Reflection

When I first read over the syllabus for the class, I thought to myself that this would be a class my kids would enjoy and they would reap most of the benefits. Boy, was I wrong!! While they did really enjoy most of places we visited, I saw and learned so much more than I could have ever read about in a book or online! I really am still amazed. I did enjoy going to to the cemetery and the museums, but I gained so much more from the impromptu visits to the library science collection in the State Library and the Legislative Reference Library in the State Capitol. The information that I can take and use in my own life from the library science collection is priceless. And the knowledge of what goes on in a type of library that I will most likely never use in my practices is still valuable. I am still very impressed with the clipping service that learned about and I'm sure it is not novel to any one else but me!! Wow! Having to choose sights to go visit saddened me in a way, though. I live an hour from Austin and yet there is soooooo much that I have never gone to see. I could probably spend a month or two in that city alone and still not see and experience all there is. I really would have loved to get over to Houston to do some sight seeing there, but time did not allow for it. Everytime my husband and I think about vacations, we always think of places outside of Texas. This class has made me realize that we do not have to go far to have some great and even educational experiences with our children. We definitely need to keep that in mind as it would save a lot of money and we would all have just as much fun as going almost anywhere else! Thanks, Dr. Bell, for keeping us in the state of Texas and "forcing" us to take a good look in our own backyard and to realize what a valuable, educational resource we have so close to home! :)

Temple Public Library

This library is located about 15 minutes from my home. We go once every few months now but when my kids were smaller, we would go every Wednesday for story time. Over the last two years, they have been doing some major reconstruction downstairs in the children's area. Our last visit was in March and they were still working. It was a nice surprise to go today and see everything finished. I LOVE it!! It has really changed and for the better, waaaayyyyy better! During the summer, they have a summer reading program. On Thursdays each week, they have a performer come to encourage summer attendance in the library. So, we got there just in time to see the magician do his stuff. He was quite amusing, he tricks were average, but he really did a great job promoting the library and reading.

There were probably 150-200 kids there and hopefully each one of them went down and checked out some books - I know we waited in the check-out line for a good 10 minutes and we were waited quite a while looking for books before we even entered the line! After the magician finished his act, we headed downstairs to check out some books and look around at the newly renovated children's library. It was beautiful! When you walk in, the circulation desk is immediately on your right. On your left is the periodical rack where about 120 subscriptions sat. These subscriptions were for all ages, not just children.

Continue walking forwards just a bit - on your left was a leisure area for anyone. There were many comfy looking chairs, a coffee pot, a sink, two bathrooms, and outside access with tables and chairs out there, too. This is brand new and a great addition to the library!!

Next to the leisure area a little further into the library, there is a teen/YA area. There were several shelves of books, ten computers that kids could access the internet from, two computer for looking books up in the catalog, and a few comfy chairs. While I think this is a great idea, to give the teens as space of their own, I am wondering which books get placed in this section vs. the fiction section. My son wanted to check out The Lightning Thief, but we weren't sure if we should look in the fiction section or in the Teen/YA section. Turns out that it had already been checked out, but we did find The Last Olympian, also by Rick Riordin, in the teen section. I wonder if another copy would have been found in the fiction section. We found multiple copies of Treasure Island in the fiction section and I would consider that to be a YA book. That would be a good question for the librarian (whom I didn't get a chance to talk to considering the amount of people present today). Outside of the teen section was a long row of children's computer to access the internet. On all computers, there is a one hour time limit in which you need to sign up for at the children's reference desk, which is in the center of the downstairs.



Behind the reference desk was the easy fiction area where all of the picture books are located. There is also the AV section where there were multiple videos and audiobooks.



The rest of the downstairs was devoted to another leisure section, the shelves of fiction and non-fiction books.
Upstairs there are more computers for both research and online catalogs, fiction, non-fiction and reference materials for adults. I have spent quite a few hours in the reference department of this library for a few other classes. I didn't go upstairs today but for just a brief moment to see if any renovations had been made. There was nothing new up there, but there are several leisure areas in the midst of all those books! I think this public library is the perfect size. It seem large to me - about 6 times the size of my local library and yet I don't get lost! :)

