Behind the Locked Door, part two

With a mere 30 days before ALA Annual starts, the YALSA Excellence in Non-Fiction for Young Adults book award committee is reading reading reading. I’ve read something like 30 books thus far on a variety of topics, and rumor has it that another 10-12 books are due to arrive at any time. The Committee is discussing the books using both e-mail and ALA Connect, assessing them per the charge:

To annually select the best nonfiction title published for young adults between November 1 of the preceding year and October 31 of the current year, available in English in the United States and, if desired, to also select honor titles. The short list of finalists will be announced during the first week of December, with the winning title announced at the following ALA Midwinter Meeting. The winners and honor authors will be recognized at an ALA or YALSA Conference.

Now, that’s a little vague. In determining what’s “best”, we’re looking at text, how the images integrate with the text (and enhance it), what additional materials there are (e.g., a glossary, a timeline or a bibliography) and how the whole contributes to our knowledge of the topic and is marketed to young adults. So, for example, last year’s Turn Right at Machu Picchu or 2010′s Unbroken, while filled with YA goodness, were written as adult books and marketed to adults, were not eligible.

There’s also a question of accuracy. While not explicitly mentioned in our charge (or any YALSA definition of “best”), accuracy in non-fiction is imperative. If there’s a glaring factual error, there may be smaller, less glaring errors. Or errors in areas of the topic about which I have no prior knowledge. Example: if a book tells me that the people of Mexico speak Mexicoan (I’m watching the Conversations with Dead People episode of Buffy as I type, hence that gem), I’m going to question what else I’m missing in the book. Wouldn’t you?

Some of the books we’ve read have had errors. Some have had questionable facts from questionable sources. Some show bias where they perhaps shouldn’t. And some have been clearly written for a younger group (it’s possible the publishers aren’t clear about our age grouping).

Luckily, those are in the minority. Overall, however, the books have been good. We’ve been nominating a number of them (there’ll be an annotated list of all the nominations available for use as a collection development tool – here are previous year’s lists [note: you'll need to log in]). We’ve even had a field nomination. What’s that?

Field suggestions are encouraged. To be eligible, they must be submitted on the official suggestion form. The form will allow for both a rationale and summary of nominated titles. Committee members will be notified of all field suggestions, which are eligible to be considered for nomination by members. Nominated titles must also have a second from a committee member. Only those titles that have been nominated will be discussed at Midwinter and Annual Conference meetings, as well as phone meetings, though a committee member may request that a suggested title be moved to the discussion list and thus treated as a nominated title. Furthermore, all nominated titles must be discussed. To prevent a conflict of interest, publishers, authors, or editors may not nominate titles in which they have a vested interest.

If you’ve read a YA non-fiction book that you think deserves our attention, here’s the form. Don’t forget, however, that we – the Committee – need to second your nomination. Don’t let that deter you, though, because there may be a book (or two) that we haven’t really thought about, or one that we’re on the fence about and your nomination may be the nudge the book needs.

Stay tuned for more from Behind the Locked Door.

Between 50 Million Shades of Gray

I’ve been watching with amusement the many e-list postings about the “controversial” trilogy, 50 Shades of Gray – does this fall within the library’s collection development plan? where do we shelve it? it’s (*gasp*) NSFW! etc..

However, as a reader of both adult and young adult books, another thought came to me: what do we do about the title and potential for confusion? After all, we know that patrons frequently mangle titles (one stellar example? a [probably apocryphal] student asking for “oranges and peaches”, aka “Origins of the Species”). Just go to Amazon, IndieBound, Powell’s or Barnes and Noble’s websites and look for “shades of gray” (or “shades of grey” if you prefer that color).

Amazing, right? You don’t get that number of hits from “Hunger Games”.

If I were in a public library, I’d have

• Sepetys’ Between Shades of Gray (2012 William C. Morris YA Debut Award Finalist and YALSA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults 2012, among many other honors)
• Kadohata’s A Million Shades of Gray (the author has won Newbery honors and this book was named one of the CCBC Choices)
• Fforde’s Shades of Grey (Fforde has a rather large readership for his Tuesday Next and Nursery Crimes series)

I might still have Reeder’s Shades of Gray, depending on how it’s still circulating. I might also have Norman’s Shades of Gray, depending on how big circulation of science fiction is at my library.

