The Unquiet Librarian

The New Classics: Books | EW 1000: Books | Books | The EW 1000 | Entertainment Weekly

Bibliophiles always seem to love chewing on yet another book list, and Entertainment Weekly provides us more fodder in their newly released “Top 100 Books of the Last 25 Years”.  Or as Phil Kloer, AJC book reviewer, points out, “Everyone loves lists prepared by magazine editors or bloggers or the like. Not the actual lists, but the act of reading them and reacting to them.”

Take a look at the Entertainment Weekly list available at http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20207076_20207387_20207349,00.html.  What do you think?  Do you agree with these lists?  Disagree?  What would you put on the list?  Are you inspired to read or find out more about any of these titles?

I’ll open the discussion by saying I disagree with nearly every bit of EW’s top 10!  I definitely would have placed A Prayer for Owen Meany much higher.  My big question:  Where is The English Patient in this list?!?!?

Information for Teen Read Week 2008 is now available from YALSA!  This year’s theme is “Books with Bite”—how delicious!    Teen Read Week will be celebrated October 12–18, so now is the time to start planning ahead!

One terrific resource is the Teen Read Week 2008 Wiki!  This wiki is truly a gold mine of ideas and resources for celebrating Teen Read Week and ways to incorporate the theme, “Books with Bite”, into your festivities! 

Teen Read Week – YALSA

 Another fabulous resource is the Programming Ideas page at http://www.ala.org/ala/yalsa/teenreading/trw/trw2008/activities/index.cfm. Here you can read more about ways to incorporate podcasts, tech programs, a fim festival, a taste test, display contests, and more for your week of celebrations!

If you are a librarian, go to http://www.ala.org/ala/yalsa/teenreading/trw/trw2008/registration/index.cfm to register now!  There are some great incentives for the first 100 registrants, including the following:

2008 Registration Incentives

1. The first 100 registrants to sign up for YALSA’s Teen Read Week will receive a free, unabridged young adult audiobook compliments of Teen Read Week Promotional Partner Listening Library. Teens at your library will enjoy hearing their favorites novels come to life on audio.
2. All new regular members of YALSA who join through the Teen Read Week Web site will receive two free paperbacks courtesy Promotional Partner Scholastic.
3. The first 4,000 registrants will receive one free paperback from Galaxy’s Golden Age series, courtesy Promotional Partner Galaxy Press.
4. Register by midnight on July 14 and you could win a free copy of Breaking Dawn, the latest entry in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, courtesy Promotional Partner Hachette Book Group USA/Little, Brown & Co. On July 15, we’ll select 200 registrants at random.
5. Twenty-five registrants will be chosen at random to receive a complete set of titles from Zest Books (about fifteen books total). The drawing will be held on Mon. Sept. 15, 2008.
6. One lucky registrant will win alibrary of Mirrorstone titles, approximate value $500 and based on availability. Five runner ups will win an autographed copy each of Sucks to Be Me and The Stowaway. The drawing will be held on Mon. Sept. 15, 2008.
7. All registrants can download YALSA’s pocket-sized, illustrated Books with Bite Recommended Reading Pamphlet, full of recommended titles drawn from YALSA’s awards and booklists and annotated by YALSA’s Teen Read Week committee. These trifold pamphlets can be printed on 8.5 x 11″ paper, cut to size, and then handed out to teens by the dozens.

I stumbled across another fun Twitter tool this evening called PowerTwitter.  If you are using Twitter in Firefox, this add-on allows you and others to see your Flickr photo stream embedded in your profile and a link to your 30 Boxes account.    You will need to set up an account with 30 Boxes for PowerTwitter to work.

Here are the basic steps to install this fun tool:

1.  Go to http://30boxes.com/blog/index.php/2007/04/09/power-twitter-by-30-boxes/. 
2.  Right click on the link for the add-on and save it to your desktop.
3.  Literally drag the installation icon you have downloaded into the middle of your Firefox browser.  Firefox will automatically install it for you.
4.  Restart your Firefox browser.
5.  Once you go to your Twitter account, click on your profile, and your Flickr photostream will pop up!

National Poetry Month Celebrations

Originally uploaded by theunquietlibrarian

Here is a cool mosaic I made using fd’s Flickr Toys at http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/ . I chose the mosaic option and pulled photos relating to National Poetry Month 2008.

I am proud to say one of our photos, The Unquiet Library, is a member of the “Poem In Your Pocket” photo pool!

A few months ago, I blogged about the Georgia Archives Digital Vaults, but have you seen the National Archives Digital Vaults?  Many thanks to Sandi Adams for pointing me to this FABULOUS resource! 

