Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

You can tell it’s the end of the year. Their exam over, our AP US History students are a little more relaxed as they attack their final debate. You can tell the pressure is off. When I shared our new books on the environment, the girls grabbed them and broke into a spontaneous book dance.  We had to capture the joy!

In a post little while back we talked about the potential for and the value of student collaboration/student involvement on library websites. That post and some of your email turned into my VOYA Tag Team Tech column.
Open the Door. Let ‘em In. eVOYA, April 2007. 1-3.

The bigger picture regarding that 2.0-themed column?

Many of us are working differently. This blog continually allows me to post ideas, to solicit input and feedback, and to synthesize the response into a better product (if that product is ever really done).

Today, I also discovered two new books about the shifting collaborative culture, that I think we need to read:

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Braffman and Rod Beckstrom
“Organizations fall into two categories: traditional spiders, which have a rigid hierarchy and top- down leadership, and revolutionary starfish, which rely on the power of peer relationships.”

And Donald Tapscott’s (Growing up Digital):

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

Perhaps this collaborative trend is connected to the way school librarians are used to leading–from the center.

When I got home yesterday, I discovered Mary K. Chelton’s and Colleen Cool’s new anthology, Youth Information Seeking Behavior II: Context, Theories, Models, and Issues (Scarecrow, 2007) waiting for me. I grabbed it and ran to my hair appointment. This time, I didn’t grab my usual guilty pleasures stack of glossy new magazines. I was the only one in Bella Gente flipping through a carefully documented book on information studies.

My participation in this collection marks a career tipping point. It’s the first time my work appears near the work of my research heroes. My chapter is: “It’d Be Really Dumb No to Use It”: Virtual Libraries and High School Students’ Information Seeking and Use: A Focus Group Investigation.

Mary K.’s and Colleen’s first collection informed both my research and my practice. It collected a kind of greatest hits volume–conveniently gathering together folks whose writings I love to discover in various journals. I find myself continually returning to that volume, chewing on and citing its contents.

I’ll be reading Volume II on the plane to Seattle.