Collection Developments @ Sno-Isle

Warner Music soon will be selling its catalog through the Amazon mp3 store without DRM.  Now 3 of the big 4 music publishers are making their digital music available without DRM which can only be a good thing for OverDrive who provides us with downloadable music.  I wonder how long it will be before our patrons will be able to download pop music from the library website.

We should own the DVD right?  Well the answer is maybe, check out this list  of 8 kick-ass movies  based on books that I discovered on Librarian and Information Science News.  Featuring some very witty writing and some weird trivia including the fact that the John McClain character made famous by Bruce Willis was originally played by Frank Sinatra in a movie called The Detective.    You might also want to look at their take on animated films.

Meredith Farkas (Information Wants To Be Free) has an article in Library Journal 12/15/07 summarizing her findings of which librarians are blogging and why. Some of the things I found interesting.

Who blogs.

• Academic librarians are more likely to blog than public or special librarians.
• More men than women blog.
• The number of librarians who are blogging continues to grow.

Most bloggers contribute to more than one blog.
“A collaborative blog can be an excellent option for those who don’t want the sole responsibility for a blog but want to share their ideas. Some 24% of respondents contribute to a collaborative blog they consider professional in nature, and 12% contribute to a collaborative personal blog.”

A collaborative blog like ours.

Why they blog.

“Respondents were asked to list their top three reasons for blogging. The majority (69%) identified sharing ideas with others. Other popular reasons include building community (38%), contributing to the profession (23.2%), and reaching out to patrons (23%).”

Meredith also notes that many librarians blog as a form of writing practice and as a way to keep abreast of developments in librarianship. A related article on Libraries and Blogging appeared in the 11/15/07 LJ.

You can read Meredith’s full findings here.

In order to make this into what I hope will be a useful resource for us, I’ve added some links and RSS feeds. There are now RSS feeds for the Collection Development feature in Library Journal, as well as the Books section of the New York Times.

Collection Development also has a Delicious feed on the blog as well. I’m hoping that all of us will add content to delicious as a way to share articles and websites amongst ourselves. See me for logon information. If you have a delicious feed of your own, please add Colldevsnoisle to your network. Don’t know what Delicious is, watch this video here.

In the Links and Tools section you’ll find links to particularly useful resources. I’ve added links to the New York Times Bestseller Lists, and also to a site called Metacritic which pulls together reviews from respected critics and major publications. Metacritic gather reviews books, film, DVD, games, and music. The reviews are weighted depending on the authority of the source and then the combined scores of all the reviews are averaged to determine an overall score. So for example if you look up a film like “The Usual Suspects” a review by Roger Ebert will have more importance than a review from Jim’s Movie Blog–and no, I don’t have a movie blog. The combined scores in Metacritic are nice but what’s really useful is that for many of the sources the full text of the review is just a click away.

Library Journal has a great collection development article on developing a punk rock collection with books, music, and film. I’ll be using it for the new year, and maybe you’ll want to as well. Is anybody besides me sad that CBGB’s is no more….

Jessamyn over at librarian.net has a great post on using 2.0 tools to save yourself time and money so you can have time for something a bit more important than running out to Staples.

find reviews for a book and more on summize.

Book Sense Announces 2007 Bestsellers

December 17, 2007
By Kimberly Maul

The American Booksellers Association has released its 2007 Book Sense Bestsellers, with 15 books highlighted in each of the categories of hardcover fiction, hardcover nonfiction, paperback fiction, paperback nonfiction, children’s fiction and children’s illustrated. The list serves as a marketing and promotion tool for independent booksellers nationwide.

Several long-running bestsellers made this year’s list, including Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Sidney Poitier’s The Measure of a Man and Kim Edwards’ The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, along with some newer titles such as Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You!), Jessica Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious, and this year’s most popular title, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The full lists are included below.

