goblin cartoons

I haven’t done a formal count or anything, but my gut tells me (sotto voce) I posted more about the fun things I did on the job at my former place of employment than I post about the place I currently hang my derby. I’m not interested in posting all the gorey details of my job now, but I am happy about what I do (and still pleasantly amazed I get paid to do it), and I’d like to say a little something about some of the things I’ve done recently. Let’s have this post be something of an omnibus edition or highlights reel then, shall we?

Part of my original plan for JoCoKids was to have fun activities for kids on the site, including coloring sheets. The head of Youth Services doesn’t like coloring sheets. She doesn’t like them a whole lot, and I think she raises some good points: they generally aren’t all that educational or creative (the crayon equivalent of eating popcorn, you might say). My argument, however, is that children generally expect coloring sheets at the library, getting them from a friendly librarian creates a positive association with the library, and children will strike up conversations with other children around coloring sheets–it’s like a kiddies’ singles bar. I put forward this: if we’re going to give out coloring sheets anyway, why not give out original coloring sheets that tie in with our library and website? The Youth Services Manager saw my point. We discussed it further, and out of our conversations came another idea: I made some sketches of coloring sheets that invited people to add their own ideas, facilitating imagination as well as coloring inside the lines. I was given the go-ahead, so with the technical assitance of one of my teammates, I made “official JoCoKids” coloring sheets, some featuring the cartoons on the site and some featuring original drawings with blanks for kids to fill in, and posted them on our Fun Stuff page. I was working the Youth Services desk at one of our branches the other day and put out some of the new coloring sheets. Later that afternoon, I overheard a little girl say to her mother, “Look, Mommy, they have coloring sheets. Oh! They have really good coloring sheets!” I’ll fess up, I kvelled a little.

On Friday, I learned the author Madeleine L’Engle had died. Like many people, I love her Time Quartet. I also got to meet her and hear her talk when I was a freshman in college. I put forward the idea of writing a news item blog post and putting it on our main library website. Not only was I told it was okay, I was encouraged to make it a front page item. I quickly created a graphic I thought was suggestive of L’Engle’s most popular series (since I wasn’t sure I’d be able to quickly find an image of her unencumbered by copyright), wrote a personal post about her, her novels, and her death, and posted it to our site.

I’m really having the time of my life, and knock on wood, this is only a nibble of the nifty things I’ll get to do.