This and That

Hello CLASC members,

A few housekeeping matters this week:

* Neither Ellen nor I are able to attend CLA this year, so no Annual General Meeting has been scheduled for CLA 2013.

* CLA’s Geraldine Hyland has asked that someone from our network sign up to work a short shift at the CLA exhibits. We have done this in the past; it’s a nice way to meet potential CLASC members and remind the rest of CLA that we exist! If you are attending CLA and wouldn’t mind putting in a couple of hours at the exhibits, please let Ellen or I know by RSVPing to this message.

* Within the next week or so, Ellen and I will be filing our annual network report to CLA, highlighting our activities in the past year and our projected activities for the next. If you have ideas, suggestions or comments, please send them our way.

*The terms of the CLA networks state that Network moderators (or Co-Moderators, in our case) serve for two years–and those two years are coming to a close very soon. If you are a CLA member and are interested in moderating this group, please let us know.

As always, thanks for your participation in CLASC!

TD Canada Book Week

 

Children get more than just Stories out of Books

#TDBookWeek

Celebrate TD Canadian Children’s Book Week by introducing children
to their favourite authors, illustrators and storytellers

Toronto, ON – April 30, 2013 – It’s more than just entertainment for children when they get lost in the pages of a book. Reading can bring out creativity, imagination and even courage among children who are inspired by their favourite author’s words or illustrations. This year, TD Canadian Children’s Book Week celebrates the theme All the Bookshelf’s a Stage: Celebrating the Performing Arts from May 4 – May 11, 2013 to highlight the joy of reading. 

 

TD Canadian Children’s Book Week is a program of the Canadian Children’s Book Centre and throughout the week, 35 authors, illustrators and storytellers will be visiting schools, libraries, bookstores and community centres across the country. Book Week tour participants will also be speaking about the pleasures of reading, writing and illustrating books for children and teens, reading excerpts from their books, as well as meeting the families and children who have supported their work. For a list of Book Week events open to the public, visit http://events.bookcentre.ca/book-week. 

 

“Finding books that I loved brought me out of my shell when I was a child and that’s exactly why I became an author – I wanted to create stories that I knew children would enjoy,” says Alma Fullerton, author of Community Soup.  “TD Canadian Children’s Book Week celebrates the self-esteem and values that children can get from reading which will shape them into happy adults.”

 

For more than 35 years, TD Canadian Children’s Book Week has been highlighting the importance of reading and has been introducing Canadian children and youth to their favourite authors, poets, storytellers and illustrators. This year, over 25,000 children are expected to participate in events all across the country.

 

“Every year we see thousands of smiles fill community centres, schools and libraries when a child’s favourite author reads from their most beloved book,” says Frank McKenna, TD’s Deputy Chair and Literacy Champion.  “We’re extremely proud to support TD’s Canadian Children’s Book Week where Canadian authors visit communities across the country and inspire children to get involved and spread the joy of reading.”

 

Dedicated to raising awareness of the many Canadian books available to young readers, the Canadian Children’s Book Centre helps educators and parents select the best for their young readers. In addition, they have selected this year’s list of authors, illustrators and storytellers that will be on tour this spring.

 

“Canada has so many influential authors, illustrators, and storytellers to showcase and TD Canadian Children’s Book Week is the perfect opportunity to connect more young people with books”, says Charlotte Teeple, Executive Director of the Canadian Children’s Book Centre.  “With communities all across Canada participating, it’s a great way to encourage children to explore the treasures to be found when

they spend time with a good book.”

 

TD Canadian Children’s Book Week is the largest celebration of Canadian books for young people in Canada. For more information and to see a full tour schedule, please visit www.bookweek.ca.

 

TD Canadian Children’s Book Week 2013

May 4 – 11, 2013   |   Tour Roster

 

Alberta Selina Eisenberg, storyteller Alma Fullerton, author   British Columbia Interior Adrienne Kress, author Lower Mainland Richard Scrimger, author Vancouver Island Marthe Jocelyn, author & illustrator   Manitoba Wallace Edwards, author & illustrator Sylvia Gunnery, author   New Brunswick Eric Walters, author   Newfoundland Hélène Boudreau, author   Labrador Jennifer Lanthier, author   Northwest Territories Lorna Schultz Nicholson, author   Nova Scotia Sylvia McNicoll, author

