Ms. Nancy's Library & Technology Blog

* They’re air-conditioned.

* The librarians are your friends.

Are you reading a bunch this summer? I hope so!

— Ms. Nancy

A friend forwarded this link, and this jumps off the page:

“Back at the Rescue Our Librarians Club, we did some calculations. Assuming that wages and benefits for a librarian average $75,000 a year, and that there are 95,000 public schools in the United States, the government would have to find $7,125,000,000 to ensure a librarian for every school.

And it is. I directed the children to the website The Cost of War (costofwar.com), where we discovered that the United States spends nearly $300 million daily on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We figured out that funding all those librarians for a year was equivalent to 25 days of war spending.”

“Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.”
— John Lennon

“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” — Howard Zinn

“I Am” Poem

— anon.

Find out more about summer reading with Multnomah County libraries here (for kids) and here (for adults); for summer reading with Washington County libraries, click here.

It’s almost summer…

— Ms. Nancy

Summer Song
by William Carlos Williams

“Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile
at this
brilliant, dew-moistened
summer morning,—
a detached
sleepily indifferent
smile, a
wanderer’s smile,—
if I should
buy a shirt
your color and
put on a necktie
sky-blue
where would they carry me?”

… you guys are the best. Private note to the 8th graders: Rock high school, all right? Just rock it. I know you’ll do great. I’ll be here if you want to stop by and say hi.

— Ms. Nancy

“I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.”
— Jose Ortega Y Gasset, philosopher and essayist (1883-1955)

“When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”
– Ignatius Reilly in “Confederacy of Dunces”