You may wonder what the logic is behind a patron's order of operations

The Story:  I was at the reference desk in the evening, by myself, about an hour before closing time.  I get a call from a mother, looking for her child that she's supposed to pick up here.  Now, the teen and adult areas are on the same level, so I expected the child to be a teenager.  I paged the name she told me, and when no one came to the desk, I got back on the phone and asked for a description.  I then find out she's looking for a nine-year-old.  Armed with this new information, myself and another librarian who was technically off the clock -until he heard there was a missing child- went on a search of the entire building and grounds.  After no such child was found, I get back on the phone with the mother, who requests I page her son again.  I do, to no avail, and we go searching the library and grounds again.  The following conversation then takes place:
Me:  I'm sorry, but we can't find anyone matching your son's description anywhere in the library or parking lot.
Her:  Oh, this is not good.
Me:  Does he have a cell phone on him?
Her:  Yes.
Me:  And I assume he's not picking up when you call him?
Her:  I actually haven't tried calling him yet.

Image credit:  Stolen from the Google; Sorry.

The Lesson:  Do I even need to say anything?  I mean, why bother giving your 9-year-old a cell phone if you're not going to use it?  The only lesson I can get out of this is don't be afraid to ask what should be a stupid question, and ask it early so you don't waste nearly half an hour of your time looking for someone you'll never find.  We never did get a call back from the lady, so I'm presuming she found her kid.

The Resources:  I can't honestly even think of anything that would be helpful in preparing for this situation, or dealing with it.  If you can, feel free to share them in the comments.

One man's trash...

...is still trash.

The Story:  The little bus pictured above had seen better days.  The steering wheel was broken, there were other moving parts that had long ago fallen off, paint was faded in many places, things that shouldn't move did, things that should move didn't...in short, it was a wreck.  It took a long time to find something to replace it, because the company that made it didn't make anything even remotely resembling it anymore, and pretty much every other toy vehicle was either cheap plastic or some version of a powerwheels car.  Finally, I find the wooden firetruck pictured below.

It's cute, and new, and roughly the same size and does most of the same stuff.  Sure, it's a little smaller and lighter, but there really isn't anything else out there exactly like the bus.  The plan was to just switch them when nobody was around, because as I had learned from the raccoon saga, children and/or parents don't like to see change in the library playscape.  There was a miscommunication when I talked to the maintenance person whose job it was to put this thing together and put it in the play area.  He thought we were just adding one, and put it out during the daytime with families around.  Well, shit.  Now I had to explain to him that there really wasn't room in the play area for two vehicles, and the whole reason for getting the firetruck was to get rid of the bus.  And so, he gets rid of the bus while people are around, which is miscommunication #2.  One of the parents starts grilling me about why we're getting rid of the bus, clearly ignoring anything I say about how broken it is.  Then he asks what we're doing with it, which is not an answer he wants to hear.  Finally, I tell him that if he likes it so much he can have it, because we're just putting it in the dumpster anyway.  He starts asking again if we can't donate it anywhere, and I tell him that other places don't want our broken toys any more than we do.  Again, I offer him the bus.  He declines again, but spends the next 20 minutes talking very loudly to anyone in the children's room who will listen about what a great travesty it is, what a great loss, to get rid of one stupid, broken toy.

He finally leaves, and the custodian brings the bus out to the dumpster with my help (it's awkward, but not heavy).  Before he can put it in, two contractors who are there working on the lights or something outside the building see us walking by and one of them asks, "Are you getting rid of that?" and when I answer that we are, and he can have it if he wants, he's just as baffled as the dad from earlier.  We leave it next to the dumpster and tell him he's got until the library closes to pick it up and take it home if he wants it, because then it has to get tossed.  Lo and behold, it's still sitting there when we open the next morning, and I make sure that the bus gets thrown out.

The Lesson:  Like with the raccoon, never change the library environment or get rid of things when there are witnesses.  While nobody will actually claim responsibility or ownership of your castoffs, there will be plenty of people who will be appalled that you're throwing away something that is broken and no longer useful.

The Resources:  It would be a little cheeky, but one could recommend some good books about decluttering your life to some of the patrons who insist that everything has value.  Also, the post about the raccoon has some good books on accepting the loss of toys for children.  Alternately, this one is pretty much just about experience.  Also, if you're curious about the firetruck, here's where I got it.

