Blog Archive
Blogroll
- Abby (the) Librarian
- AS IF!
- Big A little a
- Bildungsroman
- Blue Rose Girls
- Bookshelves of Doom
- A Chair, a Fireplace & a Tea Cozy
- Chasing Ray
- Collecting Children's Books
- Confessions of a Bibliovore
- Cynsations
- Finding Wonderland
- Fine Lines
- The Flux Blog
- Guys Lit Wire
- A Fuse #8 Production
- I'm Here, I'm Queer, What the Hell Do I Read?
- Jacket Whys
- Jen Robinson's Book Page
- Library Praxis
- The Longstockings
- The Monkey Speaks
- MotherReader
- Read Roger
- Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast
- ShelfTalker
- Wizards Wireless
- Worth the Trip
- The YA YA YAs
awesome
What's the Fourth Harry Potter Book?
Some of the best things in life—the best online resources, anyway— really are free. For example, I don't know what my department would do without Mid-Continent Public Library's amazing Juvenile Series and Sequels resource.
Wondering the order of the Betsy-Tacy books? Getting Anthony Horowitz's series mixed up in your mind? Browse thousands of children's and YA series by author name, series title, book title, and series subject. You'll get a neat list in clean text of series in sequential order!
My department uses this resource just about every day, sometimes several times a day. Very rarely have I found errors or omissions.
Actually, I do know what we'd do without without this resource: we'd go to Amazon.com and deal with long load times and multiple edition/publication date confusion. But we don't have to, because MCPL has put this absolutely fantastic resource out on the web, free for all.
Looks like MCPL also has a weekly radio show, The Library Guys. Each week they interview an author and plug library programs. Many of their author interviews are available for download. I sense a definite bias toward mystery and suspense for adults, but still: cool!
Pictures Worth a Zillion Words
For someone who went through library school just a couple years ago, I'm feeling very late to the party - or maybe just extremely forgetful. Somehow I missed that for the past 10 or so years the Library of Congress has offered digital images from its collection through its Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, with a collection of over a million images.
And now, through a cooperative effort with Flickr, called The Commons, LOC is improving access to thousands of those images (so far) through Flickr's interface and public tagging capability.
This is very cool stuff. More people will appreciate these visual documents of our nation's history, and the images will get more thorough cataloging through tagging (though possibly also more erroneous, or extraneous - I hope LOC's Flickr moderator will weed out the dumb ones occasionally). Moreover, all the images have "no known copyright restrictions", which means they can be freely shared and remixed - even more freely than a Creative Commons license allows. Just please still remember to attribute the source!
