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New Stuff and New E-Stuff

Written on: February 24th, 2010 in Blog Posts

Click on the links to see lists of new additions to the Delaware Library Catalog:

• All New Items
• New Audio Books
• New Books
• New DVDs

Additionally, we’ve added some bestselling titles as downloadable e-audiobooks this month. Click on the links below to access downloadable versions (WMA format) of

• Half-Broke Horses by Jeanette Walls
• Stephen King’s Under the Dome
• Michael Crichton’s posthumously-published Pirate Latitudes
• Altar of Eden, by James Rollins

You’ll need to enter your Delaware Library Catalog ID and PIN.

More Book Award News!

Written on: February 23rd, 2010 in Blog Posts

The 2010 nominees for the Diagram Prize were announced. This prize is awarded by The Bookseller trade magazine, and celebrates books with odd titles. Unfortunately, none of our libraries have Governing Lethal Behaviour in Autonomous Robots (although that sounds like an important topic), Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter, or Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich. You can vote online for the winner at the magazine’s homepage.

UPDATE: Crocheting Adventures With Hyperbolic Planes took home the award- full story at this link.

No Child Left Inside

Written on: February 23rd, 2010 in Blog Posts

This story in the News-Journal appeared over the weekend to promote the Delaware Association of Environmental Education’s Child in the Wild conference on Saturday, February 27th at the historic Blue Ball Barn. The conference is for both formal and non-formal educators, and will present tools and case studies on introducing environmental concepts into classroom education, and will feature presenters from Delaware Greenways, the Seaford School District, and other educational and natural resources organizations.

Delaware Library Catalog libraries can offer a tremendous range of resources for parents on educators on this topic, including curriculum guides for all grades, primers and readers, and audiovisual material. Click here for a list of available items. A resource guide on green living is also available from the Delaware Division of Libraries. More details about the conference and a registration form are available at the Delaware Association of Environmental Education website

And remember, Delaware’s state parks are some of the greatest places to play outside! Fee season starts on March 1st this year- you can pick up an annual pass from any state park or order one online at the www.destateparks.com website.

Time for Reviews

Written on: February 22nd, 2010 in Blog Posts

Plenty to choose from among this week’s New York Times Book Review selections. Everything from conservative takes on Middle East politics to espionage thrillers set in the morally ambiguous world of post 9-11 foreign intelligence, by way of reimagined lives of great poets. As ever, the weekly book reviews highlight some of the most important and entertaining titles published in the United States, and as ever, your Delaware Library Catalog library makes many of them available to our readers.

• The Strong Horse by Lee Smith, Middle East correspondent for the Weekly Standard, portrays radical Islam’s political jihad against the West as an outgrowth of the self-interest, corruption, repression and fear of overthrow of the most powerful regional regimes, through which “the ruler pushes the energies of the young militant warrior class away from his ­capital.”
• Conspirata, a thriller by Robert Harris set in Classical Rome, is “a portrait of ancient politics as a treasonous blood sport in which more — much more — than health care reform is on the line”
• The Poker Bride: the First Chinese in the Wild West is a “horrific tale of violence, exploitation, and sex slavery” which documents the experience of immigrant Chinese in the great California Gold Rush of 1849- news of which, the reviewer notes, reached Hong Kong before Washington D.C.
• The Room and the Chair is a “Syriana-style” espionage novel, but weaknesses in characterization betray a compelling plot to create a read that the reviewer found to be ultimately unsatisfying.
• Jerome Charyn’s Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is “part of the flourishing genre of literary body-snatching,” reinventing the famously reclusive poet with a vividly created inner voice and desire. The book is “smarter than most”, but still misses the mark in its attempt to bring Dickinson’s complex character to life.

(Why) It’s Thursday…is a Learning Journey

Written on: February 19th, 2010 in Blog Posts, Learning, Learning Journeys, Reading

Kathy here: A 2nd Thursday posting on a Friday? Really? It’s all about my learning journey…and learning curve…in the blogosphere.

1. It seems I have been posting to an old link. Learning: manage weblog versions as one manages document versions.
2. It seems I need to create my entries before the day I actually want to post. Learning: treat the Delaware Library Blog more as a creative writing exercise than a spontaneous letter to an old friend.
3. It seems that I can do much more to my postings than simply write them. Why sould I expect Richard to enrich the topic with links and images? Learning: commit or do not commit to blog authorship.