And now there’s the 50 Shades of Gray trilogy.  Collection development parameters aside, can you imagine the fuss if a mother, looking for one of the YA Shades accidentally borrows the adult version?  Or if a child, not realizing that there are so many titles – or even accidentally – puts the “wrong” one on hold (or worse, downloads it to their e-reader)?

It’s not just about the awards

Perusing my twitter feed today, I saw this from @TheDaringLibrarian:

My response was that J.K. Rowling isn’t American, thus her work is excluded as per the Newbery rules, and that it was too bad that some parents see award-winning books as automatically being better reads than those that haven’t won awards.

@Sophiebiblio then added:

And that’s the problem, isn’t it?  Books that are popular (Hunger Games, the Harry Potter series, Twilight, Percy Jackson series, etc.) are often discounted by parents simply because there’s no award attached to the book but – and this is really important – often the rules mean that really great books aren’t eligible or are considered and set aside for various reasons (like the consensus rule, or the limits on numbers allowed to be nominated/named).

As a librarian, I get to read Booklist and School Library Journal and VOYA and other review sources and see starred reviews.  As someone interested in finding great books for my students, I read book blogs (like the SLJ Newbery and Printz blogs, as well as others devoted to great YA reads) so I can get different opinions about the various books.  It’s difficult keep on top of all this, because over 4,000 YA books were published in 2010 alone (the exact number is in dispute), so I need help.

Parents need help, too.  Too often I’ve had parents tell me that their child isn’t ready for [genre or title], when I’ve seen that the child really is ready for it.  Or that the parent would prefer that their child stay away from [genre or title or series].  Or that the child should only read “award-winning books” because clearly those that have won awards are better than all the others that haven’t won an award.   While it’s not my place to tell them that their child has the freedom to read anything they want (ALA’s Rights aside, it is not my place to overrule a parent!) it is my place to help parents understand the collection and that an award - or lack of an award – doesn’t determine what books go into the collection.

Every January we do big displays of that year’s award-winning books… we do Newbery and Printz and Caldecott units… we run mock award groups.  We purchase those books we don’t already own that are on the various awards lists.  Perhaps it’s time to stop doing that?  Maybe we’re contributing to the problem by highlighting all those past award winners and stressing the criteria and the potential winners for the upcoming years.

And maybe we need to be more proactive about promoting the idea that it’s not all about the awards.

Inside the locked room, part 1 – #ALAMW12

As reported last April, I’m serving on YALSA’s Excellence in Non-fiction for Young Adults committee. My term started November 1, 2011 and will end in January 2013 when we make those exciting phone calls – and in between there’ll be much discussion and reading. Liz Burns, on the outgoing committee, explains our charge and the process better than I possibly can.

So why this post? Because there’s a lot of mystery about the whole “locked room committee” thing. I’m here to give you a peek behind that door.

First of all, this time we didn’t meet in a locked room. As a matter of fact, the room didn’t lock and had a sliding glass wall out to the hotel’s atrium (where one could watch the Patriots/Ravens game – so glad that ended well! – bowl, eat and drink). If you’re good at lip-reading, this would have been a perfect spying opportunity. There was no bathroom,food or drink provided, but most of us either brought food with us (we started at 1:30) or suffered.

Our first meeting was mostly “housekeeping”: introductions (I’m the only school librarian on the committee), checking our addresses so that publishers can start to send us books, talking about the criteria and how we should structure our conversations (positives first, then negatives). A few titles were mentioned, and our intrepid Chair, Angela, gets to take on the task of contacting the publishers to ask they send the books to us. We also talked about fact-checking, which doesn’t mean that we’re doing the work the editorial staff should have done in real depth, but if the work is (to our knowledge) leaving out important information, that’s something to consider.

Because this is one of the few committees whose nominations are made public (to serve as a collection development tool) we have a lot of responsibility. To be honest, it’s a little scary. Now, that list isn’t our shortlist, it’s just all the books we thought worthy of serious consideration. The shortlist will be drawn from that list, ditto the eventual winner. And a book I love love love and nominate may ultimately be trashed by the rest of the committee. The fact that e-readers show books differently, that pictures may (or may not) be laid out the same in digital format, if they’re even truly visible, means that before nominating we have to check the print version.

