Summer Reading Warrior

Miscellany from a San José librarian.

[summerreadingwarrior]

Conventions in Vegas...

[summerreadingwarrior]

Librarian City

[summerreadingwarrior]

Our summer reading project is currently being featured on eBay's blog. That's our project team in the photo!

[summerreadingwarrior]

We did it!!!

For the last seven months, San José Public Library has been working with pro bono developers from eBay to create three Summer Reading Challenge tools-- a website, an Android app, and an iOS app.

We've registered 8,000 people in six days, and we've been getting some very positive feedback.

So, we're off to a good start! Still, there's definitely room for improvement. For example, next year, I'd love to add more social elements, push reminders to read, and better digital incentives. But overall, it's been a great learning experience, and I'm really proud of what my team has accomplished.

[summerreadingwarrior]

11 days until launch!

It's been an intense year for planning, but I'm proud of the work our Summer Reading Committee has done! Our biggest changes in 2014: new native app and website (we worked with pro bono developers from eBay), partnerships with the San Jose Earthquakes and Children's Discovery Museum, and in-house graphics.

Is anyone else out there about to roll out a summer reading program? Did you make any changes this year?

[wocinsolidarity]

Attanya: #WeNeedDiverseBooks because I love science fiction and fantasy books, but I’m tired of authors treating dragons and robots and magic as more plausible than black and brown characters

Jennifer: #WeNeedDiverseBooks because… when I was 13 a white girl told me it was selfishthat all of the protagonists in my stories were Latina because she “just can’t relate to nonwhite characters.” She made me feel guilty for writing about people like me. 

Aiesha: #WeNeedDiverseBooks because…Black Girls are more than sidekicks or “sassy, ghetto friend”

[wocinsolidarity]

Facts and Figures About Race/Ethnicity in YA and Children’s Lit:

88% of the books on the 2013 Publisher’s Weekly YA Bestsellers were about white protagonists

93% of the authors on the 2013 Publisher’s Weekly YA Bestsellers were white authors

85% of the books on the 2014 Young Adult Library Services Association’s Best Fiction for Young Adults list were about white protagonists 

90% of the authors on the 2014 Young Adult Library Services Association’s Best Fiction for Young Adults list were white authors

91% of the authors on the 2013 New York Times’s Bestseller Lists for YA and Children’s Lit were white authors. 

According to the 2012 Cooperative Children’s Book Center, only 3.3% of books were about African-American protagonists; only 2.1% were about Asian and Pacific Islander protagonists; only 1.5% were about Latinx protagonists; and only 0.6% were about Native American protagonists. That means over 90% of children’s books surveyed were about white protagonists.

#WENEEDDIVERSEBOOKS

Posting this a little late, but followers please take the time out to check out this post explaining the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign and more events to come over the next few days! 

[schoollibraryjournal]

(via Children’s Books. Still an All-White World? | School Library Journal)

[summerreadingwarrior]

I'm really glad this issue is finally getting the attention it deserves.

[summerreadingwarrior]

How Gamification Motivates the Masses

By Brian Burke Gartner, Inc.  What’s new about gamification? Organizations have borrowed elements such as points and badges from games and used them to motivate people for a long time. Weight Watchers, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and military organizations have been using this approach to motivate people for a half century, […]

"There is no magic in gamification — it uses the same motivational techniques that have been around for centuries. Building self-esteem and re-enforcing it with peer recognition is a powerful means of unlocking motivation. Gamification leads players on an experience to help them to achieve their goals, and while that’s important, it’s not entirely new. The real news with gamification is the digitalization of motivation, and in the near term it will become a key part of every organization’s digital business strategy."

At SJPL, we’ve been thinking a lot about gamification and how it can enhance our summer reading program and other initiatives.

[summerdrapercosplay]

I hate to disagree with this, but for libraries, we really need to focus on internal motivators for literate and community-oriented behaviors, instead of external ones.

Points and leaderboards and rankings and praise are all great, but you know what happens when people get used to gamified rewards and then those rewards stop coming? They stop doing the things the rewards were encouraging them to do, because they got used to doing a ‘task’ for a reward, instead of doing something that is intrinsically rewarding for its own sake. Even if they liked doing it (whatever it is) before, once the external rewards disappear, their own natural interest is diminished.

Gamification can be great fun. For fun. For an occasional incentive or a contest or competition, but we can’t use this as a default, or as a crutch, because it will cripple our patrons. We can’t give everyone who reads a book a cookie every day for the rest of time, and we can’t afford to offer iTunes gift cards continually to motivate people to be active in their communities. We need to get into people’s heads, figure out what motivates them internally. Why do they do what they like to do when they’re alone, when they don’t get virtual points or public high fives for it? To really spur permanent, effective changes in habits, people need to find investing their time in libraries (or anything else) rewarding for its own sake. Find out that internal, personal-to-them motivator, and you’ve got them for life.

But no. That’s too hard. So instead we’ll BRIBE people to do yet another good ‘pro-social’ activity, and we’ll wonder why they stopped building bird houses when they finished Scouting, why they gained all that weight back when they quit Weight Watchers, and why they aren’t reading now that the summer is over and the stickers are all gone.

