News & Features

The Education Library Networks Coalition—which includes the American Library Association and the International Society for Technology in Education—is calling on the Federal Communications Commission to double the funding for E-rate, according to EdLiNC’s co-chair Jon Bernstein. The coalition also asks that the E-rate program offer more “scalable” goals for local entities, with limited national mandates.

“Penguin will resume doing business with OverDrive as of this morning,” Penguin spokesperson Erica Glass told LJ on September 25. According to a blog post by Karen Estrovich, collection development manager for OverDrive, 17,000 Penguin ebooks are already “live and available for purchase in OverDrive Marketplace.” Although Estrovich refers to the transaction as a purchase, the books are being offered for a one year term on a one copy/one user lending model.

Fighting censorship and limited access to materials is an integral part of a librarian’s mission and job description. Launched in 1982, Banned Books Week is the national book community's annual celebration of the freedom to read. More than 11,300 books have been challenged since then. The following is a selection of SLJ’s news coverage of challenged books, interviews with oft-banned authors, and tools for showcasing censored titles during Banned Books Week, and all year.

YALSA and Dollar General Literacy Foundation are offering two $1,000 grants for Summer Reading programs: one for employing a teen intern and another for purchasing resources. The Library of Congress has launched a new Twitter feed for K–12 educators which can be found @TeachingLC. ALSC members are encouraged to send suggestions for the 2013 Theodor Geisel Award to the committee chair, Penny Peck. Capstone Interactive ebooks are now compatible with the Amazon Kindle Fire HD.

OverDrive has announced that more than 17,000 Penguin titles, both new and backlist, will now be available to OverDrive's U.S. library partners—public, college, and consortium—via the one copy/one user lending model. However, Kindle users will only be able to access Penguin books via “side-loading," rather than wireless loading.

Turnitin today announced that an eight-year efficacy analysis shows that high schools using the company’s plagiarism prevention technology are currently experiencing at least a 33 percent drop in unoriginal content in their students’ writing. The study analyzes more than 36 million student papers from 2,862 high schools.

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen, Lucy Knisley First Second, April 2013 Reviewed from Final Copy I was diagnosed with Celiac disease on Halloween eight years ago. That’s eight years of politely saying, “no, thank you” when offered a delicious pastry, forgoing mom’s signature stuffing on Thanksgiving, and checking restaurant menus ahead of any dinner [...]

This wordy picture book will introduce children not only to the joys of spelling but also to words like “lulu” and “crackerjack.”

Book lovers of all ages came out in droves to the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, September 22. It is the largest free literary event in New York City, and showcased a diverse group of authors and illustrators that live or work in the borough. Gene Luen Yang, Raina Telgemeier, and Jarrett J. Krosoczka were just a few of the acclaimed and bestselling children's books creators that were present.