Sadako and the 1000 Cranes

I'm doing a program for DIOS (a Mexican holiday celebrating The Day of the Book & The Day of the Children) which falls on April 30. It seemed an appropriate time to celebrate the book SADAKO and the 1000 PAPER CRANES by Eleanor Coerr. I'd seen the play written from the book and read the book with my Girl Scouts years ago when my daughter was in middle school. We learned at that time to make cranes. The girls loved the whole thing and I thought that it'd be fun to do with the library.

Sadako lived in Hiroshima in 1945. She was affected by radiation sickness that manifested when she was about 12. As she grew sicker her best friend told her of the old Japanese sacred crane legend - if one folds a thousand cranes in honor of the bird then a wish will be granted. Sadako, of course, wished to be healthy again. She folded cranes and more cranes as she lay ill in the hospital. Some days it took all of her strength just to fold a few of them. Sadly, she was only able to fold 644 before she died peacefully in her sleep. Her friends finished the project for her and buried the 1000 cranes with Sadako in her coffin. They then erected a monument to her in Hiroshima's peace park. Eleanor Coerr saw the monument and wrote the story of Sadako & the Cranes. People/children from around the world heard of Sadako's story and began folding cranes which they sent to her monument by the thousands. The park keepers began displaying those cranes. Now anyone who sends 1000 cranes can have theirs displayed in support of world peace and in support of the cure for childhood leukemia.

So I'm going to be going to schools to discuss the book with classes. I'm going to discuss the book here in the library with middle-school kids. I'm going to offer recycled paper and folding directions to any of our patrons who want to make cranes. And I'm going to teach anyone who'll sit long enough how to fold an origami crane. I've been folding them myself - anytime I'm working the public service desks and have free hands. Anytime I can find a free scrap of paper at work. So far I've got about 800 cranes. I aim to make 1000. I hope our patrons will make 1000. I'd like to be able to send their work to Hiroshima to join all of the other cranes there.

Would you like to fold some? Here're directions!

Feel free to fold your own to keep or add to our collection! Not only are the lucky, they're pretty!

I was browsing through the Smithsonian photo website http://http://www.flickr.com/commons/

They've posted 3000 photos for us all to see & tag. INTERESTING.

I found one that was very library-ish: The opening of the New York Public Library during the 1910s. I've been in that library. The lions outside are cool.

Alive!

A cute video I found while browsing for NYC.

The Beginning...

What a great program and such fun. I've learned so much! How to play with photos & videos, how to create a "family" search engine and how to blog about it - a great way to do genealogy research!

And I've learned so many useful things: how to create a genearal search engine for reference works, how to get a lot out of Google and it's family, how to tag for fun and profit. I can wiki now - a great way to keep patrons abreast of what we're doing in the library. I can even create a podcast - how about a mini-documentary about origami crane folding! I know where to look for help in doing fascinating things with graphics for program publicity and general programming... so many things! I had not expected to enjoy the training as much as I did. I've already begun to use what I've learned, both at work and at home. I've been sharing my new knowledge with anyone who'll listen. I've published on the www, become more of a public person and it's cool! Who knows, I might even set up a facebook or myspace account as a library lady - share my books and enthusiasms not only on shelfari or librarything, but to a wider world. Anything to get more people reading and thinking!

If a discovery program like this were offered again??? I'd be one of the first to sign up. I've learned a lot from this one and what I've learned will continue to be of value both here at work and at home.

Be A Clown - A Tribute

One of my favorites!

Too Many to choose from!

How can I choose just one thing that was a favorite! I've discovered igoogle and how useful that it as a work-tool. I've put so many great gadgets on my home page like a search of world cat, and a customized search of google/yahoo/ask. And the web 2.0 awards offered so much that was interesting & fun & useful.
I've discovered Flickr & Picassa - one I'm now using to share family photos. One I'm using to start publishing my genealogy research. I've a found a lot of pictures of ancestors. Now they're posted to share. Maybe others who share the same ancestors will contact me and we can share info!
The rss readers are great! I love them. And google's features. And tagging! Delicious has so many uses. And I like the fact that FURL will cache pages - so helpful in genealogy research where web sites can (and do) drop out of site after you've found them. So easy to lose information.
My sister manages the web site for her department. I've shown her what I've learned about wikis. She's interested and intrigued.
In fact, I've found this whole training so cool that I've shared the info with my best friends and family. Several of them are playing with it all too.

My own search engine swicki

Just to see if I could, I created a family-search search engine to search the message boards on genealogy.com and ancestry.com. I used about a dozen of the family surnames on both boards and, voila! it came together. Very cool. See it on the right - "Family Search" and the surnames I've used.
This could also be a very useful tool for library work, searching various catalogs & book sites all at once. Definitely worth putting together another search engine.

Sharing your/my catalog in the library thingee

Library Thing - a useful concept. Both for helping to remember just what you've read and for finding more books by the same author. It's tempting to add most of the books I've read!

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=fcaldwell&shelf=shelf

Creating/Manipulating images

Any image, pulled, pushed, mangled, transformed - in just about any way. How cool.

Found a fractal earth program that was fun to play with:

http://direpress.bin.sh/tools/world.cgi

This is the image I came up with, tho many more were possible.

I also generated my name in Elvish - you never know when that will be necessary. And also in hieroglyph. Cool.

POD & VID casts! Worth a cheer!

The more that I've seen of these casts the more I appreciate them for libraries and thing that VBPL could find great use for them. I've seen BOOK TALKS which I imagaine is people taking about the books they've read. I've seen "EXCERPTS FROM AUDIOBOOKS". This is a great idea - one can not only get a taste of the book but, just as importantly, one can get a taste of the reader and how does he/she sound. I've seen STORYTIMES - VBPL does some of these and could do more. What a great way to bring kids to the web site!. We could also make casts of the various speakers we have for events. If the speakers didn't want to have their program broadcast then we could do an interview with that person - also very interesting. We could air the events at each library - I mean, we could do like sportscasts, with play-by-plays & participant, spectator interviews, & descriptions! We could do videos of the CL art shows & the "pimp your bookcart" contests & the "read to learn" decorating contests. We could show off the Pungo scarecrows they do in the spring. All of these would show so many more people what great places VBPL are and maybe draw even more people here. How about "how to" videos for the internet or our various Virtual library sources? A lot of places to use these casts!