You may get screamed at about important things like newspapers

The Story:  It was just another usual morning of opening the library. We open at 9 am, so that's when most of the shifts start with the exception of a few 8:45 people who are there first to open the important things. Part of the reference department's daily routine is to receive the newspapers for the day, stamp them, and put them out in the public periodical area. Usually, this happens by 9:30. The book drop would come in around 9:10, 9:15 and that's where the newspapers are. The circulation staff usually unloads the book drop stuff and then sends up the newspapers when they can.

On this particular day, it was about 9:15, 9:20 when a man stormed up to the reference desk and began screaming "WHERE ARE THE NEWSPAPERS?! IT'S ALMOST 9:30 AM. THIS IS RIDICULOUS. EVERY OTHER LIBRARY HAS THE PAPERS OUT AT 9 AM!!!!". I had happened to have the newspapers ready and stamped but was waiting for my co-worker to be off the phone with a patron so I could leave the desk. We tried to calm him down, but he did not want to hear it. I held out all of the newspapers to him. I was making it rain news all over this guy, and he just did not care. He kept screaming and yelling and finally just stormed out of the library. It was so terrible that other patrons in the library apologized to us FOR him. What kind of life do you live where you go ballistic over newspapers at a library?

The Lesson: Put the papers out at 9am, damnit, or else there will be hell to pay from that one guy. But really...the lesson here is that you can't please everyone and most likely, there was more going on with him than the damn newspapers so try to shrug it off!

You may wind up playing the role of tech support for your boss

The Story:  There isn't really just one story here, so I'm going to share a few of them.  Now, I'm not saying that everyone has to be an expert at all technology all the time.  I'm not even saying that everyone has to know all the basics, because even those change just often enough to be confusing (thanks, Windows 8 & 10).  However, it is still kind of funny when the person signing your time sheet calls you into their office, and you're starting to do that what-could-I-possibly-be-in-trouble-for thought process, and they ask you for help with their computer.  Relief washes over you, but just temporarily, because you have no idea what they're going to ask you and if you'll actually be able to answer it.  So, you just buck up and do your best, and if you can't answer it offhand, you mess around with the program until you do, or else you google it.  It can be tough to keep your cool when your supervisor is looking over your shoulder, expecting you to be a computer wiz and you don't really know what you're doing, but you don't really have a choice -- fake it 'til you make it.  Here are some questions we've answered for our various bosses over the years:

• How do I print the attachment to this email?  It's asking me to sign in, but I thought I already was.
• Here are the answers to my security questions and my iPad.  Can you sit at my email and reset my password for this app?
• (To an actual technical support agent on the phone)  I don't understand what it is you're telling me to do, so hold on.  I'm going to get one of my more technical employees to talk to you.
• How do I share this? (on facebook)
• Do we get YouTube here? (as if it's a premium channel or something)
• I want these in alphabetical order but I don't want to type them all again.  (in Excel)
• How do people still get on our website when the power is out?
• What's a hashtag?
• Okay, this is already getting too technical.  Just tell me if we can do it and how much time it will take.  I don't need to understand the problem; I just need to know if there's a solution.
• I'm trying to save this attachment on my phone, but I can't find the folder to put it in.
• This picture is way too small.  Can you blow it up or do I have to call them and tell them to send me a bigger one?  (when looking at a thumbnail at the bottom of an email)
• What is even the point of twitter?
• Why won't this print?
• The internet is broken.

The Lesson:  While we all respect our bosses and generally presume they know more about most things than we do, it's nice to be reminded sometimes that everyone's human, and that nobody can possibly know everything.  The best thing to do in this case is to not act like it's weird, even if you feel weird giving technical advice to your superior, and if possible, explain the problem so that they can understand it themselves next time. Just be prepared to be unprepared to answer questions in the future.

The Resources:  Google.  Long gone are the days when librarians think google is the devil (despite some of their more questionable monitoring practices and algorithms).  Sure, it's not the answer for everything, but for easy reference questions and technological advice, any internet search engine (Even Bing and Yahoo) is going to probably get you a short answer to an acute problem.  For learning whole subjects, I think books are still the way to go, but web searches have saved my butt on a number of occasions.

