The deposit checks are in the mail but the college buzz is buzzier than ever.

Having survived the arduous college admissions process, our seniors are now taking full advantage of their opportunities to negotiate the social landcape of their newly selected school well before they land on campus in late August.  

They are so much luckier than we were.

The social networks they know and love allow them  to explore and participate in new academic and social communities. Between now and fall semester, students can build new support networks and new friendships.

VergePipe Media offers some context for the students leaving us next month—a timeline for the Class of 2017 (also known as the  mobile millennials).

Born in 1995, they do not remember a world without social media.

3 years old – Google changes the way we search the web.

4 years old – Netflix begins digitally delivering movies and TV shows.

6 years old – The iPod hits the market and changes the way the world listened to music.

8 years old – Tom launches Myspace, and social media begins the climb to world domination.7 years old – American Idol airs and “live voting” by mobile device becomes mainstream.

9 years old – The first episode of Lost hits the airwaves. Facebook is born.

10 years old – Youtube adds a whole new element to searching the web.

11 years old – Twitter – and 140 characters – becomes popular. Toms Shoes launches the One for One Campaign.

12 years old – The iPhone took the world by storm.

(For more, also see the Beloit College Class of 2016 Mindset List.  2017 should be out in August.)

Here’s a list of what I’ve been observing and also what I’ve been suggesting regarding getting ready for fall.  

The Class of 2017 Facebook page/group;  It’s natural to want to chat with people facing the same anxiety, excitement, and experiences you face.  For the Class of 2017,  class culture is already developing and thriving on the Class or 2017 Facebook pages most universities now initiate.  It’s likely seniors have been invited to join their college’s Facebook group for admitted students where they are asking questions and meeting each other and . . .

Stalking a roommate: At this point seniors may not have an official roommate assignment, but they are are shopping for a roommate who shares their interests and perspectives.  Though the contact is often first made on Facebook, the conversation often continues via Twitter, Skype, and Google Hangouts.  And so, the nightmare  experience I had with my first college roommate (Cindy!)  should be far less common these days.

Who’s bringing what: Once students have selected a roommate, they use social media to make those crucial decisions about who’s bringing what.

Note: Students should be aware that how they post kinda matters in this particular landscape.  The  Accepted 2017 blog catalogs the crazy s*&t people say in college admissions Facebook groups.  

For instance, one NYU student wrote: I already hate half of you. There are likely better opening lines.  Students have a large new audience in this new space and there  seems to be a lot of snarky judging going on, so it might be good not to overshare till you test the water.

Stalking boys/girsl in the freshman class.  Enough said.

Staying in touch: When they say goodbye at graduation, this class of seniors know they will easily be able to keep in touch with their friends  via  Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Hangouts and text.

Following the Twitter stream: The Twitter hashtag #incomingfreshmanadvice, is a mixed bag of high school and college freshman  advice.  Combining #classof2017 with a hashtag for a university  may also reveal a conversation.

Decorating the dorm room: For the past couple of weeks I’ve watched as Jelli and her new roommates scanned Pinterest for space-saving and adorable decorating ideas to include on their own highly selective board. Searching dorms, decorating, college, etc. reveals boards like Residential Life and Dorm Room Trends and fabulous visual inspiration.  This is such a far cry from a time when Emily and I were thrilled to discover those plastic bed risers that increased under-the-bed storage space.  Moms and dads will asl find this helpful in shopping expeditions this summer.

(BTW, Manchester University seems to be a leader in college pinning, with boards that embody our spirit and traditions, as well as fun and interesting finds and original content! )

Colleges apps may be very handy downloads.  They often provide directions; class, bus, and sports schedules; meal plan systems; and guides to campus activities.

Read the newspaper: Even before they arrive on campus, the incoming class can get a sense of the social, cultural, political and academic scene–what they want to join and do and avoid–by reading the online version of the campus paper. 

Visit the library:  Okay, my students are not really buzzing about this, but I am.  Each year I try to get time to have students explore their university library’s interface in class.  I want my students to get familiar with that library website, and its possible apps and interactive resources, as well as the virtual and face-to-face voice of a librarian, before they hit a research crisis.

I want them to discover that their new library will also be accessible through the very same tools they use to connect with the other parts of their lives.

A relic of a time when reading lists looked like, well, reading lists.

Today, two things woke me up.

