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On January 22, ALA announced the top books, digital media, video, and audiobooks for children and young adults—including the Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, Newbery, and Printz awards—at the 2024 LibLearnX conference in Baltimore. The Eyes and the Impossible, written by Dave Eggers and illustrated by Shawn Harris, won the Newbery Medal, and Big, illustrated and written by Vashti Harrison, received the Caldecott Medal.
See a complete list of winners. Also at LibLearnX, the Reference and User Association announced winners of the
2024 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and
Nonfiction. Amanda Peters’ The Berry Pickers won the fiction medal, while Roxanna Asgarian won the nonfiction medal for We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America....
AL: The Scoop, Jan. 20; Jan. 22
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ALA conferences regularly feature a lineup of notable speakers, and LibLearnX was no exception. Author
George M. Johnson spoke about resisting censorship and supporting queer youth, while journalist
Michele Norris discussed a project that has collected more than half a million six-word narratives about race. Comedian and author
Jesús Trejo shared how his family permeates his books; journalist
Antonia Hylton connected a segregated hospital’s history to modern-day mental health challenges; and actor and author
Mia Armstrong spoke on the importance of inclusion and belonging. Two-time Newbery Medal winner
Kate DiCamillo demonstrated that every story is, in fact, a love story....
AL: The Scoop, Jan. 20–21
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In an era where librarians are facing major political and personal challenges, it’s valuable to celebrate the work that libraries and librarians do. ALA President Emily Drabinski organized a Main Stage Panel focusing on the good that libraries do, stating “I really want to have an opportunity to celebrate the things that are important to us, rather than the things that seem to matter to some other people.” At the
Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Observance and Sunrise Celebration on January 21, keynote speaker David Delmar Sentíes celebrated the doers: “The restless, the relentlessly optimistic, who still believe in an America in which we all belong, and who will not let it be taken from them.”...
AL: The Scoop, Jan. 21
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Read more coverage of LibLearnX from American
Libraries on The Scoop.
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Andrew Albanese writes: “In a major victory for freedom to read advocates, the Fifth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals on January 17 upheld a lower court decision to block key provisions of House Bill 900, Texas’s controversial book rating law, finding that the law likely violated First Amendment protections against compelled speech. The court remanded the case to the district court but affirmed Judge Alan D. Albright’s August 31 decision to block Texas Education Agency commissioner Mike Morath from enforcing the book rating provision of the law. Texas Rep. Jared Patterson (R-106), the author of the law, urged the state to continue its appeal.”...
Publishers Weekly, Jan. 18
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Alisha Ebrahimji writes: “Along with the smell of old books and the shelves of trendy novels at the South Brunswick High School library [in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey] are guides for accurately deciphering the digital world. Poster after poster with ‘Smart Social Networking’ tips and what ‘Good Digital Citizenship’ looks like hang at this New Jersey campus, where school librarian Lisa Manganello has made it her mission to teach teenagers to navigate the vast—often deliberately confusing—landscape of online information.”...
CNN, Jan. 22
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Meena Venkataramanan writes: “While insurrectionists were plotting to storm the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, they took time to write and send a letter to an institution two blocks from their target: the Folger Shakespeare Library, the world’s largest collection of material related to the English playwright. The letter explained that the insurrectionists would create a 2.4-mile blockade ‘surrounding all buildings to which the US Capitol has underground tunnels to’—including the John Adams Building of the Library of Congress, with which the Folger shares a block—presumably to prevent those inside the Capitol from escaping through the buildings.”...
Washington Post, Jan. 22
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“The complete list of the 2024 Academy Award nominees has been announced, and many of them are based on books. If you want to familiarize yourself with the source material, here are all the book adaptations that were nominated this year, along with the categories they were nominated in.”...
Book Riot, Jan. 23
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Dreamchild Obari writes: “You no longer have to leave ChatGPT to generate AI images. OpenAI has integrated its flagship AI image generation tool, DALL-E, into ChatGPT’s chats. Thanks to this, you only have to prompt ChatGPT to generate an image, similar to how you would prompt it to generate text. While prompting may be easy enough, we’ll show you how to know what GPTs in ChatGPT support DALL-E’s image generation. We’ll also tell you how to prompt ChatGPT to generate images when and how you want.”...
MakeUseOf, Jan. 23
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David Crotty writes: “If you’re an avid reader, you know the sadness that comes when a beloved book falls apart. But if you’ve spent much time in libraries, you are likely familiar with the heavier ‘library binding’ style of book meant to last hundreds of years. Did you know there’s a National Information Standards Organization (NISO) standard for library book binding (ANSI/NISO/LBC Z39.78-2000)? It’s some 39 pages long, so you may not want to read through the entire standard, but you may enjoy this video that takes a fun look at just what it takes for a book to be ‘library worthy.’”...
The Scholarly Kitchen, Jan. 19
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