News & Features

Nick Podehl masterfully narrates the audio version of Leslie Stella’s Permanent Record, a realistic novel about the effects of bullying on an Iranian-American teenager in Chicago.

(Waving a rickety old cane in the air) In my day, no one spoke in the library – they couldn’t! Libraries were sealed and the oxygen was pumped out, creating a vacuum! And now look what we’ve come to – every picture book seems to end in an exclamation mark. Librarians, all this merriment is [...]

Maryland’s Howard County Library System, 2013 Gale/LJ Library of the Year, will use the $276,500 grant it has received from the Institute of Library & Museum Services (IMLS) to expand its HiTech program. The program is a STEM education initiative for teens that provides project-based classes in such skill areas as computer programming, 3-D animation, green energy, nanotechnology, music/video production, ebooks, game app design, cybersecurity, and robotics.

In most books, words and pictures go hand in hand to tell the story. In a select few, the plot is revealed through the illustrations on the pages and the imagination of a reader. Background knowledge, creativity, and key elements embedded in the narrative allow children to form their own ideas as they interpret the illustrations. The following wordless—or nearly wordless—selections by the editors at Junior Library Guild provide the perfect setting to increase fluency in storytelling.

Not only did the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy send a shock wave through the country, it was the first time the public watched on-air television coverage of an historic event as it unfolded. Fifty years later, today's students can learn about the president's life, death, and legacy through a number of quality books and online resources.

Though the U.S. is still trying to push students to absorb more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects, the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL—aka Rocket City—has been steering hopeful scientists for decades, since opening the doors to Space Camp in 1982. Space Camp is a STEM education fantasy world, in which kids in attendance experience days of STEM learning wrapped into intensive space exploration and rocketry know-how.

In the face of the government shutdown that has seen EBSCO offer free access to its version of the ERIC database, Oxford University Press announced that it will offer complimentary access to three reference databases of its own. For the next two weeks, Oxford Reference, American National Biography Online, and Social Explorer will be free to access and explore online.

Interest is the engine of intellectual achievement—it’s what drives us to keep learning, keep trying. But how does one generate it in oneself or others? Expanding on her keynote message at the SLJ summit, author Annie Murphy Paul offers three practical ways to use information gaps to stimulate curiosity.

The very limitations of the book are its strengths, according to journalist and author Annie Murphy Paul, speaking at School Library Journal’s 2013 Leadership Summit in Austin, TX.