1. Finished with her AP exam, Sierra asked me for a book recommendation.  I excitedly booktalked Libba Bray’s The Diviners.  Without responding to my jumping-up-and-down excitement, Sierra whipped out her mobile.  She calmly scanned the barcode of the book I held in my hands to see if the GoodReads community agreed with my assessment.  They did.  And after examining ratings, reviews, images and quotes, Sierra decided to take the book.

2. I happened upon the media-rich, interactive Choices Summer Reading list created by Elissa Malespina, the teacher librarian at South Orange (NJ) Middle School. It offers the usual–suggestions for fiction, nonfiction, classics, graphic novels along with her students’ summer reading assignments.

But developed on Apple’s iBooks Authors,  and hosted on the Bookry platform, Choices feels more like one of those cool magazine apps I read on my iPad than a list.

It was definitely nonsnooze.  And it was far more suited to a student like Sierra, than what I called a reading list.

I got over my jealousy, contacted Elissa and chatted with her about how she moved her summer reading list beyond listiness.

I wanted students and parents to realize just how great these books are.  It is my one of my primary jobs as a librarian to make reading fun and exciting for my students.  My hope was that this interactive summer reading would help to make that happen.

The early history of the list, formerly a Word Doc, is familiar.

I’ll bet there are hundreds of new ways to build it, to connect it, to make it live.  I picture posters with QR codes on bulletin boards all over our communities leading parents and kids to our recommended reads.

So, are you proud of your list?   Do you have new summer strategies?  Does your list speak to readers like Sierra?

Please lead us to more new models of effective practice.  And please share how you are reinventing the summer reading list in Comments!

From South Orange Middle School’s Choices Summer Reading

From South Orange Middle School’s Choices Summer Reading

Choices Summer Reading on Bookry

I am a big fan of the unconference/edcamp movements and of open space planning.    

And though I’ve personally been lucky to attend a number of local, regional, and national edcamps and unconfs, I’ve wanted to share my excitement about these participant-driven events with my TL colleagues in Pennsylvania.  Our traditional PSLA state conference is pretty darn fabulous, but I’ve long wondered if we could make it a little more open, spontaneous, inclusive.  

Turns out, the stars aligned.  Everyone was totally willing to experiment.

What we accomplished in PA is replicable, totally.

It didn’t take long to form a team.

My colleagues at Mansfield University School Library & Information Technologies Online Program immediately jumped at the opportunity to sponsor and participate. Program Director Cindy Keller and instructor Stephanie Brame and I formed the core planning team. PSLA Tech Committee co-chairs Karen Hornberger and Mary Schwander joined the team enthusiastically.

The PSLA leadership, President Eileen Kern and Vice President/President Elect Michael Nailor found us late-night time –two hours after the final Thursday night session.

We started with the Unconference poster. My student interns–Jordi and Amber–developed the branding.

Stephanie took over marketing.

Vendor friends from Gale, Shmoop, Apple, Abrams and Son, and Follett helped with prizes. The Health Sciences Libraries Consortium helped fund refreshments.

With only two hours, rather than a full day, we had to condense our little Unconference to present a valuable mini-experience that served as a proof-of-concept.

We divided the event into four main sections. The Unconference Wiki, shares our behind-the-scenes planning, but roughly, the two-hour session actually looked like this (with door prizes distributed throughout)

• Cindy’s welcome
• Joyce’s introduction to the philosophy of participant-driven professional development
• Stephanie read the Smackdown rules
• strand of seven participant-driven conversations
• stinks/rocks mini-debate session on TL issues
• strand of seven participant-driven conversations
• culminating Smackdown
• solicitation of biggest takeaways from the participants

We heard from new voices, from shy voices, from voices who would never have completed a proposal a year in advance, but were eager to share a new tool or instructional strategy or discuss an issue.  Discussion was lively.  Everyone seemed engaged.  The feedback was fabulous.

Our little team has not yet debriefed, but we’re already planning for next year.

I’d love to add an ignite or Pecha Kucha session, and possible introduce some new conversation protocols.

Next time around I will actually promote the Padlet wall we set up for a back channel.  We’ll make sure the topics for the conference are available online as well as on our wall chart.

We will suggest that some conversations move chairs out into the lobby to cut down on the noise in our large room, although the noise was a clear sign that we were doing something right.

Here’s what it looked like.

