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My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris (right) debuted in February to wide acclaim. The book won Outstanding Graphic Novel and Ferris was named Outstanding Artist at September’s Small Press Expo. Monsters is the story of Karen Reyes, a 10-year-old girl living in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood in 1968 with her mother and older brother. She likes horror movies and comics and thinks of herself as a werewolf. The second volume will be released in early 2018....
American Libraries Trend, Nov./Dec.; AL: The Scoop, Sept. 22 |
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An anonymous donor is matching gifts made to the ALA Annual Fund as of November 1. Donations are tax-deductible, and gifts from an individual donor, up to $1,000, are eligible. The match is capped at $10,000 total per ALA unit, and $100,000 overall. Donors can participate by giving online or sending a check to ALA, 50 East Huron Street, Chicago, IL 60611. ALA asks everyone to consider making a gift to help support its efforts to build a world where libraries of all types are central to transforming lives....
AL: The Scoop, Nov. 14 |
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Sponsored Content
Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther is said to have posted his famed 95 Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Germany. Many scholars suggest that the dissident monk benefited directly from the emergence of a European print industry and its profound impact on the dissemination of ideas. Among the researchers who make this claim is Professor Pettegree, director of the Universal Short Title Catalog (USTC), curating Early European Books with ProQuest. Read the blog post and case study. |
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The 2017 AASL National Conference in Phoenix wrapped on November 11 with programs that stressed the need to connect with kids to get them excited about and engaged with reading, learning, and media literacy. YA author Jason Reynolds (right, Patina, Ghost) opened the day with a profound and often funny general session talk about humility, intimacy, and gratitude, and how the expression of each can leads kids to reading. Reynolds came about the realization by watching The Steve Harvey Show with his mother. Read more of our AASL conference coverage, including the new AASL standards and ed-tech tools....
AL: The Scoop, Nov. 13–14 |
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Phoenix’s annual LibraryCon canceled a drag queen storytime event—and some locals are crying foul. Michelle Miranda-Thorstad confirmed that a November 18 event called ‘Reading with Queens’ was canceled by the Maricopa County Library District. The event at the Southeast Regional Library branch in Gilbert was to feature drag queens Christopher Jay Hall, Allonna Dee, and Mia Inez Adams reading books with diversity and tolerance themes to children at the library. A library official said that the event did not follow storytime guidelines....
Phoenix New Times, Nov. 14 |
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Stephen Phelan writes: “The world is filled with people who have never read Moby-Dick, or never finished it, or say they have but haven’t, or would sooner be harpooned than even attempt it. There are others, here and there, who know the book well, and love it to bits, and hold it sacred like a kind of bible. The Atlantic seaport of New Bedford, Massachusetts, is a haven for that minority, especially in the freezing first weekend of January, when the city’s whaling museum hosts the annual Moby-Dick Marathon.”...
The Guardian (UK), Nov. 14 |
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Kate Lechtenberg writes: “In the past few weeks, we’ve included more than 20 articles in the Intellectual Freedom News about the To Kill a Mockingbird challenge case in Biloxi, Mississippi. None of those articles have taken up what I think is the central issue in this case—teaching students to talk about controversial issues in and through literature. My work is to take seriously these Biloxi parents’ concerns and to help those teachers find strategies to raise the level of discourse with their students.”...
Intellectual Freedom Blog, Nov. 9 |
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Barbara Fister writes: “Until this year I thought the fundamentals students needed to know—how to frame a question, how to think critically about what you find, how to weigh divergent arguments and create your own with a sense of integrity—were basically unchanging. But the world we’ve found ourselves in now, one where we’re being given personalized bodies of knowledge created by propagandists and bots and artificial intelligence, all locked up in corporate black boxes—I don’t even know where to start.”...
Inside Higher Ed: Library Babel Fish, Nov. 13 |
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Thanks to data contributors from around the world, IFLA was able to count more than 2 million libraries in 99 countries. During this initial phase of the Library Map of the World project, we have learned about the state of libraries in these countries and moved closer to our shared goal of having reliable global library statistics. The Library Map of the World is an ongoing activity, managed and maintained by IFLA, and this is just the beginning....
International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, Nov. 13
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Jessica Schwartz writes: “As coloring has gotten increasingly popular with adults and teens in recent years, they’ve become a staple in library teen spaces as well. I’m always on the lookout for interesting coloring books with teen appeal because the teens in my community really seem to enjoy this trend. When it comes to coloring books, my teen patrons tend to ignore basic mandalas and calming landscape images. They want stuff that’s weird and silly. Here are some unique coloring books that keep them occupied.”...
Teen Services Underground, Nov. 14 |
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With the increasing availability of online metadata, we are seeing metadata added to discovery environments representing objects of widely varying granularity. For example, one article in Physical Review Letters has approximately 300 author names for a five-page article (right). This seems disproportionate, especially when other objects with many contributors such as feature films and orchestral recordings are represented by only a relative handful of the associated names....
Hanging Together, Nov. 14 |
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Samuel Axon writes: “Video editing software ranges from free versions that are pretty bare-bones to feature-packed prosumer versions. Indeed, they vary as much as the reasons why people take up video editing—whether to make home videos, to become YouTube stars, or to create VR experiences. For this roundup we’ll first be looking at the middle ground: Paid consumer video editing programs that cost $80 or less.”...
PC World, Nov. 13 |
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Chris Hoffman writes: “Firefox transforms today. It’s now a multiprocess browser with a new design, gaining speed but leaving traditional Firefox extensions behind. If you’ve switched to Google Chrome, you might want to give Firefox another chance. But, if you’re already using Firefox, you’re in for some big changes. Firefox Quantum is another name for Firefox 57, which Mozilla released on November 14. Let’s start with the good stuff that everyone will love: Firefox is just faster now.”...
How-To Geek, Nov. 14
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