You may experience a terrible Xbox fail

The Story:  There you are, setting up for a brand new video game program where you are debuting the library's new Xbox One. You're excited. You think this is going to be awesome. The teens are going to think this is the coolest thing ever. You plug in the Xbox and hook everything up to the projector and sound system. You turn on the Xbox and then you see it:

Photo Credit: Huffington Post

Why. Why does a brand new Xbox need to update itself? Why is this taking so long? What is life? These are the things you start asking yourself in that pre-program crisis mode. The update ended up taking up a lot of the program time. When everything was finally all set and updated, I put in Fallout 4 just to have none of the teens want to play because it's a single player game. They are shutting off each others controllers. They are calling each other names. They aren't having fun, you aren't having fun, and you feel like the whole thing is a disaster. You think about throwing the Xbox out the window, but decide against it because a. you want to keep your job and b. your library spent good money on that Xbox and you want to keep your job.

One of my ex-supervisors would always tell me "This is a library. It's not brain surgery. No one is going to die if something goes wrong". It is days like these when I have to remind myself of that.

The Lesson: If you purchase any sort of game system for your library and are planning to do a program, make sure any updates that might occur are already taken care of before the program...even if you had already turned it on and done a trial run of the setup a few days beforehand. Choose a multi-player game even if it's not one of the latest and greatest titles. I was under the impression that the teens would want to see one of the newer games and watch each other play as I've witnessed a lot of my own friends do but that's not what these teens wanted at all. They probably wanted to play each other in some violent game where they can kill each other and laugh at each others failures. You know, the way friends do. :)

Resources: Xbox's support website is useful in troubleshooting issues.

Unsolvable Mysteries: The case of the missing DVDs

If only these DVDs could talk...what a story they would have to tell.  Let me set the scene for you.

It was a dark and stormy night...

Wait that's not right.  Let me try again.

Once upon a time...

That doesn't sound right either.  I guess I'll just cut to the chase, then.

In my library, we have been having a rash of missing and mixed-up DVDs for about a month and a half now, as if some elf is going through the section when nobody's looking, rearranging which DVDs go in which cases, and removing some of them all together.  We never saw anyone over there looking suspicious, and while some of the mix-ups were clearly the same patron, there were far too many of them not connected to the same patron's record for it to be solely them.

Then one day, we get the following stack of disks in the book drop, in a ziplock bag - no note, no cases, nothing.

There were thirty DVDs there, all children's movies, and most of them were ours.  There were three oddballs, though.  Movies without cases from other libraries, but not just any libraries -- libraries from another state.  We're not even particularly close to the state border, either.  Also, some of the movies we got back were missing for so long that we deleted or reordered them.  Whatever has been going on, it has a history longer than our knowledge of it.  It's all very strange.

Popular theories include:  a child stealing DVDs for kicks and a parent discovering the stash while cleaning their room and being too embarrassed to return the DVDs in person and force the child to apologize, someone who doesn't understand how borrowing works at the library, and aliens trying to learn more about Earth's history before they decide if we're a good candidate for contact.  None of these really explain the out-of-state ones, though.  We'll never know what really happened, but if you've got some interesting ideas on the subject, we'd love to hear them in the comments.

Anyway, it's now a side-project to make new cases and/or catalog records for the prodigal DVDs, re-unite known empties with returns, and hunt down empty cases we didn't even know were missing their movies.  The out-of-state libraries in question will also be receiving a mysterious package soon with their wayward movies nestled inside, and a note explaining their bizarre circumstances of return, causing more librarians to puzzle over this unsolvable mystery.

You may wind up plotting the disappearance of a giant stuffed raccoon.

The Story:  Sometimes, a patient just can't be saved.  This giant stuffed raccoon probably started his days in a carnival game booth, but he made his way to the library after his useful life in a child's playroom was over.  Here, he was loved and played with and cherished by so many tiny hearts and hands.  This raccoon was a favorite the day he appeared in the play house.  But you know what they say:  "The candle that burns brightest burns shortest".  And so it was for our dear friend Raccoon.  His first injury was sustained after less than a month in the preschool area, but luckily our wonderful stuffed animal veterinarian was able to fix him up.  Not two weeks later, he had another injury, and was bleeding tiny foam beads all over the place.  Doctor Becka again to the rescue.  This pattern continues for the better part of nine months, until one day his injuries are so severe that he'll never recover.