MU Unconference team

Marketing wiz, Stephanie Brame

Encouraging convo sign-ups

Deb copies topics/locations to announce

Does ditching Dewey stink or rock?

Stinks/Rocks argument

One of the many lively conversations

(Photos by Sara Kelly Johns)

Frankly, our password sheet has always been a royal pain.

I’ve long been in search of an authentication solution–a relatively barrier-free strategy for out-of-school database access.

For Mackin customers, MackinVia creates a single hub for e-books and database content–a one-user ID and password to your database collection (and your MackinVia ebooks) accessible from any internet-connected device–desktop, laptop, phone, tablet.

A free, password-protected MackinVIA app is available for download.

I am a very new customer, with a rather meager collection of e-books, and I am grateful that my new friends at Mackin are working so hard to make authentications work across our significant database collection.

We’re nearly there.  And we are beginning to roll the app out with our classes.

The general student reaction, “It’s about time, Dr. V!”

I agree.

Many thanks to Brandon, Gabe, Lucas, and Max graciously volunteered to create the video to introduce the Mackin app on Morning News. (We used Mozilla Popcorn Maker to add a few extras to this informal video.)

As for e-book purchasing going forward, this is a business/service strategy that works. I am truly impressed with the team’s dedicated effort to get me set up. I like Mackin’s focus on unlimited, simultaneous e-book access and that I can easily import new materials into Destiny.  (BTW, Destiny is one of those authentications on our MackinVia app.)

Here’s a closer look:

user authentication screen

This is Part II in my search for more accessible solutions and maximizing use.

Coming soon, in Part III, I’ll be trialing another step toward more sensible access (though not a free one.)  In an upcoming post, I’ll explore EBSCO’s new Discovery Service, which promises a fast, streamlined, single-search-box approach to discovering our entire collection.

My notion of collection development and of cataloging were a little different back in the day.

I now consider digital resources–OER, images, videos, audio files, slideshows, documents, ebooks, maps, art, student work, data sets, interactivities, simulations, and especially the elements of the world’s richest museums and archives–intrinsic parts of my collection.

I may not own them, but I use them.  And I want them discoverable and openable directly from the tool I purchased for discovery and access–my OPAC.

Until recently, my OPAC just hasn’t been all that gracious a host.  It’s been a bit open-content shy.

I’ve longed preferred my pathfinders and LibGuides as easy containers for collecting and curating and integrating open content into our instructional program.  They were so flexible and never asked me to make a MARC record.

The Digital Libraries to School Libraries (DL2SL) project, with its continually evolving Web2MARC tool, is a game changer.

The project’s goal is to

explore ways in which school librarians can use DL [digital library] open content to expand and enrich the school library’s resource base and instructional support. This project uses the newest web-based technologies to help school librarians identify DL open content, integrate open content metadata into their OPACs, and help use open content for learning.

It’s really silly, said Marcia Mardis, Assistant Professor and Associate Director, The PALM Center and the iSchool@The Florida State University and project leader:

Why aren’t we leveraging this really expensive piece of software sitting in our libraries?

First released in beta in early 2010, the Web2MARC tool was developed for people (like me) who are not especially comfortable cataloging.

Marcia shares: It gets you through the basics and scaffolds the tailoring of MARC records for open content.

Beginning with a URL, librarians can easily create downloadable MARC records. The tool scrapes any useful data. Registered users may save and edit the resulting records, download them individually or as a batch.

But wait, there’s more.

Web2MARC also offers pull-down menus of Dewey numbers (at the three-number level), autofill suggestions of LC subject headings, and Common Core Standards at the grade band and the standards level.

And there’s more:

Web2MARC comes pre-populated with records from sources like: PBS LearningMedia.org, the National Science Foundation’s National Science Digital Library (NSDL), and Utah State University’s National Library of Virtual Manipulatives.

And there will be more:

On the top of the project’s priority list is the integration of indicators from the new Granular Identifiers and Metadata for the Common Core State Standards (GIM-CCSS).  These new options will make it even easier for us to connect the items in our OPACs to specific curriculum, instruction and assessment.

Other priorities include developing packages of records, with starter packages addressing the Common Core and a special scraper for the new Digital Public Library of America’s metadata.

Instructions for grabbing open content for Web2MARC

This video describes the project and the process in detail.