Nunavut Sarah Tsiang, author   Ontario Rachelle Delaney, author Maureen Fergus, author Gary Kent, author & Kim LaFave, illustrator Anne Renaud, author Caroll Simpson, author & illustrator Maureen Ulrich, author Cassy Welburn, storyteller   Prince Edward Island Ron Lightburn, author & illustrator   Quebec (English-language tour) Dan Bar-el, author & storyteller JonArno Lawson, author & poet Catherine Rondina, author Max Tell, storyteller John Wilson, author   Quebec (French – language tour) Philippe Beha, author-illustrator Mario Brassard, author Denis Côté, author Louis Émond, author Jacques Pasquet, author Saskatchewan Lizann Flatt, author Lois Peterson, author   Yukon Geneviève Côté, author & illustrator

About The Canadian Children’s Book Centre
The Canadian Children’s Book Centre is a national, not-for-profit organization founded in 1976. We are dedicated to encouraging, promoting and supporting the reading, writing and illustrating of Canadian books for young readers. Our programs, publications, and resources help teachers, librarians, booksellers and parents select the very best for young readers. For more information, please visit www.bookcentre.ca.

 

TD Community Giving
TD Bank Group invests in communities in order to effect positive change in the places where it operates and where its clients and employees live and work. In 2012, TD donated over $65 million to support community organizations in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. In Canada, TD focuses on education and financial literacy, creating opportunities for young people and the environment. For further information, please visit www.td.com/corporate-responsibility.

 

-30-

For more information:

Holly Kent

Canadian Children’s Book Centre

416-975-0010 ext. 221

holly@bookcentre.ca

 

2013 CLA Book Awards

CLA Announces the Winning Authors and Honour Books for 2013 CLA Book Awards

2013 Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Illustrator’s Award Winner:

http://www.cla.ca/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&CONTENTID=14095&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm

2013 CLA Book of the Year for Children Award Winner:

http://www.cla.ca/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&CONTENTID=14094&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm

2013 CLA Young Adult Book Award Winner:

http://www.cla.ca/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&CONTENTID=14096&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm

The 2013 CLA Book Awards are generously sponsored by Library Services Centre.

Meet the winning authors in Winnipeg at the CLA Book Awards Reception on Thursday, 30 May from 7-9 pm. Enjoy cocktails, appetizers and light dinner fare while mixing and mingling with the authors and your colleagues! Take home a book of your choice – a wonderful evening in Winnipeg for $ 30! The 2013 CLA Book Awards Reception is graciously sponsored by the TD Bank Group.

CLA conference delegates can register for this event here: http://cla.pwwebhost.com/conference/index.php

CLA recognizes and thanks the dedicated volunteers who make these prestigious awards such a great success!

CLASC Profile: Alexandra Yarrow

Today CLASC profiles Alexandra Yarrow, Acting Manager of Diversity and Accessibility Services at the Ottawa Public Library (OPL). She is also the 2013 chair of the Canadian Library Association’s Book of the Year for Children Award.Alex received her MLIS from McGill University in 2004 and has held several previous library positions. She also teaches Acquisitions in the Library and Information Technician Program at Algonquin College and is co-author of the IFLA Professional Report, Public Libraries, Archives and Museums: Trends in Collaboration and Cooperation.

Alex blogs on the OPL staff blog, and at Only Connect (http://ottawapubliclibrarian.blogspot.com).

CLASC had three questions for Alex:

1. Can you tell us a little bit about the process involved in selecting a Book of the Year for Children winner?

The process of selecting a CLA Book of the Year for Children award winner begins the day after we return from the CLA Conference having celebrated the previous year’s award winner! Over the summer, the committee begins preliminary planning and gets to know one another, and the Chair sends out calls for submissions to publishers and other network contacts. Committee members begin reading submitted books as they come in: we triage those that are out of scope for our award according to our criteria and begin making preliminary notes about books we wish to include for consideration. This past year, we have been using a spreadsheet to track titles received, and an invitation-only wiki to store our reviews and comments. The wiki has been a great way to share information in one place and have a real “conversation” without bogging anyone down with more email than they already receive!

By early winter of every year, we generally have a good idea of which of the 150+ titles (this year we received 172) we want to seriously discuss and consider. We continue to receive books up to (and tragically also after!) the December 31st annual deadline for submissions. Feverish reading and thoughtful discussions on the blog continue until mid-February, when committee members have our first conference call to discuss the shortlist. To get the discussion going before the conference call, we rely on each other’s wiki reviews of each title, as well as a numerical ranking system: both qualitative and quantitative methods, in other words.

On March 1, we announce our shortlist via press release, as do the other CLA Book Awards. We then go back and re-read some titles on our own in preparation for more discussion, a second set of numerical rankings, and a second conference call to discuss the winner and possible honour books. Every year is different: some years, I have known what the winner will be in my heart the second I finish the last page of that title; other times, I have known after our first conference call (although we continue to debate up to the last minute); sometimes, I have only known after our second conference call. Our winner and honour books are announced along with the other CLA Book Awards via press release on April 15. That’s when we get to transition from reading 172 children’s novels in our pajamas to donning our fancy party dresses for the annual Book Awards Reception at the CLA Conference, generously sponsored by TD Bank and Library Services Centre.