What can you do with the resources in The National Archives Digital Vaults?

• Create a movie
• Create a poster
• Search by tag or keyword
• Collect primary source documents and images for a project

For lesson plans and ideas, go to the Educator and Student Resource Page at http://www.archives.gov/nae/education/.  In addition to great resources for teachers and students, teachers can find wonderful guides and handouts to use with students that explain primary sources and analysis worksheets for an array of primary sources, including written documents, photographs, maps, cartoons, sound recordings, posters, and motion pictures. 

Go to http://www.archives.gov/nae/education/tool-box.html to access these materials!

You may also want to read this great blog post by Glenn at the HistoryTech blog at http://historytech.wordpress.com/2008/04/12/digital-vaults-social-networking-for-primary-sources/.

This is a resource that can make history come alive for students!  We would love to collaborate with you as a teacher and develop a project or research unit that incorporates this treasure trove of primary source documents.   Please let me know if you would like to explore ways to incorporate the digital archives into your instruction!

Thanks to my Library 2.0 Ning, I came across this amazing upcoming conference sponsored by Mississippi State University Libraries:  http://blogs.library.msstate.edu/web2summit/?page_id=13.

This is a conference dedicated to integrating Web 2.0 tools seamlessly into your library program and harnessing the power of Web 2.0 to improve your service to your patrons.  You can go to http://library.msstate.edu/mslibrarysummit/2007summit/index.html to view last year’s conference agenda as well as hear podcasts from last year’s session.

Here is a preview of this year’s conference focus:

Mississippi State University Libraries : Mississippi Library 2.0 Summit

What if we had something like this for Georgia librarians?  What about a Georgia Libraries 2.0 Summit for 2008?  Anyone out there interested in exploring and organizing this venture? 

Buffy Hamilton

The Unquiet Library celebrated National Poem In Your Pocket Day on Thursday, April 17!  We created “pockets” of poems throughout our media center where our patrons can go and get a poem to read for fun!  We also gave each English teacher a pocket of poems for his or her classroom to help students celebrate this event of sharing poems.

You can come by the library and get poems for your pockets for the rest of the month!  Please stop by the media center and browse our pockets of poems, which are a terrific mix of classic, modern, and student written poems!  Several of our pocket poems were written by Creekview’s finest! 

Happy poem reading!

Do you ever wonder how much you are Twittering?  Would you like to know the times of day you are most likely to Twitter?  Has it occurred to you that you might need to enter a 12 step recovery program for Twittering?  (LOL! ). 

Here is a fun little tool called TweetStats!  It will calculate the following stats:

• Your Tweet Timeline
• Your aggregate daily Tweets
• Your aggregate hourly Tweets
• Direct replies (percentage to whom you give direct replies)
• Percentage of Tweets per Twittering application

You can view my Tweet stats at http://tweetstats.com/graphs/buffyjhamilton. 

The Unquiet Library is pleased to announce the live broadcast of poetry readings from Ms. Pickart’s 11th Honors American Literature/Composition classes this Friday, April 4!  Students will be reading originally composed “found” poems inspired by photographs of friends and loved ones.

We will be sharing these poetry readings in a variety of mediums:

• Podcasts that will be accessible from our iTunes account.
• Vodcasts via Teacher Tube
• Live broadcast via Ustream TV!

To view the show, you will need to come by the library to get the password.   You can view the show this Friday during 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 7th periods at http://ustream.tv/channel/poetryreadingapril4 or

[ustream ddGastY2uShYnWv8YkHpuUOrWWsJHRGQ.usc]

We will also be creating living walls of poetry created by Ms. Pickart’s students after spring break, so be sure to come by the media center!

Today marks the debut of a new interface from YALSA!  Check out the welcome message from the blog!

Welcome to YALSA’s new blog. We changed blogging software (we are now using WordPress) and are working with an entirely new design. The new interface gives YALSA bloggers new features to make their blogging even better. This includes integration of tags, images, and links. Over the next few weeks we may make a few changes to what you see on the blog pages. The primary interface however is ready for public consumption.

To subscribe to the YALSA blog via RSS click on the Subscribe RSS link in the far-right sidebar. Or, simply put this URL, http://feeds.feedburner.com/yalsa_blog, in your RSS reader. You can also receive blog updates via Twitter by following YALSA at http://www.twitter.com/yalsa .

This blog is a valuable resource for librarians and teacheres who work with young adults and who love YA lit!  Surf over and explore the great new design!

YALSA via kwout