Marcia, shared her vision of how the DL2SL project highlights the value of the teacher librarian’s talents to the learning community and why the the Web2MARC tool is empowering:

You have to lead from your strength and for many school librarians, their strength is the collection they’ve carefully curated with high quality digital and physical resources that are directly linked to the curriculum and personal interest needs of the students in their schools. Each collection is unique. This is not generic knowledge or knowledge anyone else in the building has. 

 

If you’re trying to build a collaborative relationship, you have to have a clear idea of what you bring to the table. A history teacher with 20 years of experience brings 20 years of history teaching to the table. A school librarian with 20 years experience brings 20 years of intimate collection knowledge to the table. That’s a collaboration built on strengths that when combined are so much more than powerful than each on its own.

We are at a time now when the traditional textbook is being replaced with a digital textbook. Along with everything else they have to do, do teachers have the time and ability to find and assemble high quality OERs for each of their topics? I’d say no…school librarians have got to step into this mix. They are the only ones in the school who can. And I intend to give them tools that can help this mission.

And so, as our perennial Civil War novel credibility project looms at SHS, it seems even more urgent that we make a whole realm of resources more discoverable.

The plan is to grow our wimpy, little OPAC by grabbing full-text Google e-books (many primary sources) relevant to such topics as: Civil War medicine, prisons, generals, weapons, espionage, women, as well as documents from the Library of Congress, the National Archives and the National Parks Service.  To make it a far more hospitable container for the content we really should be able to own.

Inspired by and led by community founder, Steve Hargadon, with Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers) and Chris Dawson (ZDNet Education), the project’s official deadline for submissions was today, April 21st.

In their letter soliciting contributions, the team wrote:

You are or are becoming the experts, believe it or not. You’ve been working with these tools in the classroom, library, media center, your home, or other educational venues and we want other educators (and the world) to know about your experiences, your successes, your not-so-successes, and everything else that has mattered as you’ve used emerging technologies to inform or change teaching and learning in the education world. For all that is said about “21st century classrooms,” you are likely already leading the way in something you actually do. We hope you will consider sharing your expertise and practical ideas for using Web 2.0 and emerging technologies in education.

The 72 chapter are predominately weighted toward practice and the practical. Each chapter is posted and promoted as a stand-alone “white paper” available for free to download.  

The book combines the work of familiar bloggers and conference presenters with eloquent new voices.  The voices are a chorus of fabulous, sharable new ideas (all CC-licensed) designing to inspire learning.

These chapters–spanning professional roles, disciplines, grade levels, tools and strategies–present a wealth of new material to inspire professional development.

Share the right pieces of this anthology with the teachers and admins you love.

Screenshot of the Scribd document

Among them:  How can I get my students and teachers to discover and use our e-resources to the max?  What does face-out shelving look like in an e-collection?

We are fortunate, I know it, to have a wonderful collection of subscription databases and e-books. We also have a whole bunch of entry points to our collection.  Among them are two large silos–our growing network of LibGuides and our new Destiny catalog.

They link to each other.  The MARC records for our ebooks are now in the OPAC, but I still see missed opportunities for discovery and use.

Note: At this point, I’ve nearly given up on a workable, affordable federated search solution.

So, earlier in the school year, I had conversations with my student volunteers and we came up with a few strategies.  We’ll look at them in the next few posts.

First–the convenience of the one-page approach.

One thing about these library kids, my volunteers, they consider themselves sophisticated users.  While they rely on the subject and project-specific guides we develop (in fact, they help to develop them), they told me that they know which ones do what.  So sometimes, what they really want is a cheat sheet–a way to see their field of options on one handy page.

So I tasked them with figuring out how to create that one page.

Jordi, Amber, and Brandon shopped around the LibGuides Community for strategies.  They shopped for layouts and decided the best approach was a pull-down menu layout.  Then they shopped for code.

We got the direct urls for the individual databases from the vendors and publishers.  And then we connected the silos by embedding the whole page–with tabs for our subject and research guides–on the Destiny homepage.

Coming in the next post: Our MackinVia app.

One-page database summary

A detail from the preliminary model for the home page of the Digital Public Library of America’s website, to be available at http://dp.la/

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is one of those projects a librarian (and perhaps any other geeky type) dreams of.

We’ve been blessed over recent years with access to the resources of so many powerful digital archives.