Mayborn Planetarium - Killeen, Texas

After exchanging emails and texts from Christen Manuel, we agreed to meet today at the Mayborn Planetarium. She is the Education & Outreach Coordinator for the planetarium and I got in touch with her after finding out my best friend is a friend of hers! :) The first thing we did was go to her office and I explained a little of what I was looking for. She spoke highly of three apps that she has on her iPhone and showed me a little how they work. She has gone to a few schools and demonstrated these apps on the few iPads that the school had for classroom use. The apps are free and look like great resources to use when doing a study of planets and the solar system. I have an iPhone, but not an iPad. I'm going to try to figure out how to incorporate these apps into my multimedia project. The names of the apps are Plates, Skyview Free, and NASA APOD. She gave me some handouts that she gives to teachers who bring their students there for field trips. Also, she explained a few examples of lessons that could be brought back to the classroom. Next, she took us on a tour of the facility. There isn't much to it other than the dome, but we did get to see a few neat things. First, in the lobby is the original starball they used in the dome. This is what the use to project the stars onto the dome's ceiling. This particular starball has the capability to project the 700 closest stars. That sounds like a lot of stars!! Then, she took us into the dome where the newer starball resides. This starball will project 1800 of the closest stars onto the dome's ceiling!! Also, it has the ability to take you to any date in the past or in the present and show you what the stars looked like on that night. If you wanted to see the night's stars in Paris, France 10,000 years ago, that's possible!! That's amazing! Christen then took us into the booth where they are able to control the starball and where they sit when doing shows. All of the controls looked complicated to me! After seeing the workings of the dome, we went into the only exhibit room they have. She showed us the Uniview which was set up there. They have another, much larger Uniview in the dome to check out the different planets during some shoes. It looks like a gaming console, but it's there to be able to move around and view the moon, Mars, and the solar system from a bunch of different angles. She said that the Uniview in the dome can view all of the planets, but they limit it to three in the exhibit room to help avoid problems with the system since it can get tricky to navigate. She told me that they have just been given more space so hopefully soon they'll have more exhibits to go along with the visit to the dome. The other exhibit in the room was a rock and bone collection that was on loan from a geology professor from Central Texas College. We moved back into the dome and took a seat for a matinee showing of The Little Star That Could. It was a cute show intended for lower grades about a star being born and looking for some planets so that it could be special. We learned about the different colors of stars. Turns out this star was our sun and then facts about our planets were discussed. I picked up some new facts that I hadn't heard before. There are about 10 different movies, so it's likely when you go back you won't get a repeat performance. I really enjoyed our trip to the planetarium and Christen was so good to us!

Floor in the lobby

Original Star Ball

Current Star Ball in the dome

Controls for the dome

Uniview - Christen showing us how it works

More Uniview

The Bob Bullock Museum - Texas State History Museum

When researching different spots around Austin to visit, this museum kept coming up. Sadly I had never heard of it before this class. I did know that there was an IMAX theater in Austin, but had no idea that it was part of this museum. I purposely kept the IMAX theatre from my kids because I really thought that’s all I would hear about until it was time to go. When we got there, we got a nice surprise – the exhibits were free that day! So, we took a vote on which movie we all wanted to see. I’ve heard good things about the Texas Spirit Theater, but everyone voted to go see Born to be Wild, which was showing in the IMAX theatre. We started on the first floor all together looking at the shipwreck off the coast of Texas – we got to see a human skeleton which amazed my kids. They didn’t believe they were real bones at first! Then we moved to La Belle, the French colonization of Texas by La Salle. Next, we visited the First Encounter, which was the Native American exhibit. There was a cool tipi set up with a video about the Native Americans that occupied Central Texas. Upstairs, on the second floor, there were several things that caught my attention in some way or another. First, there was a small mention that pertained to a library. Apparently some women of the Dallas Shakespeare Club established the reading room in Dallas' Carnegie Library in 1903. Also, in 1929, women in Beaumont organized a traveling bookmobile for Tyrell Public Library. It was the first in Texas and one of the first in the nation. The next thing I found fascinating was learning about the secession of Texas and Texas becoming a state. I think I mentioned already in a previous post that I didn’t learn much in my Texas history class, so it was almost like reading all of this information for the first time. Of course I knew about it, but not to the extent that the museum information provided. This floor was by far my favorite! It was time for the movie, so we headed into the theater. This film was in 3D, so between the huge screen and the 3D effect, we all thought it was amazing. The story was nice, too. It was about two women in different parts of the world and their cause to care for orphaned animals. One took in the baby elephants whose mothers had been killed by poachers. The other took in orangutans who lost their mothers when the loggers would come in and tear down their homes. They raised the animals until they were fit to go back into the wild. We all enjoyed it! Now we had the third floor left to explore. I have to admit that by then we all had lost some steam and did not devote as much time to this floor. We did look at the trainer aircraft and talk about the differences between that plane and the commercial planes that we fly on. We flew by the oil exhibits and the ranching exhibits didn't hold our attention, either. We walked downstairs to see the timeline on the computer monitors that we had missed on the second floor. I pulled up JFK and we watched to snippet about his assassination. We got to see the front page of the Dallas paper the day after his death. Although I wasn't alive, having been through a nation in shock after recent events, I can imagine to a degree how people felt in the days following this. However, when discussing it with my children and to watch it have no effect on them at all seemed so strange. I guess I should be thankful that they do not yet know what tragedy is or feels like. That will come all too soon. We decided that we were done for the day and headed toward to the exit. My kids begged to stop by the gift shop on the way out. I said that was ok, but I sure wasn't in the mood to hear, "I need this. Please, may I have it. Will you buy this for me?" I told them they had 5 minutes as I prepared for the relentless pleading for souvenirs. At that moment, the fire alarm went off and we were forced to evacuate! I'm not sure the reason for the alarm, and I hope that everyone there was unharmed, but I had never been so pleased to hear a fire alarm!

