REFORMA, the National Association to Promote Library and Information Services, is pleased to announce that the San Francisco Public Library, Topeka & Shawnee County (Kan.) Public Library, have been selected to be the recipients of the 2009 Estela and Raúl Mora Award for their commendable efforts in promoting El Día de los Niños/El Día de [...]

PaperTigers (http://www.papertigers.org/index.html) describes itself as a website about books in English for young readers. While books discussed are multicultural from or about any part of the world, it has a particular focus on the Pacific Rim and South Asia. The site includes book reviews, interviews, an online gallery of art by various illustrators, and a [...]

Margarita Engle is the author of the 2006 Pura Belpré Medal Winner, The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano, and The Surrender Tree, which received the 2009 Pura Belpré Medal as well as a 2009 Newbery Honor.
Henry Holt Books for Young Readers is a division of MacMillan which provides a wonderful [...]

The Brown Bookshelf is now accepting submissions for the 3rd Annual 28 DAYS LATER.
During the twenty-eight days of Black History Month, The Brown Bookshelf will profile a different children’s or young adult author and children’s illustrator. On March 1st, they will announce the winner of the grand prize: a gift basket featuring every book profiled [...]

Smithsonian Education offers educator resources including Virtual Heritage Tours. If you haven’t had the chance, I encourage you to explore the site and share it with your patrons.

This has been posted to some of the listservs but seems like such a good opportunity that it is worth repeating.
The Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is offering EIGHT FULL-TUITION SCHOLARSHIPS over the next two years (2009-2011) to outstanding and diverse students who have a [...]

Greetings from Idaho! I’m Kimbre Chapman and I run the Children’s Department at a library in the Boise area, Caldwell, Idaho. Have any of my fellow youth services librarians ever wondered why the ALA conference is scheduled in the middle of Summer Reading!? ALA has been over for a week now and I’m finally getting a chance to [...]

by Tricia Bohanon Twarogowski
In this final installment of the series examining programs for children with special needs and their families, I share ideas on two final topics: potential partnerships and future possibilities for this specialized programming.
Partnerships
As mentioned in Part One, reaching out to community organizations affiliated with special needs is beneficial not [...]

At the 2009 ALA Annual Conference the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) presented the terrific program Serving Students on the Spectrum.  The program was hosted by Alison Ernst, Director – Northfield Mount Hermon School (MA) Library and Academic Resources and Ernie Cox, Media Specialist – St. Timothy’s School (NC) with the following panelists: Patty [...]

by Tricia Bohanon Twarogowski
Last week in Part Three, I shared program plans from past Rhythm and Rhyme storytimes for children with special needs and their families. As a result of the partnership between the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County (PLCMC) and the Autism Society of North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County Chapter, training videos have [...]