Zombie U.

I thought zombies were interested in eating brains, not improving them, before I read “Using the Living Dead To Teach Information Literacy” at Library Journal.com.

Students arrive on the McPherson College campus chronically unprepared to use the library. The director of library services and his assistant, an experienced illustrator for small press comics, hope that students will read their new 23-page library guide in graphic novel format — Library of the Living Dead – and no longer have to spend so much time answering the same basic questions.

[The guide] features students taking cover in the library from zombies run amok on campus, and the flight to safety becomes a point of departure for a blood-stained lesson, replete with decapitations, in the Dewey Decimal system and other library tools….

[The] story line… includes a desperate flight through the stacks during which the characters, who are modeled on real students and staff members, incinerate zombies while simultaneously doing research (Zombies in Haitian myth? “Religion…the 200s. Follow me.”)

I asked Michael Walsh, who sent me the story, what’s in it for the zombies?

“Maybe this will help them get smarter brains to munch on,” he guessed.

[Thanks to Michael J. Walsh for the story.]

4 thoughts on “Zombie U.

  1. This is an amusing and clever idea, but it really, really bothers me that we have to resort to entertaining the ‘kids’ in order to help them with Dewey.

    What’s next – letting them use calculators in math class?

    Oh, wait….

  2. @steve Believe me, I’m the last person who wants to just trick kids into using the library, but we have to compete for their attention. And the library should be an entertaining and fun place. We created the zombie guide as a resource that could be used to help is in lieu of library staff. I was the only librarian at McPherson College – I could not cover basic library/information literacy in a traditional manner for the entire student population, so a student worker and I came up with this resource. I do understand what you are saying, but I think something like this can give the students a reason to be interested in and proud of their library.

Comments are closed.