As we lay the beloved raccoon to rest, we realize that we cannot just toss him in the already-full dumpster in broad daylight, top hat poking out for all the children to see as their parents pull into the parking lot.  This would cause an uproar.  So a plan is made, and with the assistance of the head custodian, we dispose of the body in the dead of night the following week.  The dumpster's been freshly emptied, and there is a cart of rejected booksale donations to go on top, covering up the dastardly deed.  For several days following the Raccoon's disappearance, we get questions from children about "When will Raccoon be back from the stuffed animal hospital?", and with an uneasy glance to the side counter behind which he rests while awaiting burial, we give a range of answers, none of them the whole truth.

The Lesson:  In a profession based on truth-seeking, sometimes a white lie is necessary.  When possible, we tried to tell the parents in some euphemistic way that the raccoon wasn't coming back, and thus let them have the conversation with their children at a time that they can handle it because they aren't running from storytime to toddler yoga to the grocery store.  Eventually, the kids stopped asking about the raccoon, and none seem traumatized, so mission accomplished.

Resources:  What kind of resources are there even in existence for this type of thing?  For librarians dealing with this situation, I don't know, probably not many.  But for parents, there are a host of good children's books dealing with getting rid of an old blanket or worn-out stuffed animal, so these might come in handy in your library if you're ever dealing with a similar situation.

Jonathan and the big blue boat / Philip C. Stead.
Blanket and bear, a remarkable pair / by L.J.R. Kelly ; illustrated by Yoko Tanaka
Franklin's blanket / Paulette Bourgeois, Brenda Clark
Too many toys! / Heidi Deedman
The velveteen rabbit, or, How toys become real / by Margery Williams
Maya's blanket / story, Monica Brown ; illustrations, David Diaz
The red woolen blanket / Bob Graham
Geraldine's blanket / Holly Keller
Turtle and me / Robie H. Harris ; illustrated by Tor Freeman

And if the child is really that upset, the parent might want to treat the loss of this toy like an actual death in the family, and there are a ton of children's books on that topic.  One I love that could be taken literally or figuratively is about a boy whose robot just keeps slowing down until it stops.  This is a grieving book for children about death, but since it is about a robot/toy, it may resonate with children missing their much-loved toy that just couldn't be saved.

Rafa was my robot / by Alexandra Dellevoet ; art by Ken Turner

You may find books that are old enough to be your mother

Weeding is always a fun time for me.  It feels so liberating and productive to cull the herd, trim the fat, impose my vision of a perfect and relevant collection upon the existing shelves, and just plain throw shit out.  There are many wonderful weeding resources out there, and this is one of the things they taught most of us very well in library school.  However, I find myself continually unprepared for some of the things that manage to somehow stay on the shelves well past their useful life (although some books make it hard to imagine that they had a useful life at all).  There are some egregiously racist titles that I wish I had snapped pictures of early on in my career, just for the shock value of them, but alas, I was not so far-sighted as to see myself wanting to share these crimes against collection development with the world.  Be heartened to know that in a millennium starting with "20" there was a library in the world with such titles as, "How to Speak Black" (an actual dictionary/language resource), and "A Negro's Guide to Manners" still in circulation.

For now, though, let me share some examples of some great discards from a very recent weeding project.

One of the first books I would like to draw your attention to is this collection of national anthems from 1967.

Let's just take in this cover for a moment.  Mono-colored flags in a crude, no doubt intended to be "minimalist" or some nonsense, illustration.  Doesn't it just cry out to be picked up and read?  Also, let's not forget that this was in the children's collection.  Really high-interest-level stuff here.

There are a dozen African nations that have come into their own since this book was published, nine from the Americas, thirteen from Asia, up to nine from Europe, almost all of Oceania, and three others considered "transcontinental".  Not to mention all of the territories and civil wars and borders that change daily in Africa and the Middle East.  So, if you're going to have a book on national anthems, maybe one that includes all the current 195-ish recognized nations would be a good start.

And for our bonus feature, let's take a look at some of the dated language on this table of contents.  Who calls Asia "The Orient" anymore?

Moving on.

Our next book is called, "Let's Do Fingerplays" and it's from 1962.  Now, fingerplays themselves don't necessarily go out of style.  I mean, we all know the Itsy-Bitsy Spider, but really, who says "water spout"?  Who even knows what it is anymore?  We all just say "gutter".  Anyway, the problem is not with the timeless content here, but every decade or so, things like this could use a new presentation.  Like with pages that aren't yellow and smelly, and illustrations that aren't so tragic.

