I have 2 new reviews available at Educational Media Reviews Online:

• Jack Kerouac: Le Sel de la Semaine
• The Suzuki Diaries: Sustainability in Action

You can see all my EMRO Reviews here.

Tying Your Own Shoes portrays 4 people with Down Syndrome. Shira Avni’s film mixes interviews with animation and emphasizes the independence and artistic interests of the 4 interviewees as well as their frustrations with dealing with people’s lack of understanding regarding living with Down Syndrome.

Tying Your Own Shoes is a short film (about 16 minutes) so these portraits are very cursory.  Unfortunately, these brief portraits feel slight and left me wanting to know about these people. The film works as a brief introduction to what living with Down Syndrome is like and provides an enlightened view of the condition. Unfortunately, it does present any new information to anyone other than those totally unfamiliar with the topic. Because of this basic approach, the short run time, and the animation, Tying Your Own Shoes seems more appropriate for a younger audience. That’s not a criticism of the film, just a concern of its appropriateness for the Notable Videos for Adults list.

The film implies that the animation was done by the 4 interviewees; however the end credits reveals three additional animators, leaving one to wonder how much of the animation was done by the individuals portrayed in the film.

Note: I have started a page to list all the 2011 films.

My involvement with the American Library Association’s Video Round Table will be keeping me busy for the foreseeable future. As I mentioned last week, the program I helped put together as the chair of the Program Committee is coming up in a couple of weeks at ALA’s annual conference.

I also have volunteered to serve for another 2 years on the Notable Videos for Adults Committee and the films we will be reviewing are starting to come in. I really enjoyed being on the committee the past two years even though it’s a big time commitment. For the past two years, I have blogged about most of the movies I viewed (2009 and 2010). I debated whether or not I wanted to blog about the films again this year. My hesitation stems from the fact that I have never been able to keep up with posts for all the movies I watch. But looking back at the posts, I realize that they have been helpful to me at least when the time comes to deliberate about the films and help select a list. And just because I haven’t been able to keep up with the posts in the past doesn’t mean I won’t be able to this year, right?

And, finally, I have been elected as the incoming Vice Chair/Chair Elect for the Video Round Table with my tenure as Vice Chair beginning on July 1. I look forward to serving in this capacity as I have found my involvement with the Round Table these past few years very rewarding and really enjoy working with the other members.

I am pleased to announced that the Video Round Table Program for the ALA Annual Conference is all set:

Video Makes the Library Star: Library-Created Visual Media

Sunday, June 27

10:30 am – 12 noon

Mayflower Renaissance – Colonial Room

1127 Connecticut Avenue Northwest

Washington, DC

The program will feature creators of library-related visual media. Librarians who have used their videos for promotion or instruction will share their experiences and discuss things to consider before launching a video production project.

The speakers include:

• Dee Vazquez, Community Engagement and Outreach Officer for the Pikes Peak Library District

• Matt Harp, Digital Library Production Manager, and Mimmo Bonanni, Digital Projects Librarian from Arizona State University Libraries.

• Michael Porter, librarian, presenter, author, practical technology fan, and PEZ collector.

I am quite thrilled with the speakers we have been able to schedule. The work they’ve done on creating their videos is quite impressive and I am looking forward to hearing about their experiences with creating these videos.

I feel very fortune to have had the opportunity to chair the VRT Program Committee and thank the other members:

Steve Brantley, Reference Librarian and Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago
Tracy Montri, AV Department Manager at Toledo-Lucas County Public Library
Juliana Nykolaiszyn, Visiting Assistant Professor at Oklahoma Oral History Research Program
Danette Pachtner, Film & Video Librarian at Lilly Library, Duke University

Test. Feel free to ignore.

There is a great new site called Movie Clips which provides legal access to a searchable database of movie clips. As of this writing, they have 12,000 clips available. The site allows sharing clips via a variety of social networking tools and and provides code to embed the clip into your own site.

The database is searchable, but it is also indexed by a variety of criteria. In addition to obvious categories like movie title and actor, the clips are also indexed by genre, occasion, mood and theme among others. One strange omission is production year. API access is available and the explanation shows that production year is part of the metadata, so I am not sure why this bit of information is not searchable.

And just because I can:

My most recent review for Educational Media Reviews Online is now live. It is a comparative review of Battle for the Arctic and The Tipping Point, two climate change documentaries.

I am happy to announce the launch of a new group project: the Libraries and Transliteracy blog, which is an effort to share information about the new literacies, digital literacy, media literacy, 21st century literacies and transliteracies with special focus on libraries. I am honored to be working on this blog with Bobbi Newman and Buffy Hamilton. We will be posting resources relevant to the discussion of what role libraries can play in helping create a transliterate culture. We hope this blog will be a helpful repository. You can add the feed here.

I want to thank Bobbi for initiating this project and for including me.

I’ve recently become fascinated by the surge of interest in the concept of Transliteracy.  One of the things I find fascinating is that, for a new term, it’s not really all that new. In a way, it’s just a fancy new term for media literacy with a few different twists. The Center for Media Literacy defines media literacy as:

a 21st century approach to education. It provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate and create messages in a variety of forms — from print to video to the Internet. Media literacy builds an understanding of the role of media in society as well as essential skills of inquiry and self-expression necessary for citizens of a democracy.

Similarly, the National Association for Media Literacy Education states:

Media literacy– the ability to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, and COMMUNICATE information in a variety of forms-is interdisciplinary by nature. Media literacy represents a necessary, inevitable, and realistic response to the complex, ever-changing electronic environment and communication cornucopia that surround us.

Although media literacy began as a reaction to the perceived negative influence of Mass Media during the middle of the 20th century, it has evolved to include and analysis and understanding of a variety of emerging media. In this way, media literacy is not much different than transliteracy, which The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) defines as:

an umbrella term encompassing different literacies and multiple communication channels that require active participation with and across a range of platforms, and embracing both linear and non-linear messages.

Despite the fact that print is a communication medium, media literacy tends to focus on non-print or non-text print materials. Transliteracy attempts to be broader. IFLA, in its report “Transliteracy: take a walk on a wild side,” quotes Sue Thomas, who defines transliteracy as “what it means to be literate in the 21st Century,” that is, having a “unifying perspective” on the ability to “read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.”

In this respect, media literacy can be considered a sub-topic of transliteracy. Regardless of how one chooses to use the terminology, the emerging field of transliteracy is building on the foundation set forth by media literacy.

Having a long-standing interest in media literacy in my work as a media librarian, the recent wave of interest in transliteracy fascinates me, and I hope to investigate and write more about it, especially as to how it relates to libraries.

As with last year, as the deadline neared for the American Library Association’s Midwinter Conference where the Notable Video for Adults Committee meets to compile its list, I was unable to keep up with my reviews. My entire list of scores and links to the films I did review are here.

The official announcement includes annotations and purchasing information. Below is the list of the selections with links to my reviews, where available:

• American Outrage
• At the Death House Door
• FLOW: For Love of Water
• In Search of Memory
• I.O.U.S.A.
• Lake of Fire
• Malls R Us
• Operation Filmmaker
• Sita Sings the Blues
• Trouble the Water
• Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick
• Walk to Beautiful
• Waltz with Bashir
• Who Does She Think She Is?
• The World According to Monsanto