Industry News

On Saturday, February 23, 2013, Oakville (ON) Public Library held the Real Life University & College Fair, the fourth of its kind since 2010. As I told one of my colleagues, “I love my job because of events like this and all the amazing young adults with whom I get to work!” I know that many of you share this very sentiment, too.

What have you done to celebrate School Library Month? The theme this year is Community matters @ your library, and some of your colleagues have contributed their activities to the "Community Calender" which the American Association of School Libraries (AASL) has set up to allow libraries to exchange their ideas and programs.

Fred Smith, a junior at Vidor (TX) High School, needed to find something written by an author after 1960 for the Oral Interpretation portion of a prose and poetry competition. He found Francesco Marciuliano's I Could Pee on This, and Other Poems by Cats (Chronicle Books, August 2012) fit the bill. Smith's drama teacher, Adam Conrad, reports that his student recently placed first at the District 20 AAAA level Oral Interpretation contest and has advanced to the Regional level that will be held April 20, 2013 at Sam Houston State University, as part of the Texas UIL (University Interscholastic League) Prose and Poetry Competition.

Here’s a brief update on the all-digital, bookless library system now under construction in Bexar County, Texas (San Antoni0) that infoDOCKET and many others first posted about in early January. From the San Antonio Express-News: Construction is underway on the system’s 5,000-square-foot base of operations at 3505 Pleasanton Road. County Judge Nelson Wolff, Precinct 1 Commissioner Sergio [...]

SLJ is giving away 25 author-signed copies of the latest book in the format-bending “Infinity Ring” series (Scholastic). Written by Matt de la Peña, the middle grade novel Curse of the Ancients continues the adventures of Dak, Sera, and Riq, who are on a quest to set history back on course by traveling to different cataclysmic events in time. Leave comment to enter.

The live webcast along with a live is scheduled for April 18, 2013 at 2pm Eastern/11am Pacific. It’s being organized by Connected Learning. Blurb An in-depth look at YOUmedia’s strengths as a space for connected learning, and broader considerations for application in other environments. Speaker Info Penny Bender Sebring is a founding co-director of the [...]

From Madison.com/Wisconsin State Journal: Wisconsin public schools have received $30.1 million from a state trust fund to help purchase materials for their libraries. School districts can spend the money awarded Monday on books, newspapers, periodicals, and some digital materials. A state trust fund set by the constitution uses loan interests generated on public lands to [...]

When word came out that Amazon was pulling social network Goodreads into its acquisitional tractor beam, reaction seemed to fall into one of two categories... Travis Jonker, a librarian who blogs at 100 Scope Notes, falls somewhere in between.

In honor of National Poetry Month, acclaimed poet Naomi Shihab Nye—whose anthology This Same Sky (Simon & Schuster, 1993) continues to be used in both college and fifth grade classrooms—offers us five of her “very favorite lovingly-used poetry collections.”