Again with the monocolor.  Of course, adults would be using this book rather than children by themselves, but that's no excuse for a bad cover.

Dominion of Canada?  Nobody's used that ever in my lifetime that I can recall.  I had to look it up.

I said I wasn't against the content, but really, who wants to sing this strange song about a metronome?  Kids who are of the fingerplay age don't really know what one is yet.

And the piéce de résistance:  this illustration.  It looks like the child is demented and breaking the neck of her baby doll, which makes the words of this rhyme, "Good Little Mother" a little bit macabre.

And the oldest book we deleted in this round of weeding was a book of folksongs for children from 1948.  I'm sure some of the songs have dwindled in popularity since then.

Also, lithographed in the USA.  Not printed.  I'm not really sure why they specifically said "lithographed".  And I'm pretty sure they weren't using the modern offset lithography that printing these days often uses.  When the technology used to create the book in your hands no longer exists, or is reserved for fine art students, it's maybe a sign to chuck it.

Many of these books are old enough to be my mother.  Many of them have seen war, revolution, the fall of the Soviet Union, and still they remain on the shelf, oblivious, waiting in vain to be read by someone and made useful again.  These books may also pre-date the existence of frisbees, cable television, lint rollers, barcodes, lasers, spandex, and coolers.  What I find crazy is that someone had to add a barcode to each of these books, create a computerized record for it, and add it to the system way back in the '80s or '90s or whenever the library went digital.  A lot has happened since 1948, and nobody anywhere along the way thought, "Maybe these books aren't worth the trouble".

This probably won't be the only making-fun-of-weeded-books post that I do, because clearly, if books like this are still out there, I've got a lot more collection development to do.

You may wind up being a dog wrangler and community sleuth

The Story:  Here I am, minding my own business, womanning the desk on a slow weekday morning, when a golden bundle of fur streaks across the library, heading straight for the preschool play area.  Up I jump in a flash and I find the dog sniffing and briskly walking through the area.  It goes up to a couple of people but then quickly turns away, as if they're not what it's looking for.  I slowly approach it once it stops for a minute, but then it bolts across to the other side of the children's room.  It slows down and walks down an aisle of non-fiction towards me, and I crouch low and try to coax it towards me.  It comes up to me, sniffs me, and sits down.  I see it's got a collar with several tags, and then it's fairly easy to grab it by the collar and walk with it into the administrator's office, which happens to be one of the only rooms with a closable door.

Myself and my two bosses start chasing down leads, while the dog sits herself on the floor and calmly enjoys being pet while we read off tag information.  Her name, apparently, is Grace Louise.  One of the tags leads to a phone that is out of service.  The next one is an online lost pet service, and eventually leads to a shelter in the South that adopted the dog to its owner up here in New England, and they have the same old phone number as we do.  They reveal, however, that the dog was well-cared-for down there until its owner died and it was surrendered to their shelter before being fostered then adopted up north.  The third tag leads to a local vet, who tells us that the owner up here is deceased, and they don't know who is currently caring for the dog.  We get the former owner's name from the vet and call the police to see if they know who next-of-kin is and if they might be able to track down the dog's new caretaker.  We then realize that this is the exact same dog that ran through the library a few months ago with its now-deceased owner on its heels after she had gotten loose during a walk.  This dog got loose and came to the library several times over the years, according to my coworkers, who took turns coming in to the office to pet the dog while we worked on finding its caretaker, though this was the first time it happened on my watch with this particular dog.

The owner's death was a well-known incident in town, as it was a fatal hit-and-run that people were still talking about in its own right.  We go on facebook, of all places, on a well-trafficked community forum on there, and find out who is caring for the animals from comments on the thread about the crash.  Then animal control comes and gets Grace Louise and confirms that they also believe they know who is taking care of her, and it is the neighbor we identified from the forums.  So, off they go to reunite this poor, sweet dog with owner #3.  The shelter down south offered to take the dog back to one of its northern partner shelters and foster it/find it a new home, if we did not locate the owners or it didn't work out for whatever reason.  Hopefully, that won't be necessary.

