Tag: library

Reader-in-Residence article in SCAN Magazine

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Parkes High School’s teacher librarian Tracy Dawson has an article in the latest SCAN magazine about the Reader-in-Residence role which I held in Parkes across late 2013 and early 2014.

The role was designed to link the school and wider community in a celebration of storytelling, literacy, and culture in all its forms. Events included teen publishing workshops, our biggest ever zombie roleplay, urban myth writing, and the inaugural Central West Comics Fest, which will be returning in 2015. I also mentored high school students, led sessions for the Parkes writers’ group, and worked with the school’s special needs unit.

Tracy gives a teacher’s perspective on how trying new things, pushing boundaries, and reaching out to a wider community also yielded great benefits to students at the high school. You can also read her guest posts on this site about Auckland’s XXUnmasked project and the work of a teacher librarian.

SCAN magazine is a refereed journal published by the New South Wales Department of Education, focussed “on the interaction between information in a digital age and effective student learning.” You have to subscribe for recent issues, but the archive is publicly available – I’ll let readers know when the current issue moves into the free archive.

Parkes Library Roundup

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My friends and clients at Parkes Library are having a big week on the Internet. I’ve collected some of the various links in this blog post.

Our “Tabletop Superheroes” game devised for October’s Fun Palaces weekend is now available for free download. A remix of Cory Doctorow’s article ‘DMing for your toddler’, it was featured by Cory on BoingBoing. There’s also a blog post about the game at the State Library of New South Wales website.

Over at Library as Incubator, you can read Tracie Mauro and Shellie Buckle’s account of running Australia’s first ever Fun Palace.

Meanwhile at Zoe Toft’s Playing By The Book site, Tracie is interviewed by Zoe about the “Wonder-based library programmes” she creates for children and families. Tracie explains how you can create similar activities at home, school, or your own local library.

The Parkes Library team
This image is licensed by Parkes Shire Library under a CC 4.0 BY-NC-ND licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

The Parkes team are among the most daring and resourceful librarians I’ve ever worked with – no project daunts them, from live action zombies to wading through chocolate pudding swamps. Stay tuned, because there’s much more to come from these amazing Australians.

Library Journal on Play For Grown-Ups: Dark Night Burlesque at Auckland Libraries

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Dark Night at Auckland Libraries
Image by Dylan Horrocks

Over in the US, Library Journal has just published my piece on last year’s Dark Night burlesque season at Auckland Libraries in New Zealand.

The festival for over-18s aimed to “question, celebrate, and challenge sex and sexuality on page, stage, and screen” – and it led to exciting new projects such as this year’s award-winning XXUnmasked media literacy event.

You can read more about Dark Night in my original post from 2013 and there’s a few words on the season from American library maven Heather McCormack over at her blog, too.

Show Me the Awesome: Immersive play in the 21st century library

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Show Me the Awesome Banner by John LeMasney at lemasney.com.
Banner by John LeMasney at lemasney.com.

Hello! Some of you visiting today will be regular readers of this blog; others may be here as part of Show Me the Awesome: 30 Days of Self-Promotion for libraries and librarians, a great project to help librarians around the world to celebrate their work.

So if you don’t know me, this is the Big Secret: I’m not actually a librarian myself, but currently an adviser to Auckland Libraries, the largest public library system in Australasia. (My wayward career is best described on my ‘About Me’ page). I make up fun stuff for people to do in public spaces, and so today I’m writing about immersive play in libraries. By ‘immersive play’ I mean activities which physically draw your library patrons into the world of a book, artwork, or other piece of media – whether through craft, gaming, roleplay, or content creation.

The big revelation for me came when running a workshop to decide the future of Auckland’s collections management policy – not, frankly, the sexiest task in a public library service, but most rewarding in the long run. Not just because we had a cathartic Nerf gun shoot out as part of the activity, but because I discovered the UN’s Missions of the Public Library.

(I go on a lot about this document, but it’s something really worth hammering home).

The mission statement doesn’t even use the word “books”. It talks about reading, sure – but this is not a manifesto for shelves. Instead, the focus is on activities like stimulating imagination and creativity, providing access to cultural expressions of all performing arts, supporting the oral tradition, and providing opportunities for personal creative development.

That’s an especially big deal in New Zealand, where a lot of the discussion about future branding of libraries revolves around their historic association with books. Wherever you are in the world, that “libraries = books” equation comes up a lot, especially when libraries’ enemies want to imply that they are outdated and can be supplanted by digital means, as happened in the Huffington Post last week.

So, how do we bring those missions of creativity, play, independent learning, and performance to life while remaining true to libraries’ heritage of literacy and reading? Let’s see if we can do it in six bullet points… Read more →

Zombies at Tupu Library, South Auckland

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Auckland Libraries' Anne Dickson in zombie makeup
Auckland Libraries’ Anne Dickson led teen zombie hordes against a group of survivors in Tupu Youth Library

Last Friday in Tupu Youth Library, South Auckland, I ran an interactive live-action zombie event for teens on their school holidays.

The ‘survivors’, aged from 12 to 18, found themselves besieged in a meeting room while zombies feasted on hapless victims outside. Teens made barricades from furniture, used library resources to plan their escape from South Auckland, and faced special challenges including detecting potential zombie victims and even wrestling with a zombified police officer!

See the Tupu Zombies on New Zealand’s TV3 News and find more coverage at New Zealand’s Stuff.co.nz website.