Do you blog? What learnings can you share with the rest of us? Interested in starting a blog? The Delaware Library Catalog has 29 titles to help you. Perhaps you just want to begin/to continue as a blog reader. Check out The Weblog Awards for “best” reading adventures as chosen by folks like you (including me). And, while I do read more substantive material, Cake Wrecks and Passive Aggressive Notes are such a guilty pleasure.

See you here next Thursday…I mean it.

Gotta Keep Reading!

Written on: February 19th, 2010 in Blog Posts, Reading

Another wonderful video, created by passionate, imaginative teachers and librarians- and the spirited and enthusiastic children they serve! Let’s kick off Summer Reading Black Eyed Peas style this year!

A Digital Native’s Demands

Written on: February 18th, 2010 in Blog Posts

I am getting to work on this right now. Because you are so cute!

This video was produced by the Australian library technology organization VALA

Children and Teens Vote for Favorite Books at Delaware Public Libraries!

Written on: February 17th, 2010 in Blog Posts, News

Voting is currently underway at all Delaware public libraries to select the winners of the 15th Annual Blue Hen Book Award, sponsored by the Children’s Services Division of the Delaware Library Association. The Blue Hen Award promotes reading and library use in children and teens. Youth Services Librarians from Delaware public libraries nominated five books published between November 2008 and October 2009 in the following categories: Picture Book, Chapter Book and Teen Fiction. Children and teens who read all the nominated books in a category then vote for their favorite.

Nominees for the 2011 Blue Hen Book Award in the Picture Book category are:

• The Plot Chickens by Mary Jan and Herm Auch
• Tiger Pups by Tom and Allie Harvey
• The Birthday Pet by Ellen Javernick
• Stars Above Us by Geoffrey Norman
• The Scarecrow’s Dance, by Jane Yolen

Nominees in the Chapter Book category are:

• Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware by M.T. Anderson
• Chrissa Stands Strong by Mary Cassanova
• A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck
• The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick
• When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Nominees in the Teen Fiction category are:

• Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
• If I Stay by Gayle Forman
• Pop by Gordon Korman
• The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
• Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor

The nominated books and ballots are available at all Delaware public libraries. Voting will end August 31, 2010; the 2011 Blue Hen Book Award winners will be announced Saturday, November 6, 2010.

Evolution of a reader

Written on: February 16th, 2010 in Blog Posts, Learning Journeys

Sometimes it strange how everybody’s learning/reading interests converge. At some point last week during Snowmageddon ’10, I looked around at my reading family and noticed that we were all reading books which were just about on the same topic. Normally our interests are much more obviously diverse- and even so, while the books we were reading all had evolution and natural history as a central theme, they were still very different!

My wife was reading Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier, which charts one woman’s struggle for scientific and social recognition in Victorian England, my daughter was devouring Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, the story of a girl’s discovery of science and the complexity of family life in 19th Century Texas, and I was reading Dry Storeroom Number 1, an eccentric history of London’s Natural History Museum.

For further reading, there are plenty of great books available through our libraries:
99% Ape: How Evolution Adds Up and Evolution: the First 4 Billion Years are both highly recommended by Choice Reviews (one of the most significant book selection resources for academic libraries), and would fulfill my non-fiction interests. Peter Dickinson’s Bone from a Dry Sea might be a good follow up read for Lucy, or to close the gap between fiction and non-fiction, she might be interested in Charles and Emma: the Darwin’s Leap of Faith, another 2010 award winner, which explores Darwin’s struggle to reconcile his faith with his discoveries. Our NoveList database suggests Diane Smith’s Pictures from an Expedition for Kirsten.

If we wanted to know more about the actual science behind the subject, we could always go to the MIT OpenCourseWare website and experience a free, virtual lecture series in biology and genetics: click here for the list of video lectures. You can view the first lecture in the MIT series below:

Snowy Sunday Book Reviews.

Written on: February 15th, 2010 in Blog Posts

• The Three Weissmans of Westport is a light-hearted ‘chick-lit’ parody of Sense and Sensibility filled with “fine and wicked riffs.”
• The Politician: an Insider’s Account of John Edwards’ Pursuit of the Presidency is as well known by now as Game Change, although much tawdrier. Andrew Young, who took the fall for Edwards’ affair, portrays a candidate “whose mental clutch completely slipped” under the pressure of the campaign and his own substantial flaws.
• The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a fictional remixing of Homeric themes, with both hits and misses, but in which the author’s “imagination soars and and his language delights.”
• Amy Green’s Bloodroot is an Appalachian gothic set in a hardscrabble blue collar world, which charts the struggle of “an all too ordinary woman trying to escape an inheritance of violence and poverty.” You can read an extract here.
  
  
  
  
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