Between now and Annual we’ll be reading, discussing and taking notes. Then we’ll meet, again in a possibly locked room, and talk about our favorites at that point.

Stay tuned.

Finding the Right Level

AASL has issued a Position Statement about Labeling Books with Reading Levels. Helen Adams wrote a wonderful blog post about this, including this quote:

“Recently I helped a student who came to me while his class was in the library browsing. As the librarian of a middle school library, I often see situations such as this one. The boy had been most recently reading about George Washington and Ben Franklin. His class assignment that day was to checkout two computerized reading program books within his tested reading level and thus was “allowed” only one free choice book. “But I’d rather not have to check out labeled books and there are some books I’d like today that don’t have the dots or reading level labels on the backs of the books. Does that mean Ican’t [sic] check them out?” he asks me.

Reflecting on my personal reading experience, I’m so very glad these programs didn’t exist when I was in school.  It’s probably no surprise to those who know me, but I was reading well above my age level throughout my school years (when I was in 7th grade, I tested at a college+ reading level).  Now, if I had been the above student, I’d have had a real problem: not too many grammar school libraries have high school (or higher) books.  So what could I have read that was “at my level”?

Looking at AR’s books, I learn that the Lord of the Rings trilogy is “Upper Grades”, but I read it in 5th grade.  Little Women is for Middle Grades, which I guess is good since most of my friends read it in 3-5th grade.  The non-fiction topics I studied aren’t even listed.   When I was in 6th grade there was a time when all I read was Nancy Drew, which prompted my librarian to speak with my mother because she felt I could be reading “better” books (my mother told the librarian that I could read what I wanted to, thank you very much).  My point is, had I been restricted to my “level” I wouldn’t have read Mistress of Mellyn in 6th grade, nor would I have enjoyed the works of Thornton Burgess at a high school senior.

Why so many schools have jumped on the reading level bandwagon is beyond me.  It’s sloppy teaching and librarianship to rely on some test (or tests) to give students a limited range of reading.  Years ago I had a kindergarten class and there was one boy who always borrowed Agatha “Cripsie” mysteries.  I knew he wasn’t reading them, but his parents read them to him – by the end of the year he was reading above level, but would he have been had we insisted on his borrowing picture books?  Evidence suggests not.  It also can be traumatic for students reading greatly above or below level to advertise their status, which is what happens if the books are labelled (and there are some libraries where there is no label other than the AR – or other program – level).

So let me take the opportunity to praise AASL’s statement.  My fear is that it’s too little, too late.  How do we get administrators to read this, and recognize the harm it does?  How do we convince teachers to do the same?  It’s not enough to write letters to the editor.  We must find better ways to encourage a return to broader reading, to allowing students to read for pleasure, whether they’re reading “at level” or not.  As reading experts, that’s a critical part of our jobs, right?

The Role of Reading

The recent twitter effort to get our senators to remember school libraries/librarians during their ESEA discussions made me think about the role of librarians – or, to be accurate, it was one of the things that made me think about our role. 

Let’s talk about PDA (part two)

(see Part One)

In addition to the questions of findability and privacy and information overload, the question of who actually owns the materials you’re acquiring arises. Let’s say a student is studying Portugal’s involvement (some might argue creation of) the Atlantic Slave Trade. I could purchase a physical copy of Hugh Thomas’ The Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 knowing that it would be on the shelves for students to use for many years to come. If it was available in e-book format, I could purchase a digital copy. However, I’d have to think about whether I wanted to be locked into a device (Kindle, Nook, Kobo or ???) or if I were going to support a BYOD program that allows patrons to download or read the book on their own device. What if we change devices, from Kindle to something soon-to-be-invented – how do we take that copy with us? The same holds for “purchase” via a consortium or content provider (say, Follett Shelf or OverDrive): if we don’t re-up our fees every year, how can I provide that content to my students year after year (the same question holds if the provider goes out of business)?

This might be a good idea if the books “purchased” are multiple copies of current popular fiction. When the demand for yet another copy of Twilight or the newest Sarah Dessen goes down, just stop renewing that title. But for research, it seems to me that this might not be the best model from a fiscal or a rights perspective.

