Picture Book of the Month: T is for Terrible

This month's picture book is T is for Terrible by Peter McCarty. This book is breathtaking, it is such a sweet book, a book that has a soul. I loved this book ever since I first laid eyes on it. The colors are lovely and, in the words of my niece, the book makes one feel "calm" and it seems as if it is going to rain, as if there is a cloudy, calm feeling all throughtout the book.


The dinosaur in the book, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, is a good-hearted dinosaur who realizes that he is known to be a "terrible lizard." He ponders what it would be like to be different, and why he is not different. The book has just enough wording and the illustrations are perfect. At one point there are no words, but no words are needed. The feeling that this book evokes is absolutely amazing. I highly recommend this book. It will cause you to feel, to cry a little bit for the dinosaur. That is how powerful the words and the pictures in this book are.

If you don't have it in your library, get it now! If you don't have it in your house, also get it now! What are you waiting for? Get it now!!!

Elegy for Librarians

Elegy for librarians: After all the budget cutting's done, who'll be around to help us ask the sharper questions?





If librarians seem distracted these days, you can't blame them. They're worried that they'll lose jobs. As cities, counties, public schools and universities all grapple with recessionary budget cuts, libraries look like low-hanging fruit. In this iEverything age, the thinking goes, books are musty relics. And without books, who needs librarians?



The truth is that we've never needed them more. Every day in this city, librarians do important jobs not strictly related to library science.



They teach senior citizens to use e-mail and show job seekers how to fill out on-line forms. They help middle-schoolers with math homework and urge high-schoolers not to trust everything they read on Wikipedia. They reserve rooms for community meetings. They set up displays. They arrange reading series. They keep cranky microfiche readers running. They read aloud to toddlers.



But as valuable as all those things are, what we need most right now is for librarians to do their core jobs: to serve as information professionals, a job that's harder now than ever before.



The infoverse has exploded. Data still comes in book form — and also in a bazillion other forms as well: among them, databases, online journals, architectural plans, maps, photos, microprints, CDs, DVDs, podcasts, posters, manuscripts, Tweets, musical scores, scripts, magazines, software and web sites.



Librarians make it possible to navigate wilderness.



They do the brute-force work of organization: bar-coding new acquisitions; putting books back on the right shelves; scanning and digitizing paper holdings; entering items into databases, where a search can reveal them.



Handed a difficult question, a good librarian happily hacks through the data jungle, sorting the good info from the bad, and procuring exactly the answer you wanted.



But great librarians do something even better: They help you ask a sharper question, then find the answer you didn't know you needed.



Maybe printed books will largely disappear in the next decade. But even so, we'll still need libraries - because we'll need librarians.

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