Digital Scrapbooking

(I am trying to do most of my blogging out of school and after hours, but I am having a problem with my firewall at home or cookies--until I resolve it and/or figure out how to post directly via email--I will email to school and then post. Thus, the dates and times will be wrong for a while. These entries were from Saturday morning around 7:30 am, when I was up way too early with my kids :) )

Last night I had 7 people over to learn about digital scrapbooking via Creative Memories and I am going to get hooked on their storybook product. All the guilt of being years behind on Nevin’s birthday pages will be gone, especially knowing I can create the pages while sitting on the sofa watching tv with my husband, thus making it a bit easier to be all things to all people. By bringing my laptop on our family vacation to Guatemala, I can even create the pages on a daily basis and have my sister-in-laws contribute their journal boxes, with the intent of publishing a book that is a reflection of the whole family. Of course part of me thinks immediate process means lack of reflection time, but the alternative is looking at photos and guessing how old the kids were when the photo was taken. Actually that doesn’t have to be the alternative, but it presently is. The download for Storybook is free and 20 page books (bound, sewn) start at $40, which is very reasonable. They also have a Memory Manager, which I was digging b/c it reminds me of Flickr in the way you sort, tag, and group your photos. It made cropping and editing photos very easy and will save each revision of the photo you make. It can store one photo in multiple groups, so you don’t have to remember to physically move them anywhere. You can sort by many different categories, including time, date, and name. You can find photos down to the day you took them or uploaded them. This was good for people like us, who are either 1) lazy—in my case or 2) can’t agree on how the photos should be organized and end up with folders that don’t make any sense. Of course, with multiple kids there can be a question of where to put the picture…. There are other products and companies on the Internet that do the same thing for about the same price, but since I’ve been a CM customer and die-hard scrapper for several years now, I will go with this one---it doesn’t hurt to get it for free b/c I had the party :). I asked the CM consultant what future retreats will look like—will we all be bringing our laptops and digitally scrapbooking instead of lugging more scrap supplies than regular luggage to the conference center? Her reply, more time for the fun stuff---facials, massages, etc. I can’t disagree with that :).

In other technology reflections, Alexandria went wacko yesterday. Kids returned books and they were clearly in the system when they checked the books out, but they weren’t in there when they returned them. T was working on the system yesterday and decided to run a program that hadn’t been run in a year. The problem is mainly with the 9th graders, who are just now being added to our system. We had been putting them in by hand, which was quite troublesome when 15 from a class are lined up to check out books for research. Also, b/c we didn’t all enter them exactly the same—mostly b/c I am still learning—b/c B is fastidious in her work, so retrieving them has some times been problematic. The whole thing with Alexandria is that to learn it you have to use it, and the number of students using books versus checking them out is significant. In today’s world, if they can copy the pages for free, why take the book out? There is a way to track book use in Alexandria (even if they don’t go out) but I have to look into my notes on how to do it. Basically, though, the real problem with Alexandria is that each school is using a different version so when we call for help to FMS, they tell us something that works for them, but may not work for us. The other thing is that the physical catalog needs so much work---inventory hasn’t been done in years, it could take significant hours to get the catalog back into good shape and also to update the subject fields for many records since Follett and B&T provide only limited cataloging. This also requires the use of Sears and Dewey but really to my mind, requires me to also talk to the teachers about the keywords they use with their students so that we can make sure the kids can find the books by keywords the teacher’s use. I know Dewey purists would roll over in their graves, but in my mind, things in Alexandria aren’t set up to search the exact way they are at MCL (the closest library they know), so kids won’t automatically become familiar with the Sears subject headings. In the past there was one person who mostly only did the one job of entering addl subject headings. Now there are two of us doing everything, and as I see it a huge problem that school libraries face is as they reduce funding/staffing, the expectation is that fewer people will be doing the same level of work that was done previously. Something always has to suffer in that equation and at Ewing it is the collection maintenance and the catalog that have suffered. One person can not maintain the space, no matter how empty or full it may look on a daily basis. How to educate those who don’t understand that is a challenge I and many face currently.