Teaching with Primary Sources: How can we do research with political cartoons? | Brooklyn Public Library

Politics | Cartoons | Information literacy | Research Skills

by Jen Hoyer | Jun 20, 2018 

 

 

 Brooklyn Connections is the education outreach program in the Brooklyn Collection. It focuses on cultivating 21st Century learning skills in students and supporting teachers on the incorporation of archives materials into curricula. This blog post is part of a series from the Brooklyn Connections team, sharing skills and ideas for using archives primary source material in the classroom. Using primary sources in the classroom shows us that we can access history through many different formats as long as we are grounded in historical thinking. 

The Brooklyn Connections team loves engaging with teachers for regular Professional Learning events, and our recent workshop at Plymouth Church gave us an opportunity to learn about the role that this institution played in Abolition and Civil War-era Brooklyn. While exploring the Brooklyn Collection for primary sources that we could share, we were excited to find political cartoons about our subject. We wanted to share some of our ideas on how students can learn to work with political cartoons. We think that using political cartoons in the classroom is an engaging and exciting starting point that shifts away from textbooks and classroom lectures while still scaffolding the same historical information. Read more...

Istanbul’s Libraries: A Refuge in Uncertain Times

Public Libraries | Turkey | Advocacy | Libraries abroad

By Kaya Genç

Last month, the Turkish Statistical Institute announced that the number of public library memberships in Turkey increased by 24.1 percent in 2016, compared to the previous year. In a time of terror, political uncertainty, and a coup attempt, Turks took refuge in libraries.


Some Istanbul libraries owe their existence to taxes; others to banks; one to an English monarch. SALT is located in the previous headquarters of the Ottoman Bank, which was founded in 1856 on the orders of Queen Victoria, a friend of the westernizing Sultan Abdulmecid. The building opened at a time when Turkish-British commercial ties were at their peak. Today, its library houses 110,000 books. Last year, it served more than 47,000  readers.

On a recent weekday the library was bustling with bright-eyed readers, and every seat were occupied. A hush fell over after I entered the reading room. On a desk by the entrance, a young man pored over a book; he checked a page number, and he typed a footnote to his thesis; in the little garden outside, two young girls smoked rollies. SALT is paid for by Garanti, a private Turkish bank. This is part of a trend. Read more...

Eulogy for the Information Age: The Future is Impact Not Access

New Librarianship | Impact | Access |

 RD Lankes

Library hosting workshops on ‘adulting’ | Heather Laura Clarke | 05-14-20107

Public libraries | Library services | Adult education |Adulting

Halifax Public Libraries found they were serving lots of people from most age ranges and life experiences, but weren’t seeing many “new adults” come through the library doors. Their adulting series has changed that. (123RF) 

 

 

Libraries across the HRM offer programming for babies, kids, teens, adults and seniors, but Jocelyn Covert saw that there was a noticeable absence of one particular demographic.

“We have lots of families with young children, and lots of seniors, but there’s this entire age range — university through the early 20s — we don’t get to see very much,” says Covert, youth service librarian with the Bedford Library.

In library lingo, this demographic is referred to as “new adults.” No one could figure out how to get these young people through the doors until Covert came up with the idea for a How to Adult series.

“Talking about ‘adulting’ or saying you ‘just can’t adult today’ has become a trending theme, and we’re always searching for opportunities to bring in new users, so I just thought I could put the two together,” says Covert. Read more...