PLA Blog

It’s a busy time of year for public libraries. Libraries are frantic to spend the last bits of budget before the fiscal year ends, students are taking finals and graduating, and, behind the scenes, summer reading programs are preparing to launch.

I was listening to On Point early last week, when Tom Ashbrook hosted a show on recommended summer reading picks for 2008, with 3 guest hosts: one buyer and manager of a bookstore, and two book reviewers. I’ve listened to this episode two years in a row, and I still find myself wondering when they’ll invite three librarians as their guests… I really should email them about that and see what happens (you should, too). It’s definitely worth a listen (.mp3 file), if for no other reason than to know what books your NPR listener constituency might be seeking. I’ll be adding some of the recommendations to my ever-growing queue of books to read.

So, I’ve decided to grab the opportunity that Tom Ashbrook missed and ask you, the public library and librarian readership: What are you recommending for summer reading this year? It can be any age group, any genre, any format, anything. Scroll down to Leave a Reply on this page and post your picks as a comment to this post, we’ll be listening! While you’re in the comment box, what are you planning for summer programs? Share your ideas, plans, and links to web sites and photos with us and fellow readers.

Also, feel free to comment on the picks listed by the OnPoint guests, I’d be interested to hear what you think of them. You can read about what other listeners thought, and what they’re recommending, and chime in yourself in the 2008 Summer Books OnPoint message board.

I attended another preconference session on Wednesday morning, Bridging the Divide: Libraries Transform Communities.

Before we started, a moderator said ominously, “Please fill in empty chairs so each table has eight people. You are going to do some work this morning. You can’t really understand the concept of civil engagement unless you actually do it.” And then: “Let me introduce our panelists, who should be called ‘civic entrepreneurs’ more so than ‘librarians.’”

According to the panelists, our democracy is in danger because people are becoming alienated and withdrawn. Instead of actively participating in democracy, citizens are turning into spectators and passive consumers. Robert D. Putnam’s book Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community was cited as evidence of this problem.

Public libraries can save democracy, the panelists argued, by bringing people back together. Libraries can “bridge the divide” by providing public places where people can access and discuss a diversity of ideas. Librarians should not only be “at the table,” so to speak, we should “set the table.”

I agree that public libraries should promote and foster civic engagement, especially by using literature and information to enable individuals to empower themselves. If people are being alienated by consumerism, maybe librarians should stop overemphasizing “customer” service, I argued smugly in my group.

But when it was announced that after the session break our groups would facilitate a mock debate/forum about immigration, I bailed out. I gathered up my coat and bags and sneaked out. Luckily, I found refuge in Nancy Pearl’s mid-morning presentation, Book Buzz.

Nancy Pearl wondered if librarians should coin a new word to describe “the fear of being stuck somewhere without having something to read,” and then she told an amusing story about an author whose audience of one person actually collapsed and died during a disastrous book reading. Then a panel of publisher representatives talked about some of their best and most exciting upcoming books.

I was disappointed that Nancy Pearl didn’t talk more about her own favorite new releases, but I must thank her for the session. Thanks, Ms. Pearl, you literally saved me, at least this morning, with books!

Postscripts:

• Two interesting sites mentioned during Nancy Pearl’s session, bookclubgirl.com and earlyword.com.
• When I was greedily scarfing up free advanced reader copies of books at the exhibits, a New York librarian stopped me and exclaimed, “Hey! You abandoned my group this morning!”
• There actually is a session this coming Friday called Patron or Customer? From the description: “In short, the library is more than a business and patrons are more than mere customers.” Awesome!

Hi, I’m Michael May. I’m one of the adult services librarians at Carnegie-Stout Public Library in Dubuque, Iowa, which is about five hours south of Minneapolis by minivan. My colleagues and I are driving up this afternoon.

This is my first PLA conference and I am excited. I wonder if Minneapolis resident and award-winning novelist Louise Erdrich will talk about Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, her personal account of travels through Minnesota and Ontario.

In one eloquent passage, Erdrich describes how Ojibwe poet Al Hunter reacted when his community was suffering from terrible poverty, alcoholism, and despair: Hunter urged his community to build a library. A library full of books, Erdrich explains, contains “wealth, sobriety, and hope.”

I’m looking forward to the conference programs, exhibits, and sight seeing. Hearing from people like Louise Erdrich, however, is what I think will make PLA worthwhile.

This just in from the ALA Public Programs Office (PPO):

For the first time ever, readers around the world will be able to participate in a free, live interactive book discussion program, led by [Oprah] Winfrey and [Eckhardt] Tolle. Each weekly class will be presented as a webcast and correspond to a chapter from “A New Earth,” with the discussion focusing on the chapter’s themes. Participants will be invited to take part in the discussion by submitting questions in real-time via the Oprah.com web site.

The 10 weekly sessions will be webcast every Monday night from March 3 through May 5, at 9:00pm ET/6:00pm PT. To register for the class, log onto www.oprah.com/anewearth. For libraries that can’t participate in real time, archives of each session will be available for download via Oprah.com within 24 hours of the original webcast.

We’d love to hear about public library experiences with this program. You can comment on this post, or send us email and let us know what you’re up to (we’d love to see pictures!), and how it’s going.

Has your library participated in online book groups (real-time or asynchronous) before, and what has your experience been? How do Oprah’s Books play a role with your library users and your local book groups?

I saw this story about how a publisher is using nonfiction to appeal to the hard-to-capture boys market on NECN (New England Cable News) this morning, and thought it was pretty interesting. The video is 4:25 long (there was no code for me to embed it here), and worth a watch.

It’s curious to me how the story used being bored with video games as an angle for drawing boys into nonfiction books, and it made the astute point that not all boys are Harry Potter fans. Do boys really get bored with video games? Really? Perhaps gaming isn’t the only way to get boys to read, or get them into the library?

Has your library had success with promoting nonfiction to encourage boys to read? Are there any lines of books you can recommend that can hook this elusive audience?