CM8ShowAd(”Middle”);”The presentation of the year’s bestselling titles at independent bookstores nationwide in one distinctive poster makes a persuasive marketing tool,” said Meg Smith, ABA’s chief marketing officer. “Since we began creating the lists in this format, we’ve received very positive feedback about the dynamic visual statement they make to a bookstore’s customers. We hope this year even more of our members will use the lists as a colorful backdrop to in-store and window displays.”

Hardcover Fiction
1. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
2. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon
3. The Children of Hurin, J.R.R. Tolkien
4. For One More Day, Mitch Albom
5. Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult
6. On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan
7. Lean Mean Thirteen, Janet Evanovich
8. The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, Alexander McCall Smith
9. Playing for Pizza, John Grisham
10. What Is the What, Dave Eggers
11. The Maytrees, Annie Dillard
12. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
13. Bridge of Sighs, Richard Russo
14. Run, Ann Patchett
15. Plum Lovin’, Janet Evanovich

Hardcover Nonfiction
1. The Secret, Rhonda Byrne (Ed.)
2. The Dangerous Book for Boys, Conn and Hal Iggulden
3. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara and Camille Kingsolver, and Steven Hopp
4. I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron
5. The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama
6. A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah
7. Marley & Me, John Grogan
8. God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens
9. The Assault on Reason, Al Gore
10. You: On a Diet, Michael F.Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet C.Oz, M.D.
11. Einstein, Walter Isaacson
12. I Am America (and So Can You!), Stephen Colbert,
13. Deceptively Delicious, Jessica Seinfeld
14. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
15. The Best Life Diet, Bob Greene

Paperback Fiction
1. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
2. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Kim Edwards, Penguin
3. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
4. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
5. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See
6. Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky
7. The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
8. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
9. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
10. My Sister’s Keeper, Jodi Picoult
11. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
12. The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud
13. The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
14. The Whistling Season, Ivan Doig
15. Astrid and Veronika, Linda Olsson

Paperback Nonfiction
1. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
2. Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
3. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls
4. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
5. The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan
6. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
7. The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
8. The Measure of a Man, Sidney Poitier
9. Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama
10. Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
11. Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick
12. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
13. Night, Elie Wiesel
14. Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder
15. 90 Minutes in Heaven, Don Piper

Children’s Fiction
1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling
3. Twilight, Stephenie Meyer
4. Eclipse, Stephenie Meyer
5. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling
6. Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson
7. Forever in Blue, Ann Brashares
8. New Moon, Stephenie Meyer
9. Eragon, Christopher Paolini
10. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K.Rowling
11. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K.Rowling
12. Eldest, Christopher Paolini
13. The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman
14. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K.Rowling
15. The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan

Children’s Illustrated
1. Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd (Illus.)
2. Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
3. Fancy Nancy and the Posh Puppy, Jane O’Connor and Robin Preiss Glasser (Illus.)
4. Fancy Nancy, Jane O’Connor and Robin Preiss Glasser (Illus.)
5. Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, Dr. Seuss
6. Dog, Matthew Van Fleet and Brian Stanton (Illus.)
7. Flotsam, David Wiesner
8. Pat the Bunny, Dorothy Kunhardt
9. Love You Forever, Robert Munsch and Sheila McGraw (Illus.)
10. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, Bill Martin and Eric Carle (Illus.)
11. Good Night, Gorilla, Peggy Rathmann
12. Pirates Don’t Change Diapers, Melinda Long and David Shannon (Illus.)
13. Puff, the Magic Dragon, Peter Yarrow and Lenny Lipton
14. Skippyjon Jones, Judith Schachner
15. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle

Sarah at Librarian in Black has posted a thoughtful discussion on the black market of holds in public libraries. She talks about hold queues, the impact on collections both to buy enough copies, and the browsing collections available to patrons when the most popular materials are all out on hold. For libraries who charge fees for holds (thank god we’re not one of them) this creates a second class of patrons those who can afford to place holds on popular materials and those who would like to but cannot afford this service. I haven’t read all the comments yet, but I imagine they’ll be very interesting as well. Very timely information as we talk about hold to copy ratios.

terry pratchett, even when delivering bad news, throws in a laugh.