The Lesson:  Keep up with local news.  Though print newspapers are slowly dying, town papers and related websites are still heavily read in most places; it doesn't matter if you are in a big city or small town.  People still want to know what's going on around them, and they will often flock to online forums to talk about it as well.  As soon as we got a name, we recognized it from the headlines, and knew we needed to adjust our approach.  Even if you don't live in the same town as you work in, take some time to at least skim the newspaper.  Fifteen minutes or so a week of reading on the clock is perfectly justifiable professional development, because you never know when community connections will come in handy.

Learn how to behave around stray/lost/frightened animals.  I read up later about how to catch a skittish dog, and while some of it may make you look and feel foolish, there are some basic principles there that make sense.  When I was running at the dog, it also ran.  When I stopped moving and crouched, I was no longer a threat, and it approached me.  This particular dog was very social and seemed to think the running was a game rather than fleeing in fear of me, but still.  Me changing my behavior cued the dog to change hers.  Obviously every situation is different, but it helps to be able to get a dog to come to you.  A dog will pretty much always be able to outrun you; they've got twice as many legs, and have a very low likelihood of wearing movement-restricting clothing.

Expect the unexpected.  This particular instance happened in a public library setting, but I have seen dogs running amuck in university libraries too, albeit less frequently.  Any place with automatic doors has the potential for animals to let themselves in.

Resources:
Local newspaper
Facebook/local online forum
Pet tags and pet-location services, such as 24PetWatch
How to behave around lost pets
How to catch a stray dog

You may wind up with flour on your ass

The story:  This was the scene the other day in the children's room as I frantically mixed salt dough to prepare for this weekend's special craft program.  I had help from one of my library assistants who is super-crafty, which is a good thing, because I probably would have taken four times as long and messed it up somehow had I done it on my own.  And here's why:  I was multi-tasking, badly.

Due to scheduling abnormalities, I would have no other time to make this stuff for the weekend, and I would also have no other time to have a meeting with my cataloger, and I also would have no other time to set up for an after school program that day.  So, all of this had to happen at once.

We started mixing the salt dough (recipe here), and I very quickly realized that I was ill-dressed for the occasion.  I had decided to wear a black pencil skirt that day, completely forgetting what I'd be doing.  My hands were gooped up with dough and flour and there was already a white spot on my skirt, so I went to get an apron, thinking I'd prevent further mess to my outfit.  I tied the apron on myself, and only when it was too late did I realize that in tying it behind me I deposited further flour mess onto my backside, and that trying to wipe it off with dirty hands would only make it worse.  So, to Hell with it.  I went back to the children's room, and mixed some more dough, and had a very professional, in-depth conversation with our new cataloger about my cataloging philosophy and specific examples of inconsistencies and inaccuracies that needed remedying.  We discussed how many decimal places a children's non-fiction book really needs, whether climate change belongs in the three hundreds or five hundreds, and when a personal account crosses over into biography...all while my coworkers politely ignored the smear on my rear.

And then the leader of the after school program walks up, and has to awkwardly shake my floury hand.

The Lesson:  Plan your schedule, have extra clothing and an apron at work (and actually remember to change into it BEFORE you get messy), think about asking for help before you make an even bigger mess, and don't get phased by a little white powder.  I took several children's literature classes in library school, and while we touched on children's programming, I never really foresaw myself as a children's librarian, so if there were classes on crafting (I don't think there were), I missed them.  I think my biggest realization throughout my career is exactly how physically messy this job can be.  Luckily, I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty.  (Or my skirt for that matter.)

Resources:  
Salt dough recipe
Not that you don't already have your own Dewey schedules, but here:
000
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900

What's it all about?

Library school taught us many things about being a librarian.  However, the field is always changing, and there are new things that we'd never dream were going to be part of our job descriptions when we started studying for our MLS/MLIS.  There are also things that we probably should have been taught, but somehow or another, those things slipped through the cracks in the education system.  And then there are the un-teachable things, the interactions and personal experiences that shape how we view the world and our profession.  In this blog, myself and other librarians hope to chronicle some of these experiences to help current and future librarians be prepared for the road ahead.  Also, everybody needs to vent and have a good laugh about what they do for a living, and this can be the place for that also.  If you've got an experience you'd like to share, let us know, because we'd love for this to become a collective blog, widening the breadth and deepening the depth of what we can teach and learn.