My Instagram was mentioned on YALSA!!!

I was just alerted that my Instagram account was listed in the YALSA blog post “Instagrams, Tumblrs, and Vines, Oh My!“, (posted the day before Christmas, so you might have missed it).

Honestly though, this is beyond cool to me. This is really just my personal Instagram account where I post silly things or things I am proud of and, as you can probably guess, that means I post a lot of pictures from work because I love my job.

Just goes to show that if you are passionate about something, someone will eventually notice and give you a little shout-out! So thank you YALSA blogger!!

things donated and things left behind

I love finding bookmarks in returned books and donated items, especially creative things like drawings or notes to yourself. This afternoon, I was going through donated teen books and I found this stuck inside a random fantasy novel:

You see, this isn’t just any movie ticket. This was really important to our reader. They didn’t just use the ticket, no they mounted it to a index card and taped it down to protect it. I wonder what the story is behind Hellboy II…was it a first date with a cute boy/girl? Maybe their first PG-13 movie? Or was July of 2008 just the best summer ever? Or maybe they just REALLY LOVE HELLBOY?

Along those same lines, buried in a box of LEGOs donated to the library was this half of a necklace:

The chain it was attached to had clearly snapped and it made me sort of sad to find this forgotten among the toys, probably discarded years ago into the bin and now Mom & Dad had decided to give the LEGOs to the library, not knowing this was still inside. I wonder who has the other half and if they still care?

So check those pages before you return your books to the library and maybe empty the box of books and toys before you donate them…just in case…you don’t want to leave a memory behind.

fun with social media: Instagram tag search

So I was posting to Instagram the other night and decided to play with tags. Our tag for the summer has been #summerreading when we post to Twitter/Facebook, but I noticed that on Instagram, the tag was #summereading so I clicked on it to see what the people are posting.

It’s mostly teens posting images of the books they are being forced to read this summer and talking about how terrible the book is. And, honestly, most of the books are the same old crap everyone has been forced to read over the summer for the past 20 years (though I did spot a few lucky teens with Jurassic Park and Book Thief – wanted to comment but thought that might be creepy). Anyway, I just think teachers and parents need to realize that any ASSIGNED book is automatically a dumb, boring, long, badly written book. I really wish they summer reading assignments would just be to READ. Because, let me tell you, most of the books that were assigned to me in high school? I’m only JUST NOW understanding them. Most of the classics do not resonate with teenagers today and they really won’t do anything except make them hate reading. Reading them during school, when a teacher is there to guide them through the language and the themes is a better idea. Instead, give them choices of MODERN titles that might touch upon the same themes. There are plenty of ‘Catcher in the Rye’ stories that were written in this past year, believe me. Have them read Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother” over the summer then draw parallels when you make them read 1984 in class.

side note: 1984 must feel to these teens as far into the past as the future felt to the original readers of the title.

OH! And then I was like “hey, I tag a lot of my post as “librarian”, let’s see what else is in that tag. This tag is mostly populated by girls wearing Tina Fey glasses. When I did my initial search, I got an image of a girl on her bed trying to take a photo of her shoes she said made her “feel like a librarian” but mostly ended up a picture of her butt. **sigh** The tag has been repopulated now but there are still more random glasses than actual librarians. “librarians” has more pictures of staff, maybe we tend to photograph ourselves in groups?