Closing scenes

The book drop after Krista turned in her senior history seminar paper:



And a few hours later, a surprise baby shower for Jenny:



Yee haw, the Uni High Library's very first baby!

- And thanks to Aaron for taking on photographer duty :-)

Assessment time

It's finals week, with projects and papers due as well. This morning, the computer literacy teaching team is grading the Computer Literacy 2 semester projects. As usual, we've got an interesting variety. One group designed a restaurant using Google SketchUp, another group learned Java programming by recreating the original Frogger game, and we had another photo gallery posted on the commercial photo sharing website, SmugMug. We also had a music composition project, a how-to-play-the-cello instructional DVD, and three publications -- a graphic novel, a fashion magazine, and a photography book highlighting cultural diversity at Uni. As in past years, some groups used various software packages to create game boards based on long-time favorites. This semester we saw Uni Life, Uni Risk, and Uni Clue. Here are two of the possible murder weapons in the Uni-ized game of Clue:



I'm not sure how death-by-protrator works, but I can totally see it with that heavy volume of the Readers' Guide. And, given these two mugs, who would you pick as the likely murder suspect?



Maybe it's time for me to dye my hair blue and get some facial piercings.

Parting gifts from seniors

Today, seniors Christine and Katy, with a lot of last minute help from Victoria, finished their marvelous signs for the end panels on our New Book Shelf.




I suppose it's time to update the 1980s Saga of the New Book Shelf on our photo gallery. Then again, maybe not.

Today was the last regular day of school. Final exams are next week. School is ending on a high note, with Uni featured on the front page of the University website for its selection by Newsweek magazine as one of 21 "public elite" high schools. The University's blurb links directly to Carl's fine article in the Online Gargoyle for full coverage. Very cool.

Final installment

At least for this year. Alexx and Liz were kind enough to smile for one last earbud buddy picture.



Previous installments can be seen here, here, here, and here.

Though summer is almost upon us, I'm already thinking about next year. I'd really, really like to find a way to use this video about copyright in class. The folks at Disney can't be happy campers about it. Especially not with that Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

"Smart" spam

Well, not exactly smart. What I mean by smart, is that a human being is spending human brain time creating it, rather than a spambot that only spends machine time spewing mindlessly. Lately, this blog seems to be attracting comments that are relevant to the post, but come from people I don't know and contain embedded links to sites that sell stuff. I delete those comments faster than you can say "spam." But for a nanosecond, I'd like to get into the heads of people who spend time doing this. I can't imagine the mindset.

This is not to say that I don't want comments from unknown persons. On the contrary - comments from far-flung places are generally very cool and remind me that my audience is broader than I think it is. One of my favorite examples of this is a two-year-old post on the novel Kiss the Dust, which is told from the point of view of a Kurdish girl. Apparently, there are folks who regularly search the Web for references to all things Kurdish. Lately, though, another two-year-old post has been drawing a lot of attention. In fact, on the school's website statistics for May, this post has gotten more visits than any other page, except for the school's main page. 7,457 as of today. I have to say that I don't get it. Surely there are better places on the Web to find information about this topic?

They could have danced all night

Prom is the best dance ever to chaperone. Everyone is just so transformed. And I really like the way Uni students are comfortable coming with groups of friends. The pressure to have a date for this event sure isn't what it used to be -- a totally positive transition, imho.

Library workers made another strong showing this year:



As did pregnant chaperones:



Don't get any ideas, kids.

Summer reading

Our final display for the year is devoted to summer reading. Jenny posted some great annotated book lists on the bulletin board that's out in the hallway. The 2007 Printz Award winners, the 2008 Illinois Abraham Lincoln Award nominees, titles from Publishers Weekly "Hot Books for Summer" list, the 2007 Alex Award winners, and the Ultimate Teen Reading List from teenreads.com. Inside, books are on display and students have been posting their recommendations. One blank yellow page is filled up now, but a whole other one awaits adornment.



Oh, and now I have scouts out spotting earbud buddy photo ops. This picture of Abby and Rohun was taken by Mr. Garvey in the PC lab. Awwwww.

More reasons why the Internet is a good thing

For starters, you can stay in touch all the time. Besides Twitter, which allows you to constantly update your doings online and broadcast them to your friends as text messages, now there's Cluztr. Cluztr lets you to share your "clickstream" with your friends so you can "stop wandering the web alone." Now you can find out which of your friends is on the same web page you are, find out what sites your friends are visiting and follow them around, and leave messages for friends on any website you visit. Personally, I don't know if all this togetherness is for me. A few days after Jason wrote about Twitter for the Online Gargoyle, I overheard a girl in the library describe it as "that stalking software." Even if you and the stalkers are friends, I have to admit that the comment resonated with me.