But until now, these efforts existed as silos. We’ve had no  infrastructure to aggregate these wonderful collections–small and large–into one portal.  We’ve had no effective strategy for making the items in these collections–documents, photographs, art, maps, audio, video—easily discoverable, physically and ethically usable, online and free of charge.

Officially launching on April 18th at the Boston Public Library, with approximately 2.4 million records, the DPLA’s goal is to create a resource that goes well beyond providing simple access to digitized or born digital content.

In a New York Review of Books essay , Harvard University Librarian Robert Darnton expressed the DPLA vision:

The user-friendly interface will therefore enable any reader — say, a high school student in the Bronx — to consult works that used to be stored on inaccessible shelves or locked up in treasure rooms — say, pamphlets in the Huntington Library of Los Angeles about nullification and secession in the antebellum South. Readers will simply consult the DPLA through its URL, http://dp.la/. They will then be able to search records by entering a title or the name of an author, and they will be connected through the DPLA’s site to the book or other digital object at its home institution.

Among the project’s impressive founding library and museum partners, or Content Hubs, are Harvard University, the National Archives and Records Administration, ARTSTOR, the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Virginia Library, the Biodiversity Heritage Library.  A number of regional digital initiatives–like the Kentucky Digital Library or Massachusett’s Digital Commonwealth, will function as service hubs , or on-ramps for local museums and libraries.

The Sloan, Arcadia, Knight, and Soros Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services offered initial support.  Darton expects the project to grow organically as far as the budget and copyright laws permit.

There’s an idealism behind this great American project.  The DPLA initiative sees itself as an advocate for open access and enrichment of the public spheres, encouraging Americans to hack the humanities.

The About page offers a peek under the hood at the Elements of the DPLA:

In terms of code,

DPLA will make use of  existing free and open source code and all new code funded by DPLA will be free and open source.

In terms of metadata,

the DPLA will aggregate existing library data and create new data; it will operate as part of a global linked data environment. . . All metadata contributed to or funded by the DPLA will be placed in the public domain.

In terms of content,

the DPLA will incorporate all media types and formats including the written record—books, pamphlets, periodicals, manuscripts, and digital texts—and expanding into visual and audiovisual materials in concert with existing repositories. In order to lay a solid foundation for its collections, the DPLA will begin with works in the public domain that have already been digitized and are accessible through other initiatives. Further material will be added incrementally to this basic foundation, starting with orphan works and materials that are in copyright but out-of-print. The DPLA will also explore models for digital lending of in-copyright materials. . .

In terms of tools and services,

The DPLA will provide a number of tools and services designed to provide enhanced use of content. There will also be tools to facilitate digitization of and broad public access to content. The DPLA platform will be generative and open to public innovation to facilitate new discovery, encourage new kinds of questions, and enable the creation of new tools and services, including social sharing and networking services, research tools, and as-yet unforeseen applications. Tools and services funded by the DPLA will be made available in forms that enable their reuse and extension.

In terms of community,

The DPLA will be designed as a participatory platform that facilitates the involvement of the public in all aspects of its design, development, deployment, maintenance, and support. The DPLA will actively support the community of users and developers that want to reuse and extend its content, data, and metadata.

I spoke with Luis Herrera, a member of the DPLA Board of Directors and a former Texas school librarian.  He sees DPLA

as an opportunity to gather a huge and diverse array of resources together.  To combine the scholarly content at Harvard with the archives from a small town in Kansas.  To build bridges across the diversity of vast amounts of content and different material types.  All free to public, all through one platform.  

Users will search for and use content that include portraits and maps from the Smithsonian and photos from a neighborhood archive. We will support the digitizing of small collections and make them accessible to all.

What excites me, is that a student working on a project will now have access to news clips and digital photos about the freedom riders, daguerreotypes of the women’s suffrage in Kentucky, artifacts from the Minnesota Street Car Museum, audio from Utah relating to westward expansion–all public domain. 

And it’s going to gain momentum, as more folks get involved and more libraries and museums want their collections to be discovered. 

How can you replace those convenient gadgets, feeds, easily accessible bookmarks, useful tools, and pretty backgrounds?

Here are a few of the options for us and for our students.

A Chrome Startup page is a simple thumbnail solution.  I had no idea how many buttons; games; reference resources; study, teaching, and curation tools; utilities and themes were sitting around in the Chrome Store waiting for me to add them to my Chrome home.  After signing into Chrome with your Google login, search or browse for the sites you want to access, choose a theme, design a simple, personalized browser of thumbnails accessible on the cloud from any computer.