Finally, there’s the question of note-taking. How easy would it be to take notes on digital content? The Kindle does allow for bookmarking and note taking, but not in quite the same way I see students currently taking notes and marking pages (using post-its or making copies/scans of relevant pages, of course). How easy is it to flip from e-book to e-book, comparing one fact or explanation or discussion to another? Again, this is one of the areas that a strong PDA program needs to address. And if we’re opening up the notes to the public, what are the odds that plagiarism will flourish?

So many questions to consider, and so many conversations still to be had. Let’s start them at AASL11.

Let’s talk about PDA (part one)

I’m not talking about allowing Public Displays of Affection in one’s library. Nor am I talking about a Personal Digital Assistant. This post is about Patron Driven Acquisition, a topic that I’m hearing more and more about given the rise of e-readers and e-books in our collections. How do we adjust our existing policies to include PDA? Do we adjust our existing policies? What limitations, if any, do we put on PDA within our institutions? What about findability: do these items go into our catalogs, or not? How do we measure the success of a PDA program?

Some schools are allowing students to recommend (or purchase) books via their Kindle/Nook programs but this isn’t quite what PDA means. Barbara Fister has a good description of PDA in her Inside Higher Ed column:

This new way of building collections emphasizes speed and choice, things that are popular these days. No need to wait for interlibrary loan; just click on the title in a large shopping mall of e-books and you can have what you want right away. One model that’s popular is to enter the e-book options into the library’s catalog. Browsing for a short period of time is free; browsing for a longer period is treated as a rental and the library pays a fee; and if a book is “rented” four times, the library automatically purchases the book.

During the recent LJ/SLJ E-Book Summit, I “attended” the academic library thread to see how I could better prepare my K-12 students for their next academic experience and was surprised by the conversation that was had about PDA.

The librarians were all very much in the Pro-PDA camp, with findability being the major issue they faced. One university was actually creating its own app to assist students! What about privacy? Well, as danah boyd often points out, teens think of privacy differently than adults do and in the academic realm, it could be very helpful to know that when you’re researching the Boxer Rebellion or the environmental changes brought about by El Nino that previous researchers found certain books and articles to be helpful. On the other hand, it could also be argued that part of doing research is to do the search part on your own, to see what information you can find on the topic (and if you miss something critical because you didn’t search well, or hard enough, that’s part of the learning process). That conversation, of course, leads to questions of academic integrity and what role research should play in the educational process.

But back to PDA. Shortly after the Summit, Barbara Fister posted The Revolution Will Not Be Subscription-Based, in which she discusses the financial implications of this mode of acquisition. Having recently had the experience of spending over $500,000 in six months to replenish a K-12 print collection, I’m painfully aware of the financial discussions. There are a great number of books that were purchased that haven’t circulated, books that should have been purchased in digital format, and books that have (already) outlived their usefulness. While we have added books requested by patrons (teachers and students) as soon as we can, the immediacy of acquisition in the PDA programs at the panelist’s colleges hasn’t been there.

Would joining a consortium that offers hundreds of titles for potential immediate purchase be a good thing? What about the financial side and the DRM issues (see my upcoming part two)?

As AASL11 approaches, I look forward to having these conversations with my peers and colleagues.

Appearing Elsewhere

(aka “shameless self-promotion”)

For a while now I’ve been reviewing books for the SLJ Adult Books 4 Teens blog. It’s an eclectic list:

• Among the Wonderful
• Sanctus
• fathermothergod
• The White Devil
• In the Garden of Beasts
• 13, rue Therese

Angela Carstensen, our wonderful editor, had made me a better reviewer and does an amazing job of introducing all the books reviewed.  If you aren’t subscribed to this blog, you should be (just try to resist running out to buy and read the books listed!).

A few months ago I was asked to write  for EdTech magazine on the issues surrounding adding e-books to the collection.  The article, “Checking Out the E-Library” is now available on-line.

Don’t Read That Book!

Those that know me know that I can be critical when reviewing books – one friend said I was more critical than most of the other reviewers she knew.  That’s ok, because my policy for reviewing is to help people choose what to read next, always with the understanding that their tastes and mine might not mesh.  I’ve blogged before about Reader’s Advisory and censorship, but recently I’ve been thinking about how to do RA best if you don’t like the book.