Tag Archives: Resources

Check this out:, Public, School Media Specialist

Maud Hart Lovelace Book Award Winners Announced

On April 25th, winners of the Maud Hart Lovelace Book Award were announced at the Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul. The 2009-2010 Maud Hart Lovelace award is a children’s choice book award presented by The Minnesota Youth Reading Association (MYRA).

The winner for division 1 (grades 3-5) was Champ by Marcia Thornton Jones.

The winner for division 2 (grades 6-8) was I’d Tell You I Love You, But then I’d Have to Kill You by Ally Carter.

The award, established in 1980, honors Maud Hart Lovelace (1892-1980), the author of the popular Betsy-Tacy series about growing up in Mankato at the turn of the twentieth century.  The goal of the award is to encourage recreational reading among school age children.  Each year winners are announced on Maud Hart Lovelace’s birthday, April 25. More information is available at:  http://maudhartlovelace.org. 

Academic, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

U of M Libraries Send Books to Google for Digitization Project

This month the U of M Libraries will be sending resources to Google as part of a larger digitization project that was agreed upon in 2007 by Google and several Big 10 universities. The U of M will be working with Google to digitize resources on the topics of Scandinavian literature, bee-keeping, forestry, and area studies collections. In all, the U of M Libraries will be sending more than 1 million books and bound journals to Google for digitization.  

Once the materials are digitized and verified that they are public domain, Google will provide copies of the digital files to libraries. For more information, consider viewing the following links: http://tinyurl.com/2cqlxkf, http://tinyurl.com/2cr2kyw, http://tinyurl.com/2e6glx5.

Academic, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

One Book, One Twitter

Jeff Howe, a contributing editor for Wired Magazine and writer of the popular blog – Crowdsourcing, recently developed the idea of One Book, One Twitter. Inspired by “one book, one city” clubs, Howe posed the idea of an online book club that would hopefully pull in “zillions” of readers. Howe first proposed the idea on March 18th, and began collecting book nominations from online participants. All nominated books had to be available around the world, translated into MANY languages, and of general interest to all. As of April 6th, American Gods by Neil Gaiman was selected as the crowd favorite. Other popular nominations included Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Brave New World, Slaughterhouse Five, and Catch 22.

But, wait, not so fast… Voting isn’t over yet! By the end of this week, “judges” for the One Book, One Twitter club will be posting 4 other possible choices. Then, during the week of April 12th, participants will be able to vote for one of the “judges” suggestions, or can select American Gods or one of the other popular nominations as their favorite. In all, voters will have ten books to choose from. No word yet as to when the winner will be announced, but we’ll be sure to update you as soon as we know!

 This is something libraries should get behind, and just maybe…help promote. Imagine the possibilities, and how cool is it that a huge group of people from around the world are being exposed to great works of literature? What a wonderful way to promote a love for reading, create a community made up of people from vastly different backgrounds—AND introduce people to a popular technology!

To get involved:

1) Get a Twitter account!

2) Search for hashtag #1b1t

3) Read posts, you’ll quickly discover where the group is with the whole process.

You may also learn more about One Book, One Twitter at Howe’s Crowdsourcing Blog: http://www.crowdsourcing.com/cs/.