PortalPanel is a far more sophisticated approach. This new kid on the block, has a fresh, clean and attractive style based on three blocks or panels.  A top widgets block offers instant access to continually updating social networking sites and weather reports. The Bookmark folders, in the center, display links as thumbnails. Folders, on the bottom panel, allow you to create, categorized and save your bookmarked links. These may be password protected for privacy.  PortalPanel is also available for mobile.

The creators explain the vision:

Didn’t you get used to carrying around tens of books squeezed in one little eReader?  PortalPanel is to bookmarks what a Kindle is to eBooks! Bookmark, organize, and pull it up on demand!

Netvibes has been around since 2005, when it pioneered the first personalized dashboard publishing platform for the Web.  Used by millions, it continues as a strong contender if what you are after are dynamic widgets and RSS feeds, similar to iGoogle in the scope of options. (Before we subscribed to LibGuides, I used Netvibes as a free platform for our pathfinders.) Users may create multiple dashboards that may be either public or private, borrow from popular templates, and organize groups of tabs.  An iPad app is available.

Users search for widgets (recently renamed apps) in the huge Netvibes Ecosystem or may browse listings of Essential, Featured, or subject organized apps.

Netvibes Ecosystem

Protopage, similar to Netvibes, allows users to assemble a home page by selecting, dragging and dropping widgets and by setting up newsfeeds from a variety of categories and decorating with wallpaper, font, color, shadows, etc.  Pages may be either public or private.

Protopage

UStart, another customizable start page, offers a wizard to help you get started gathering widgets and feeds, assembling and customizing blocks with attractive themes, skins and colors.  The friendly wizard will also help you import feeds from your Google Reader page, iGoogle or Netvibes.

MyFav.es allows users to create very simple launch pages in no time flat with options for layout, background style, and icons. Optional registration gives you your own custom URL.   Gather sites from the provided lists or add your own personal faves.

Here’s a 30-second description:

I was familiar with the AllMyFaves’ (no apparent relation) matrix of search tools but unaware that I could create my own Mini Faves page on top of the matrix.  Pages may be edited, sorted and shared.  AllMyFaves is also available as a mobile browser app.

AllMyFaves mobile

That really ought to do it, but just in case, a few curation and bookmarking options may also function well as simple launch pages.

• LiveBinders offers a three-ring binder, community approach to gathering and organizing websites, documents, narrative, media and more.
• Pinterest allows build, browse, annotate and share pinboards based on visual content.
• Educlipper Adam Bellow’s clipping community for sharing all types of educational content
• Sqworl is a very simple tool for gathering together annotated thumbnails, to visualize and share bookmarks.  You can search the community, share Sqworls on social networks, and choose to follow the Sqworl groups of others.
• Only2Clicks allows users to aggregate and annotate thumbnails of related websites and organize those list in tabs.
• Tizmos, a classroom-friendly visual bookmarking tool offers inexpensive pay-per-feature rates. Users may drag, drop, and sort items on their Tizmos page and create multiple folders. Pages may be public or private. Video tizmos allow viewers to watch specific sections of videos from Youtube.com or Vimeo.com without leaving the Tizmos page.
• Delicious  and Diigo  for collaborative social bookmarking

In a recent post I chatted about my students’ eager acceptance of the EBSCO e-Book Academic Collection.

Karen, the librarian at Palisades High School, as well as our PSLA Tech Committee co-chair and blogger, decided to test drive the database herself.  She also crowd-sourced the conversation.  I asked Karen for permission to cross-post and share her ebook pros and cons remix of one of our shared favorite picture books, Remy Charlip’s Fortunately.

Here is Karen’s synthesis and analysis:

Hi!  Last week I created a public Google Doc which allowed people to add to my thoughts on the pros and cons of nonfiction eBook collections.  It was an active document and many people contributed useful ideas!!!  Thank you, contributors!  Joyce Valenza emailed me the day I made the Google Doc public sharing with me that she planned to blog that same day on the topic.

As I was reflecting on how I wanted to organize and synthesize the information, I remembered a book that I read as an elementary librarian called Fortunately which alternated between fortunately and unfortunately.  I decided that I would create a slideshow with that as the format.