Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Buffy Hamilton at the Unquiet Librarian writes about Book Tasting in the Library. This great article discusses an immersive activity that she organizes at her library which encourages students to select five books on a particular topic and evaluate them.

“Susan and I have worked together in past years to develop a collection of book sets (fiction and nonfiction) on issues related to countries and/or regions in Africa including the HIV epidemic, ethnic wars and genocide, famine, environmental issues, women’s rights, apartheid, and children soldiers. We’ve expanded the offerings for this fall to include other contemporary titles related to these issues in other regions of the world as well as immigrant rights, poverty, human trafficking, and privacy issues in a post 9/11 world. We placed the books on carts that were ready for students when they arrived in the library today…”

Image: Horla Varlan

Audrey Watters writes an interesting piece for MindShift about How Social Networks Might Change the Way We Read Books.

“…critics will point out that the social aspect create distractions from reading. But we can also argue that the social element can add depth to the understanding of what’s being read, just as book clubs do. Peers can help define words and concepts that are sometimes hard to grasp when reading alone.”

Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers has put together a great list of 5 Free Tools for Creating Book Trailer Videos. Each entry in the list includes a brief review with feature highlights. Here are the tools discussed:

1. Animoto
2. Stupeflix
3. Shwup
4. Flixtime
5. Masher

Liz Dwyer at GOOD asks Are College Libraries About to Become Bookless? In a time of e-books and ubiquitous computing, what lies ahead for libraries? This is quite a though-provoking piece.

“The number of colleges using electronic textbooks available to students is on the rise. But what about the rest of the books on campus—the millions of volumes stored in the library? It turns out the digital text revolution is beginning to turn college libraries into places that no longer stock physical books.

As Time reports, the engineering libraries at Kansas State University, Stanford and the University of Texas are almost completely book-free. And now at Drexel University in Philadelphia, the new Library Learning Terrace, a 3,000 square foot residence hall-based space that opened in June, there are no books at all.”

Jason Boog at GalleyCat rounds up the Top 20 Facebook Apps for Book Lovers. This comprehensive list will help you pick books, find book clubs, take quizzes, and swap books. Here are the top five:

1. Goodreads
2. Visual Bookshelf
3. weRead
4. aNobii Books App
5. I’m Reading

I am thrilled and honored to share that “The Tech Set” book series has been named the winner of the ALA’s 2011 Greenwood Publishing Group Award for the Best Book in Library Literature!!! Congrats to all the incredibly talented authors and the wonderful folks at Neal-Schuman. This was an amazing project to be a part of!!!

If you’re researching which e-book reader is right for you, you’ll want to check out Justin The Librarian VS e-Book Readers. Justin Hoenke rates and reviews four popular e-book devices detailing which features he enjoyed and which he disliked as well as providing further comments.

via LibrarianinBlack

Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers reviews BlogBooker, an application which will Turn Your Blog to a PDF Book. This brief posts provides a feature summary of the application and short screenshot tutorial for how to export your Blogger or WordPress blogs as XML files for use with BlogBooker.

The folks at Technology to Software have put together a helpful list of 25+ Useful Free E-books Every Blogger Should Read. If you’re a blogger, you’ll want to check out the entries here.

Jason Fitzpatrick at Lifehacker reviews the Five Best Book Recommendation Services. Each list entry includes a review of the website features, cost, and a screenshot. I rely on Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This…” service as well as LibraryThing. What’s your favorite?

Yogesh Mankani at Save Delete rounds up the Top 10 Best And Free E-Book Reader Apps For Your iPhone. If you’re an iPhone owner, you won’t want to miss this list.

My friend Pauline Rothstein has just published a new book titled Boomers and Beyond: Reconsidering the Role of Libraries with Diantha Dow Schull. The book is “A roadmap to the trends and perspectives on the library’s role in meeting the needs of our aging population”, with perspectives from contributors such as Stephen Abram and R. David Lankes. Congrats Pauline!

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

The Huffington Post has put together a list of authors and book lovers to follow on Twitter based on readers’ suggestions. The list gives a quick bio of each bookish twitterer, their pic, and a sample tweet. Based on this list I’ll be adding Clive Barker, William Gibson, and the BookBitch to my Twitter list.

BBC News has announced that Google is set to Digitise Ancient Italian Books. According to the recent story:

“The Italian government has signed a deal with Google to put the contents of two national libraries on the internet.

Up to one million antiquarian books – including works by Dante, Machiavelli and Galileo – will be scanned and made available free on Google Books.”

I am very excited to announce that the book series that I’ve been working on for the past year+ has officially been published today! The Tech Set is a series of 10 practical technology books for libraries that’s been co-published by Neal-Schuman Publishers and LITA here in the US and Facet Publishing in the UK. We also have a companion Tech Set Wiki with extra content for each book and author podcast interviews.