SAYL Mail

Welcome Back to School3

SAYL MAIL
August 25, 2006
 

SLED SURVEY / SCHOOL LIBRARY WIKI / BATTLE OF THE BOOKS / CE EVENT / BLOG?
Welcome to the new school year.  Please let me know who has come and gone in your school district library world, so that I can update my mailing list.  I particularly would like to greet any new school library staff.  
 

Congratulations to the public librarians on this list who have completed the 2006 Summer Reading Program, PAWS, CLAWS, SCALES, & TALES and are working busily to help with the recall of adorable bendable toys that turned out to have unacceptable levels of lead.  What a busy last two weeks we’ve all had!
 

SURVEY TO START THE SCHOOL YEAR
 

Now available on SLED ( http://sled.alaska.edu ) is a survey to find out what librarians, teachers, parents and students think about the databases on the Statewide Library Electronic Doorway The survey will provide information for a committee that is designing online tutorials for the databases that are available in the section Magazines, Newspapers and More. The tutorials for home or individual users will be the end result of a grant from the Alaska State Library implemented by a committee headed by Renee Wood, librarian at South Anchorage High School.
 

The survey is meant to give the committee a better idea of who is using the databases and what problems these users may experience.
 
If your library links to the statewide databases on a different page than the SLED home page or the databases home page, you might want to provide paper copies of the survey to students and other users.
 

The survey, which will be up through September 30, is available as a link both on the SLED main page and the Magazines, Newspapers, and More list itself.
 

ALASKA SCHOOL LIBRARY WIKI
 

Darla Grediagin and her colleagues at the Bering Strait School District have created an online resource which may be a very useful way for us all to share resources.  Go to: http://akasl.pbwiki.com/ . You will need a password, which you can get my contacting me at sue_sherif@eed.state.ak.us This site is based on the software and concept found in the much discussed Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page , which bills itself as the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”
 

NEWS FROM SHELLY LOGSDON, OUR BATTLE OF THE BOOK HEROINE
 

Welcome to another year of Battle of the Books!  The 2006-2007 Battle of the Books list has been moved from Tentative to Official.  There is 1 change on the 3/4 list. The title Good Dog has gone out of print and we are replacing it with Enormous Crocodile by Roald Dahl.  The official list posted on the web site, along with the corrected bookmarks…  http://www.akla.org/akasl/bb/bbhome.html   
 

Registrations have been pouring in and district contacts will receive their first e-mail by the end of August
 

CONTINUING EDUCATION OPPORTUNITY – COMING SOON!
 

Peggy Barber and Linda Wallace of Library Communication Strategies will be presenting 4 one-day workshops in Alaska next month in Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Juneau. 
 

This CE opportunity, “Building Local Library Marketing Plans,” is open to all types of libraries and is free of charge. The goal will be for participants to leave with the draft of a marketing plan for their own libraries.
 

Peggy Barber is former public relations director of the American Library Association and was a presenter at this year’s Alaska Library Association Conference in Anchorage.  She and Linda Wallace are partners in Library Communication Strategies, Inc., “a consulting practice dedicated to promoting libraries and librarians.”  For more information about their firm and the types of presentations they do, check http://www.librarycomm.com
 

The dates for the workshops in Alaska are:
            Fairbanks                      Monday, September 11
            Anchorage                     Tuesday, September 12
            Anchorage                     Thursday, September 14
(repeat of September 12)
            Juneau                          Friday, September 15.
 

There will be spaces for up to 30 participants for each workshop.  Registration information, exact locations, and more details about the contents of the workshops will be available next week.  Lunch will be on your own in each location, but there is no charge for the workshop itself. 
 

These workshops are sponsored by the Alaska Library Association and the Alaska State Library.  Patience Frederiksen has organized this exciting opportunity, and you will be hearing more from her soon.  To contact her, write to her at: patience_frederiksen@eed.state.ak.us
 

TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG
 

In an effort to make this newsletter more readable and more interactive, I am considering making SAYL Mail available also as a blog on the Edublog site. 
 

I would continue to put it out in the plain email format, but would add a link to Edublogs at the top, so people could read it in a more attractive format and one that would allow them to comment and perhaps allow me to add some graphics.  (Now I am limited by a lot of bandwidth and software considerations for some of our colleagues throughout the state.)
 

Would this be a worthwhile effort on my part for you?  Would it be a way to give you a chance to try the blog format?
  

Let me know what you think.

Sue

Posted: School Libraries

Safety Alert for Public Libraries0

       
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Aug. 10, 2006  
Contacts:   Barbra Holian, ADHSS, (907) 465-8116, cell (907) 321-2610 
                        Christine Lynch, ADHSS, (907) 269-7954, cell (907) 529-1520 Sue Sherif, ADEED, (907) 269-6569 
State Health Officials Warn of Unsafe Levels of Lead in Children’s Toys Distributed by Libraries
 
(Juneau, Alaska) ─ Bendable dog and cat toys given away at many public libraries this summer might contain unsafe levels of lead. State health officials in the Department of Health and Social Services today issued a consumer health alert regarding the toys, which were distributed as part of a statewide summer reading program at public libraries throughout Alaska, and in at least 30 other states nationwide.
The rubbery toys are roughly four inches long, with round heads and long bendable arms and legs.  They come in various colors.  The toys are stamped “Made in China” on the back of the head, and “China” on the back of the body.  In recent tests run on three of these toys, lead levels ranged from 0.24 to 0.4 percent lead.  The Code of Federal Regulations stipulates that lead may constitute no more than 0.06 percent of the weight of the paint applied to a toy.  
The main risk posed by these toys is the possibility that children might chew on them and swallow part of the toy, and thereby absorb unsafe amounts of lead into the bloodstream.  The toys are not hazardous to touch.  Young children, infants, and developing fetuses are at greatest risk of lead poisoning because their bodies absorb more lead and their brains and bodies are still developing.  
“We are currently unaware of any children in Alaska who have become ill or who have elevated lead concentrations because of the toys,” said Dr. Joe McLaughlin, Medical Epidemiologist with the Alaska Division of Public Health. Since prolonged exposure to lead in young children has been associated with lifelong learning disabilities and behavioral disorders, he encourages parents to consult with a healthcare provider if they think their child has swallowed any portion of the toys.
Approximately 2,400 toys were obtained by about 72 libraries in Alaska.  It is not known how many toys may have already been given away to children.  The company that supplies the toys to libraries, Highsmith Inc., has issued a voluntary recall of the product.  
“Librarians involved in the summer reading program are appalled to think that something they distributed might pose a risk to the children they serve, so we notified the health department and the libraries involved right away.  We really hope parents will search their children’s toy boxes and return these toys to their local library as soon as possible,” said Sue Sherif, School Library/Youth Services Coordinator for the Alaska State Library.
State public health officials advise parents whose children have the toys to return them to the library where they were obtained.  Local libraries will either return the toys to Highsmith Inc. or send them to a central collection facility for safe disposal.  
For more information on the hazards of lead, please visit:
http://www.cpsc.gov/BUSINFO/leadguid.html  or http://www.epa.gov/lead/
or call the Environmental Public Health program in the Alaska Division of Public Health at 907-269-8000.

Posted: Public Libraries, Uncategorized

A New Wiki World?2

What can be said for an encyclopedia that is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and sometimes illiterate? writes Stacy Schiff in The New Yorker last week. A student sent in this article, which is a long exploration of wikipedia at
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact
Take a look and let us know what you think.

Posted: Uncategorized