Questions for Donna Nicely Friday December 12, 2008 via telephone interview:

 

Diane Chen: Newspaper and web articles have referred to this project as the school libraries being merged/taken over/and consolidated into the Nashville Public Library (NPL) system. What term are you using to discuss this project?

 

Donna Nicely: ...Read More

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What's new in social networking for readers? Reading Trails. I'm not certain I'll invest a great deal of time in this tool yet or how to use it, but I'm up for exploration this weekend.

Reading Trails offers tools to organize books in a new way. A trail is a sequence of books linked in an interesting way. Unfortunately I feel brain dead this Friday night so I'm copying bits from the website to try to explain this. You go on the site and start browsing their trails until you find books you've read, then you click new trail. Here's the interesting part:

Then ask yourself, what book should people read next? You don't have to know why they should read that book. Trust your gut. And repeat. Once you get going, maybe you'll find an overarching "reason" for linking those books toget...Read More

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Have you noticed how often libraries are being touted as the Great Place to Be and Use during these tough economic times? The message is getting out there that libraries provide great value. Check out this video page from Katie Couric's notebook. I love that she is quoting ALA because our professional organization is out there spreading the message. This shows someone is listening. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4692037n%3fsource=search_video 


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Imagine you are the production team of a book (author, illustrator, publisher, cover illustrator, etc.) and you produce an outstanding product. Your marketing people contact the big corporate bookstores to see if they'll stock your book, but they are told they have to make changes first. A discussion on childlit, kidlit, YALSA, and at various conferences lately has revealed that one of the huge chains has told publishers they must go back and change covers before they'll buy and stock the books. 

Why should these bookstore chains control the creative process of books? Shouldn't the publishers and artists involved decide these things? Is the power of the large corporate chain greater than the right of an artist? I've learned that many booksellers sell the space on the tops of their shelves of end units to companies to market their books. Do the publisher...Read More

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Marietta from http://thebookwormsbooklist.blogspot.com has a 2009 Children's Chapter Book Challenge for everyone! This challenge is open to everyone, and you can join in at any time! Here's the scoop from Marietta's email on ChildLit:

• Read one chapter book per month!
• You can join this challenge at any time during the year!
• Either you read the book with your children or your child reads the book by himself (or herself).
• At the end of the month, report the following information to Marietta in the form of a comment on her blog!
  
  First name and age of reader/readers:
  Book Title:
  Author:
  Illustrator (if there is one):
  Rate the book on a scale from 1-10 with 10 bei

...Read More

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Ever read someone else's blog post or review of a book and wonder if you were both reading the same book or not? I disagree with Ms Yingling's Reads blog post on The Door of No Return, when she writes:

I wanted to like this, and the first 200 pages were great. Suspense, action, ...Read More

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Yes, readers. I have spent too much time thinking and not enough writing. Those great posts I intended to put out, but I didn't finish because they weren't good enough, they are going to see daylight. After attending several wonderful author sessions at the TASL conference, SLJ Leadership Summit, and YALSA Lit Symposium in November, I realized most of my favorite authors were still keeping print journals. 

The authors shared pages from their journals, notes, and even their attitudes about writing. Many of these authors are highly connected via technology, but they still record every title they read, checklists, and lots of minutae. They don't worry about their audience in their journals like we bloggers do with every sentence we write. So, this year I intend to begin again with a written journal where I will record every title I read. 

I ...Read More

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Last summer I received my first link to the "Mom video" on youtube. Amy Bowllan wrote about it last week. Sometimes it takes some deep thinking on a topic so I'm ready for the discussion. If we were to compose the "librarian" video, what phrases would we include?

What words fall out of your lips without any brain processing? What has become so embedded in your professional-being that people will immediately recognize your words for library-speak?  Wouldn't it be great fun for someone to gather all these phrases and create our own version of the librarian video? 

Share your phrases. Not every librarian says the same thing, but there has to be come commonalities. What are the phrases new librarians must learn?

Look it up
Use a boo...Read More

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In Christopher Harris Next Big Thing column entitled "Should Libraries Be Run Like a Business?" he suggests we should be detailing our collection development plan that shows we "are deliberate and thoughtful in your spending and provides a base from which you can address the impact budget reductions will have on the long-term health of the collection."

For the past 11 years while at one elementary school, I had a written collection development plan of acquisitions based upon Karen Lowe's strategies and book Resource Alignment: Providing Curriculum Support in the ...Read More

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Yesterday I wrote about my needing to slip away for a "moment to recover." Code phrase for "mom needs to go read for a minute so everyone leave her alone!" I received an email from someone asking why I would want to be apart from everyone to read on the holidays. 

Yikes! I am not a bad mommy. I am a very attentive, involved mommy. But my sons are 19,19,17, and nearly 17. For some reason, they also have need to get away for a moment to recover. Does this indicate that we are all introverts? They even had friends and other family to visit. Even the dogs and cats took a nap while I read. Is this unusual behavior? Should I have sat in front of a TV and pretended to watch the game?

Readers, if I don't get away to read for at least a few...Read More

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...Read More

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The short of it:  I handed a student The Rules of Survival based solely upon the fact that A) Nancy Werlin wrote it, B) it was a National Book Award finalist, and C) was on our TN state reader's choice award list for this year. I staked my reputation on Nancy's ability to reach readers. SUCCESS!!! The student now trusts me to be right some of the time.

The long of it:  A teacher drags a 6'2" student to me and says to him, "Ms Chen will find you something, anything, but you've got to read a book." By now you are thinking to yourselves, &q...Read More

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