For the environmentally conscious, now there is Blackle, a Google custom search done in all black to save energy. How cool is that?

Thanks to the LibrarianinBlack for the tipping me off to Cluztr and Blackle.

Installment three

Emy and Julia make their selection:



And then get down -



The earbud buddies collection is starting to see some depth -
Installment two
Installment one

Community connections

Today, several members from Students For A Better World (S4BW) came in to pose with the display they put up. It's a fabulous collection of artwork submitted for a drawing contest the club sponsored. S4BW asked third to fifth grade students from Champaign-Urbana schools to "draw what makes your neighborhood special and what it means to you." The idea was to "cross and dismantle borders" in the community. The submissions were then displayed in the Urbana Free Library before coming to us!

Major announcement

So you know up front, this is the sort of announcement that only a techie loves. People Magazine is NOT going to come calling. So if you've been sucking in your breath, you can let it out now.

First, a hint. Notice anything different about our website? No? Excccellllent, then we have succeeded. What you are not seeing on the website is a complete makeover of the underbelly, the guts, the workings -- all undertaken while trying to keep the veneer looking as close to the original as possible. We've always loved the design, with its elegant-yet-whimsical look and feel. For this, I owe much gratitude to former Uni High Library Graduate Assistant, GSLIS student, and web designer supreme, Maurice York. Maurice is now the Associate Head of Information Technology at the North Carolina State University Libraries. For those in the know, NCSU is just about the most cutting edge library out there in terms of technology implementation. Anyway, Maurice designed our site when cascading style sheets (CSS) were not really the norm. CSS are lists of instructions that lay out how text (borders, colors, fonts, and all other kinds of design elements) should appear on a website. We loved our site, but it was hard to maintain without CSS. Every single page was built from scratch, with lots of tables, which were really, really easy to break. The site was also heavily reliant on graphics (or, as Maurice calls them, his "graphical indulgences"). Graphics aren't very disability-friendly, so our site was definitely not up to modern standards.

So how to update our technological underpinnings while keeping the concept intact? Simple -- call in the local talent. Uni High senior Ben Hyman, also known as the technical editor and co-editor-in-chief of the Online Gargoyle set to work replicating the site with CSS and succeeded admirably. The lion's share of the work is done, though a few subordinate sections will have to be summer projects. With the lovely commenting he's added to all his code, I may even be able to maintain the site after he goes to college in the fall.

You can see a picture of Ben here. And you can see pictures of Maurice here (scroll down, he's wearing sunglasses and a lei) and here (the bottom "yikes" photo). Let me know if you see any bugs before Ben goes away!

Return of the Zombies

Photo ops keep dropping in my lap. I was all set to make a Major Announcement, but then some members of the Film Study class dropped by.



I thought their appearance called for another use of the delicious Zombie Speller.





The Major Announcement will just wait until tomorrow (okay, okay, it's not that major).

Earbud buddies, continued

Installment two (though you have to squint a bit to see the wires):



Thanks to Bhaskar and Jamie for being willing to let me capture the moment for my "collection." You can see installment one here.

Lost and found

For the last few days, we've been comparing search engines and evaluating websites in Computer Literacy 1. Part of the problem with search engines is that you never know exactly how their ranking algorithms work. We know some general tricks, yes. For example, lots of links to a site from other highly ranked sites will pump up the site's ranking. That's one way a notorious hate site leveraged its way to the top of a Google search. Well-meaning librarians and teachers were linking to it as a demonstration example for lessons on website evaluation. For a business, the lack of transparency about search algorithms can be devastating. Apparently, Google has a supplemental index, "a holding pen for pages it deems to be of low quality or designed to appear artificially high in search results." Once your site is relegated to this dungeon (called "Google Hell" by marketing people), it's very, very hard to pull it out again. Ouch.

In the found department, our SI swimsuit issue finally arrived. Will someone please remind me why I wanted it? Oh yes, that "principle" business.

Big hair

My mother says that she missed the Golden Age of Television putting children to bed. Now I understand better what I missed while I was putting my own children to bed -- hair metal music. Our copy of American Hair Metal, by Steven Blush (781.66 B629am) arrived today. Page after page after page of guys with Big Hair. And not just big hair, but serious displays of androgyny too.



I'm thinking my mother got the worse end of the deal.

The final, FINAL, word on the super unicorn

Those who take library vocational videos to heart, and who already work in a library, often find creative uses for the detritus of the profession. I thought Aaron had reached the pinnacle of his creative use of the backing from rolls of spine label protectors, but I was wrong. He needed both Emily and Julia to help demonstrate:



Katy and Christine, who do most of our book processing, are grateful Aaron is finished with this business.