Kimberly Hirsh

I’m attending the #FanLIS2025 Symposium today and will be live-blogging!

Super exciting opportunity shared at #FanLIS2025, the British Library and the University of Glasgow are sponsoring a PhD student to explore the publication, collection and preservation activities of online fan communities and fan archives. Great topic at a great university!

Ludi Price is introducing the fifth FanLIS Symposium. #FanLIS2025 doesn’t have a particular theme. Ludi asks how are things different in FanLIS now than five years ago? (A note on names and titles: I’m using first names for people I know personally, titles/last names for people I don’t.)

First up, Susrita Das with Food, fan art, and preserving a moment in time: a case study of the fandom-themed cafe ecosystem as alternative memory institution. #FanLIS2025

Das is investigating cafes as a method of cross-cultural fandom for Indian fans of Korean entertainment. #FanLIS2025

Today I’m attending my first Association of Independent School Librarians institute, Booked for the Day: Reading, Reflection, and Revitalization. I’m planning to live-blog. Posts should automatically appear on Bluesky & Mastodon.

📚💬 “…surely ghosts will follow wherever there is bad record keeping.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻

Starting off #aisl25 with Deborah Salyer talking about What’s New in Books for Children.

Deborah introduced Kari Lavelle’s Butt Or Face? series.

Looking at highly awarded, favorite authors and illustrators, variety of genres, cultural representation, and fan favorites. #aisl25

Deborah shares 2 books about whale falls, providing an environment for an ecosystem after a whale dies. These could be good for lateral reading, having students read one and then the other. [Life After Whale] (https://school.teachingbooks.net/tb.cgi?tid=94746) and Whale Fall. #aisl25

Deborah says there is a trend of middle grade books with parents/adults having mental illness and kids having to keep secrets to keep siblings together. #aisl25

Prolific author Kate DiCamillo’s Orris and Timble series has a new book coming soon. #aisl25

Deborah suggests pairing informational texts with graphic novels. For example, kids who love Ben Clanton’s Narwhal and Jelly series might be interested in Candace Fleming’s Narwhal: Unicorn of the Arctic. #aisl25

Deborah works as a trainer for Teaching Books, which includes a Book Resume for each title that librarians can use to justify inclusion of books in their collection, especially helpful responding to book challenges. #aisl25

Next up at #aisl25, Building Manga Collections Students Will Love with Suzie Bergstrom.

There’s so much info in this manga session that I can’t really keep up with live-blogging! #aisl25

📚💬 “Here, then, is a central paradox in the way that ghosts work: to turn the living into ghosts is to empty them out, rob them of something vital; to keep the dead alive as ghosts is to fill them up with memory and history, to keep alive a thing that would otherwise be lost.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, writing about the dissonance between Richmond’s history as the home of slave trade and torture and the fact that all Richmond’s ghosts are white 👻

Finished reading: Kiss the Girl by Zoraida Córdova 📚

This is such a perfect move of Disney’s The Little Mermaid to contemporary romance. There is so much perfection to be had here, such magic work taking movie moments and making them part of our world. If you’re an Ariel person, you should read it.

📚💬 “Romantic heroes are the greatest cryptids of all.” Zoraida Córdova, Kiss the Girl 🧜‍♀️

North Carolinians, use this tool from EveryLibrary to contact your state senator about H636, a bill that “threatens student rights, undermines local control of school libraries, and risks costly censorship battles across the state.” I’ll try to do a detailed breakdown of the bill soon. 📚

Finished reading: By the Book by Jasmine Guillory 📚

A sweet Beauty and the Beast retelling.

📚💬 “Ghosts, you could say, flock to women left alone.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻

“If Emerson could find God in a forest, why couldn’t a medium find departed loved ones in a darkened room?” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻

📚💬 “The contemporary attitude toward Spiritualism as a particularly ridiculous belief stems in no small part from the misogyny with which it was attacked in the second half of the nineteenth century.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