Keuhne Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy Library - University of Texas

When we arrived, I noticed how small it was. I guess my expectations of a University library exceeded the size it actually was. It was cold and sterile, not welcoming at all. Based on my research online, I knew that it was an individual library rather than merely an extension of a larger library. The librarian behind the circulation desk was “busy” on the computer and when I approached her she immediately asked if I needed a bathroom – I guess she doesn’t get many families passing through. When I explained why I was there, she explained briefly that the library only contains books on physics, mathematics, and astronomy. I tried asking her a few other questions, but it was evident she had no interest in talking with me. I did ask her if she would mind if I took some pictures in which she happily replied that she didn’t have any problem with that. She seemed relieved to watch me walk away from the circulation desk. The first thing I noticed that there were individual pictures of planets taped to the top of the shelves that looked like they had been there since the 70s. My husband, being a physics teacher at the secondary level, swarmed to the bookshelves scouring through as many physics books as he could get his hands on. He pointed out that there was a section specifically for physics textbooks. Although the library was small, it was two stories. The first story was devoted to journals and the second floor housed the books. Most libraries have atlases sitting out somewhere, I’ve noticed. This library was no exception, although the atlases were made up of star charts rather than maps. There didn’t appear to be anything new in terms of technology. There were about 9 computers, a scanning station, and two copy machines. Only two people occupied the library while we were there. For the last 10 minutes, we were upstairs with a big book looking at the different galaxies and planets. The kids got a real kick out of that. I do wish that we had gone to a bigger library on campus, but I was really trying to appease my husband by taking him to the designated physics library!

Austin Museum of Art

I had never been to this particular museum before. I had been to their website before we got there, but to be perfectly honest, I had been to many museum's websites, so I couldn't quite remember which art museum this was. When my husband was in college years and years ago, he took an art appreciation class and we went on many field trips to different art museums. Of course we lived near Boston at the time, so we went to the Boston Museum of Art, the Guggenheim in NYC and a couple in Washington DC. It has been that long since I've been to an art museum, so when we reached the Austin Museum of Art (which I primarily picked based on location), I was shocked that it was such a small building nestled within other buildings. Then, I was even more surprised when we entered the building and saw just how small it really was. But, they say that big things come in small packages. I went in with a very open mind. The first thing we found was the children's area so that the kids would have something to do while we milled around the museum. There was an art area, a book area, and then an area where you could design your own chair or couch to make it comfortable to you. I thought this was ironic since the visiting exhibition at the museum was Good Design: Stories from herman miller. In this collection, we saw different designs of chairs, offices, graphic design, and modern furniture. My son spent a good thirty minutes deciding which pillows would go where to make the ultimate comfy chair! There were four case studies that were exhibited in the design collection. Case study #1 was about the design of a good, ergonomic chair. There were some plans to view, videos to watch showing people trying out the mock designs of the chair, and then the final product. This was the only case study that was somewhat interactive in that you could sit out and try out the chair. After sitting in the chair, there was a whiteboard that contained a survey in which you could take part. Case study #2 involved the design of office floorplans. This was especially interesting to me since I had just finished my ideal library floorplan and I understood and appreciated what it took to make everything fit in the space provided. The case study showed how Herman Miller's Action Office changed and improved upon an office with updating to storage, colors, organization and landscape. Case study #3 showed graphic design and how their products were marketed and advertised. This was mostly done through videos telling stories about the many graphic designers that helped out during the process. Finally, case #4 was the design of modern furniture. Furniture took on a new look following the Depression, so this was a showcase of Herman Miller's reinvention of home furniture. Most of these new styles took on a simple yet functional, space-saving designs. I have to admit that I was not a big fan of many of the designs. They were too "modern" for me.
The rest of the museum was occupied with art that appeared to be mostly donated by the artists. There were a few pieces by famous artists, such as Andy Warhol. All of the pieces were what I would consider to have a modern flair and were not necessarily my style. There were a few pieces of glass that I really enjoyed, though. My husband, though, enjoyed the museum thoroughly and commented that he would have spent a lot more time there if we had not been with him!

Library Science Collection at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission

What a find!!! When we were leaving the capitol building and heading back towards the parking garage. We noticed the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. There was no way we could walk past it without going inside! So, we went in and were greeted by a super nice receptionist. I told her who I was and why I was there. She immediately told me that I needed to go up to the 4th floor to the library science collection. I wasn't sure what to expect. When we got to the room that held this collection, I wasn't real sure what I was looking for. Then I saw Christina Manz. I told her why I was there and she grew a large smile. She explained that this was essentially the librarian's library. They are a resource for professional materials and information to help develop, maintain, and grow libraries. This collection is also a perfect resource for library science students. Christina mentioned that any time we needed information and/or help with anything to call her and she can gather information and send it to us. In addition to the shelves and shelves of books, they provide continuing education opportunities for librarians. They have DVDs, webcasts, and live satellite teleconferences that librarians can obtain and use for staff development or CE credits. There are online courses addressing advocacy, public relations, fundraising, e-referencing services, youth programs, and more being offered through the Texas State Library. Also available are webinars on various topics. This is definitely a resource that needs to be shared with prospective librarians! The website for services for librarians is www.tsl.state.tx.us/librarians
Also, the phone number for Christina is 800-252-9386. What a gem!!