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GARZ4LIB

“Second Generation Librarian.”

Author Archives: mmgarza

May 9, 2010 Happy Mother’s Day Garza 1.0!

This Mother’s Day, I wanted to thank my mom, Lynne, for encouraging me to enter this profession in the most public way possible. She’s a totally amazing librarian herself and has been in public and private libraries for probably more years than she’d care for me to share on the internet.  She originally went into [...]

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May 8, 2010 Comics for Kids, What’s Next? Being a Champion for the Comic Book

Today was the first day of the Toronto Comics Arts Festival (TCAF) – “Hooray!” says I and hundreds of other people who crowded into the Toronto Reference Library. I went to TCAF for the first time last year and was kind overwhelmed by everything to see (and buy!) during the second day of the festival. [...]

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May 6, 2010 Eating Disorders in Fiction: Looks by Madeleine George

Meghan Ball is, to put it bluntly, fat. Hugely fat. But despite this fact, she’s sometimes literally an invisible girl at her high school. People treat her either like part of the scenery or she’s the bullseye for horrific abuse. She copes with the sadness that these two unhappy poles bring her by binge eating [...]

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April 12, 2010 Bulimia in Fiction: A review of Perfect by Natasha Friend

Isabelle Lee (age 13) is coping with the loss of her father and her mother’s grieving by falling into a pattern of bingeing and purging. When she’s caught by her 10 year old sister April (aka “Ape Face”) she is forced by her mother to go to “Group” – a small support group for young [...]

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March 21, 2010 Twelve: A Toddler Book for Tweens

In the process of learning to do baby storytime, I’ve learned that one sort of popular book for infants and young toddlers is simply a book that outlines the basic components of “baby’s day.” Briefly, this is because they can easily make connections between their lives and what is going on in the book. Waking [...]

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March 9, 2010 Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: I finally give myself over to the movie.

I have to admit, I avoided this movie like the plague. I loved this book so much as a child, and at first, I was saddened to see it become one in a line of children’s picture books turned into movies. Not even the awards would sway me. But my friend had mentioned that it [...]

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January 28, 2010 Library Day in the Life Wednesday: The Hardest Spreadsheet to Spreadsheet

9:07 a.m.: Go to deliver my books to the Ontario Early Years program that’s in my branch every Wednesday. The ECE coordinator tells me that 1) The keys for our cupboards are missing. And this is okay because she has her own (howdidthathappeniwonder?!?! 0_0) but someone has been rifling through her cupboards “looking for something.” [...]

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January 26, 2010 Library Day in the Life Monday: Blergh.

Today I woke up and looked at ye olde Twitter feed and what should happen to appear? The announcement that Round 4 of Library Day in the Life is starting! Ahem: “Yippee-skippee!” as they say. So, fellow librarians and students of information science: tag yer blogs w/ librarydayinthelife or use the hash tag #libday4 on [...]

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January 9, 2010 Storytime on Demandate Part 2: So what’s the point?

So, 15-20 min. after getting all of the kids together, reading books, jumping around, and saying goodbye, I’m pumped on adrenaline and sweaty and embarrassingly out of breath. This is where also I run into the other stumbling block in the process besides actually making the mini-mes sit down: Parents are usually thrilled that we [...]

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January 9, 2010 Storytime on Demandate Part 1: Overview of Service

I think that I’ve mentioned MPL’s “out in the open” policy with regard to storytimes before: namely, all of our storytimes are to be delivered in open space in the library, rather than behind closed doors, in order to promote our services to newcomers, new users, and customers who are otherwise unaware of programs provided [...]

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