… and that’s a year in the life of a BOYCA jury member! All this work would be impossible without committed volunteers serving on the jury (supported by their employers), excellent enthusiastic partnerships with Canadian publishers, and the invaluable support of CLA staff, especially the lovely Judy Green.

2. How are committee members chosen, how long do they serve, and what kinds of challenges has the committee faced?

New BOYCA committee members are chosen by the current committee, with assistance from CLA staff. We can never have too many applications, so please keep us in mind and watch the CLA website and Digest for calls for interest! Committee members serve one 5-year term, and we try to balance it out so that we add a new member every year or so. That way new members have opportunities to learn from longer-serving members, and we ensure good succession planning practices. I have been lucky to serve with several teams over the years, and I can say that our true “challenges” have been few, largely due to tremendous teamwork and wonderful support from CLA. One ongoing challenge is dealing with the inescapable fact that coordinating a committee made up of members from across the country can be interesting: try scheduling a conference call taking different time zones and work schedules into account! Otherwise, I would re-frame challenges as opportunities. For instance, the challenge of our choice of The Shepherd’s Granddaughter by Anne Laurel Carter in 2010 (see Quill & Quire blog post covering the controversy) was an excellent opportunity for the committee to take a stand for intellectual freedom. In fact, choosing Carter’s book and standing by it throughout the controversy was one of my proudest moments on the committee.

3. Over the course of your tenure on BOYC, in what ways would you say Canadian publishing for children has changed?

Canadian publishing for children is always changing, and it has been a real privilege to watch its evolution over the past few years. A recent Quill & Quire feature about the state of Canadian children’s publishing is particularly illuminating if you can get your hands on it. I have noticed a few interesting trends in publishing recently. Increasing numbers of titles have crossover appeal with teens: much is written and published for the 9-12 or even 10-14 crowd, and fewer books really seem to have the appeal for readers at either edge of the age range for BOYCA. Children on BOYCA’s upper edge of 12 years old are also reading a great deal of material that many libraries and publishers classify as teens (you can call this the Twilight effect if you wish!) I am also noticing an explosion of genre fiction and series titles (the Harry Potter effect), as well as increasing numbers of titles featuring marginalised voices in history (minorities, women, Inuit and Aboriginal groups: for instance, see this recent piece about Inhabit Media). Of course, much like the publishing industry in general, Canadian children’s publishers and writers are experimenting with ebooks and apps, and it will be fascinating to see how these industries develop in the coming years; we are already receiving submissions of ebooks for our award. Finally, another interesting trend is the “branding” of children’s literature: related to series books, we are noticing that characters (Scaredy Squirrel, Stella and Sam, or Charlie and Lola on the other side of the pond) are developing into a multimedia phenomenon. We will all have to take Scaredy’s advice (stop playing dead, that’s not what I meant!) and leave our nut trees to venture bravely into the exciting future of children’s literature!

Thanks, Alex!

Book of the Year Lists & Links

Today we add a new page to our website–a full list of Books of the Year for Children, linked to the video trailers. Look for additional videos to be posted in the near future; we encourage all our members to consider making a contribution to this project.

Ellen & Kay

UBC iSchool Debuts YouTube Channel

Recently UBC’s iSchool debuted its own You Tube channel, which can be found at http://www.youtube.com/user/UBCiSchool

This channel features a growing collection of library related videos that will be of use to novice and seasoned librarians alike. Current playlists include series on Designing Research Posters and Developing Book Trailers, a selection of young adult book trailers, the CLASC Book of the Year for Children videos, SLAIS’s Colloquium speakers series, and the Service Context series (which includes a tour of the West Vancouver Memorial Library’s Youth Services Department and comments by Head of Youth Services, Shannon Ozirny.

This channel is the brainchild of SLAIS Professor Eric Meyers, who reports that he and his video team hope to do some additional videos on best practices for youth reference later this year.

Final Video for the Book of the Year Video Project: Silverwing, by Kenneth Oppel

Thanks for following along with us in our CLA Book of the Year Video project, made possible through CLASC’s collaboration with SLAIS students in Prof. Judith Saltman’s library services to children class.

Our last book trailer takes us back to 1998′s Book of the Year winner, Kenneth Oppel’s Silverwing. A fantasy of fast-paced adventure featuring an unlikely hero to root for, Silverwing follows the runt of a bat colony, Shade, as he makes the long journey south to Hibernaculum, and is separated from the rest of his colony. Enjoy the trailer, made by Ashley Pettet and Kaitlyn Sparks.