mind is enlightened.
-Mongolian Saying

The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts: monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again and yet live on.
-Clarence Day

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine-everybody drinks water.
-Mark Twain

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books.
-Thomas Carlyle

Read in order to live.
-Gustave Flaubert

A library is thought in cold storage.
-Herbert Samuel

A library is a hospital for the mind.
-Anonymous

I think it is good that books still exist, but they make me sleepy.
-Frank Zappa

We are what we read.
-Richard Saul Wurman

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
-Mortimer J. Adler

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
-Edmund Burke

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
-W. Somerset Maugham

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
-Barbara Tuchman

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.
-William Styron

Librarian is a service occupation ... gas station attendant to the mind.
- Richard Powers

Week 8, #19

After much anticipation, and forcing myself to carry out all the previous activities in order, I now have a LibraryThing account! What fun! Long before personal computers were invented, I went to a session on booktalking given by Joni Bodart at a California school library conference. One of the pointers she gave was to keep a written file of all the books you've read, with either your booktalk itself or enough detail to enable you to give an enticing booktalk to students. She told us that no matter how much you love a book, time and more books in your brain will be obstacles to your memory. Over the more than 25 years since I got that advice, I have filled old catalog drawers with the summaries of the books I've read, written on the backs of discarded catalog cards. I include call number, author, title, which library has the book, the month and date I read it and enough of a summary to help me give an effective book talk. Of course, since this file is pre-computer, there are no tags to help me find mysteries, "boy" books or any other category. Also, since my librarian brain decided to file by author, sometimes I have to search in the catalog to find the author of a book for which I can recall only the title. LibraryThing complements my file perfectly, but the best part is it connects me to others who have read the books I've read!
To start my file, I put in books I've already read, beginning with the book I just finished and loved, Honey, baby, sweetheart, by Deb Caletti. While I was reading it I drove everyone around me (usually my husband) crazy by laughing out loud often. Although there is some serious subject matter, the author's descriptions and tossed-off lines are little jewels. I also put in several other books that stick in my memory, since I'm writing from home and my "books read" file is at work. While some of my books are on other LibraryThing folks' lists, two nonfiction titles I included, The Hot zone and A Shining season, are not on anyone else's lists. Hmm, wonder what that means? My LibraryThing account name is elliege.
I also have an excel spreadsheet on my computer at work with books I want to read. In addition to author, title and call number, I have categories like World Lit, Easy reading, etc. I have a column to enter the month and date after I've read the book, so I can see what progress I'm making in reading it all. I can see importing this into my Zoho Writer account, created in a previous activity, so I can access it from any computer. I can also add these titles to my LibraryThing account with a "to read" tag, and find other readers who have already read them. When I took the LibraryThing tour, I learned that the limit for a free account is 200 books. That will force a decision as to whether I delete titles, or just go for broke by continuing to add and become a paid subscriber. I'd be interesting in hearing from others about what they decided to do when they got to the limit.....

Week 8, #18

As I explore Zoho Writer, I have looked at the templates in particular. There are 5 resume templates available, designed for specific jobs in business. One, called Fresher, can be adapted for high school students to use either as part of a class assignment or when they are independently searching for a job. This feature is very useful, since the 4 resume templates that used to be on Word seem to have disappeared. Some of the other templates will be useful for a school: student homework schedule, student progress report and multiple choice test. I like the toolbar at the top of the writing screen, mentioned in the site introduction, that includes all the options, without having to select them under View.

The chief advantage of using Zoho Writer at my school will be to eliminate the problem students encounter when they create documents away from school using a different word processing software than our school uses. Since we have migrated away from students using floppy disks to carry their work to and from school, more of them are either using flash drives or email attachments to make their work portable. Even with their comfort at using computers to write their work (Do any of them even know what a typewriter is?), most do not realize the problems they will encounter when trying to open a document created in a different program than the one at school. At least several times a day I help students whose work looks like "Martian writing" at school when it was completely readable on the computer where it was written. Instituting a web-based application like Zoho writer would help eliminate these glitches. However, success depends on students having access to the internet away from school, which not all of our students have at their homes. So, while web-based applications eliminate the disconnect between various word processing programs, they do not level the playing field for those students whose home computer access, if any, may be limited to word processing only, without a printer and web access. They will still have to find internet-connected computers, such as those at the public libraries or a friend's house, but will be unable to write papers online in the middle of the night, a student tradition!
Another smaller glitch is that I read through the FAQ section, and discovered that Safari, one of the internet browsers on our school library computers, does not support Zoho Writer now in the beta version. We do have Firefox available for students in the library and it is supported by Zoho Writer, but this means students must be attentive to which browser they are using if they want to create accounts in Zoho Writer.
I also looked at the spreadsheet, presentation, meeting and other options available. I can see uses for the meeting option in particular at a school, sending the agenda and time specifics ahead of time without using any paper! Another way to be green!