[summerreadingwarrior]

It’s smart to be concerned that gamification relies too heavily on extrinsic motivators to convince young people to read and engage in learning activities! Gamification is a trendy idea, and I fear that libraries aren’t spending enough time having this discussion. Our Summer Reading committee shares your concern, and we spent a lot of time talking about extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation and systems of reward this year.

When my planning group met with a local tech company that specializes in gamification, I was surprised by how much time the specialists spent discussing the limitations of gamification. From what I understand, gamification (in the field of education) ideally does not replace intrinsic motivators with extrinsic motivators, but rather combines the two for better learning results. Gamification can be a great tool for making learning more compelling and engaging. Meaningful gamification inspires intrinsic motivation if it includes user choice, real world/personal context, and a chance for reflection. (Easier said than done, so I hear, and at least one study has shown that a poorly designed game can actually lead to less internal motivation.)

If librarians aspire to build communities of readers and lifelong learners by giving people the chance to win stickers and gift cards, we must be pretty deluded. Any use of gamification towards those huge goals will need to be meaningful and very carefully designed.

It would be great if every game-inspired Summer Reading program succeeded in tapping into the intrinsic motivation of participants. That won’t always be the case. However, extrinsic motivation and tangible rewards have been shown to be great motivators in the short term. And the more urgent goal behind the Summer Reading program, at least in urban neighborhoods like mine, is simply to help young people avoid summer learning loss. We can bribe relunctant readers to read for 20 minutes a day because the research shows that’s what they need to do in order to keep up with their peers. We can give them gameboards and allow them to choose learning activities that hopefully strike their interest. We can hope our external rewards motivate them to read long enough to bridge that two-month gap between school years. Then in the fall, working alongside teachers, we can get back to that lifelong learning business!

[summerreadingwarrior]

San Jose Public Library’s 26th Annual Children’s Faire

When the storm hit yesterday, the wind blew over our event canopies and rain soaked the park grounds. So, we were feeling a little anxious about pulling this thing off (see first photo).

But the event gods were smiling down on us today. We ended up with 70 degree weather, an estimated 7,000 attendees, and a great variety of hands-on activities for young children provided by our booth participants.

When one performance group failed to show up, we invited young people on stage to perform songs. It was so moving to see kids show the courage to take a risk and sing in front of the crowd. (Even if I did have to listen to Let it Go so many times my ears were bleeding…) We even had a special guest appearance by Mateo Contreras, YouTube star from the Mateo Wants a Cupcake video. http://mateowantsacupcake.com

[summerreadingwarrior]

How Gamification Motivates the Masses

By Brian Burke Gartner, Inc.  What’s new about gamification? Organizations have borrowed elements such as points and badges from games and used them to motivate people for a long time. Weight Watchers, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and military organizations have been using this approach to motivate people for a half century, [...]

"There is no magic in gamification — it uses the same motivational techniques that have been around for centuries. Building self-esteem and re-enforcing it with peer recognition is a powerful means of unlocking motivation. Gamification leads players on an experience to help them to achieve their goals, and while that’s important, it’s not entirely new. The real news with gamification is the digitalization of motivation, and in the near term it will become a key part of every organization’s digital business strategy."

At SJPL, we've been thinking a lot about gamification and how it can enhance our summer reading program and other initiatives.

[thedigitallibrarian-deactivated]

Get your professional headshot at this years ALA conference for only $15. Must make an appt.

[summerreadingwarrior]

Taking children shopping can boost early development - Telegraph

A study by academics from The Open University and Oxford finds that a series of activities such as shopping, reading, storytelling and arts and crafts had a positive impact on happiness levels and the development of early skills

[summerreadingwarrior]

Why Businesses Should See Early Childhood Development as a Smart Investment

Emily Gustafsson-Wright recaps the Center for Universal Education's recent webinar on the business case for early childhood development, jointly organized with the Global Business Coalition for Education and Ready Nation/America's Edge.

[summerreadingwarrior]

Berkeley 8th graders raise $80K to build their own library

A Berkeley middle...

This is pretty awesome!

[schoollibraryjournal]

The first thing this librarian needs to understand is that the bookmobile doesn’t belong to her. It belongs to the public, including children.

Pat Scales responds regarding a ‘conservative’ librarian who wants to keep “Wimpy Kid” and “Captain Underpants” out of the bookmobile that she mans.

SLJ Columnist Pat Scales Addresses Censorship Concerns in Libraries | School Library Journal

(via schoollibraryjournal)

[summerreadingwarrior]

Libraries are dying? Think again

Many people are discovering a renewed fascination with libraries

[summerreadingwarrior]

We just got a preview of the upcoming SJPL Summer Reading app and website from our team at eBay. Way back in September, when this was just a developing idea, it was hard to imagine getting to this point.

Next step: refining content, adding lots of graphics, sizing for different devices, adding bells and whistles as time permits. It's been an exciting process! We only have a few weeks left...