actual email (with a few edits for clarity and general blogginess) to Sara Zarr, written at 2:03 a.m. on May 7th, after finishing ARC (Advanced Reader’s Copy) for How to Save a Life, Zarr’s latest book, which comes out Tuesday October 11.

Dear Sara,

In high school, I used my babysitting money to pay for a subscription to Writer’s Digest. And I remember one ad that said, I can come into your house and steal. (it was sort of sinister). But the gist was, a writer has power. To make you laugh, or cry.

I started crying about halfway (if that) through reading HTSAL and have been blubbering ever since.

(Did you cry while writing it?)

I went through a (not full) Kleenex box. I didn’t stop. I started at 11:30 and didn’t look up until 1:15. A.M. Fortunately, I can go in to work late in the morning if need be.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE your book. From the minute Mandy’s character said “all the magazines had ‘the’ in front of them, ‘The Economist…” I was in love.  (I never thought about that…that magazines could be categorized by an article. But truly, magazines like People, Star, Hello! are very different from The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker…) Right away, Mandy, who up to that point seemed like a bit of a ditz, had a real voice, not just the things her mother told her about to how to catch a man. Here she was, in a world so different from her own, trying to make sense of this new habitat. Even the magazines are different…

I remember your blog posts (and tweets, I’m pretty sure there were tweets) about being in Denver and thinking you should move to Denver.

I love that the fonts are different, and how each font really reflects each girl. I love that Alex wrote back and said “stop writing me!” (and how we discover that he wrote that.) I loved how Mandy parroted her mother but wanted something different, and that’s why she decided to not have an abortion, to instead try to save a life, to maybe change her own. I loved the letters that Mandy wrote, long hand, because I used to be queen of the long hand letter and miss that form of communication so much.

And Ravi…what a dear dear boy. I love that Jill decked him in the beginning.

I imagined the store where Mandy worked, Margins, as the Barnes and Noble that I worked at before I left to go to library school, in Seven Corners, Virginia. When I worked at a different B&N in downtown Pittsburgh, I remember a guy swiping my books back in the kids’ department, but I could never catch him, prove anything.

The relationships in this book were so true, the language was so natural. I feel like you took a lot of big risks, this was a book that could have been one big cliche. But you made it honest. You did right by the story.

And even though I am hormonal, and stressed, you gave me a way out of my own crap for a couple of hours. And I needed that, so badly. (Even though I do wish I hadn’t used all my Kleenex…) (Well, I’m sure I still have some in the bathroom.)

I thought the Bible being the box for the watch was a great prop. And Dylan, all hip, afraid of the cops at the pawn shops. So different from Ravi. “Clark.” That was a classic scene. “No, uh, I was thinking of William Clark, you know, of Lewis and Clark, the explorers?”

You done good. I promise to blog about it, but I wanted to write to you, too, since I already had (was that only yesterday? It seems like a lifetime ago.)

All cried out,

Suzi

actual email to Sara Zarr, the day before.

Sara,

It’s strange, because I don’t know you, not really, but I felt like I needed to tell you (ask permission after the fact?) that I flipped to the end of your book. It’s a habit I have if the book seems like it might break my heart. Almost all Grisham novels also get this treatment. After writing that, I can see some people might see that as pejorative and I didn’t mean it that way.

And it’s so beautiful and I probably was close to a cry anyways after a confusing chat with my mother, but I am blubbering. It is so beautiful. I didn’t get all of it, and that’s okay, b/c I don’t want to spoil the whole thing, but I know that I will love the middle, now that I’ve sampled the top and bottom layers.

Also, I adore the cover. It’s been staring at me all week, saying “why are you not reading me?” as I’ve been scurrying around, trying to not fail at my own deadlines.

I’m really intrigued now to find out who Kent is, and who the guy Jill meets for coffee at the end is.

Suzi

The story of this blogger’s year: I have been too busy trying to not fail at my own deadlines since May. But I want you to know that if you miss this book, you’re missing something wonderful.

So, here we are. We’re closed Sunday, I’m off on Monday, so starting…NOW, it’s Europe week for “One World, Many Stories” at my library. The “Oktoberfest in July” is on Tuesday–the next two days will be full of putting pretzels in little wax bags and stapling them.

Still have no clue how we’re doing the root beer taste test, or the crafts. But the crafts involve magazine pictures from Europe, so some sort of collage project.

I’ll post the book list on Tuesday. Meanwhile, what books would you put on a list of books that take place in Europe for children? I did picture books, younger grades, and middle grades.

See you Tuesday!

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Yes, I know. EVERYONE is reading it. Well, everyone is reading The Paris Wife, and I’m not reading that book either. (I may read The Paris Wife in the fall. It just seemed like it was heading for a train wreck and I can’t read books like that in the summer.) The Elegance… looks a little too complicated, and one friend on twitter said, “do the characters in The Elegance… ever stop trying to prove how smart they are?” I’m also not reading the latest Traveling Pants book (Sisterhood Everlasting) for a similar reason. Too heavy.  (I know, it seems totally against the whole Traveling Pants franchise, but I’m telling you, keep a hanky handy.) I made it through the first disc saying, no, tell me no, you can’t start the book this way and Brashares, darn her, did.

What can you do with an old red shoe? by Anna Alter. The cutest book on recycling I’ve ever seen. I came across it this morning because someone recommended Alter’s more recent book, A Photo for Greta and our consortium doesn’t have any copies yet. For shame! (Our particular library doesn’t order books during the summer in Children’s because we have this little affair called Summer Reading. We have over 1200 readers signed up from birth to twelfth grade.) So I’ll make a note of it for in the fall order. But I don’t need to take it home because a) it was a quick read and b) I do not have time for crafts projects in the summer.

The Little Women Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly. I actually put this on hold when I was checking the catalog record a few weeks ago, and read the first chapter. But since then, I have become sensitive to the whole pregnant women, young children issue that rears its ugly head every so often. So when on the first page Jo, Jo! uses these words to describe her new daughter, I know this is not right now the book for me.

“And now, just when I had thought that part of my life was done, comes the most precious little gift that I had ever dared to dream of.”

Jo, I expected more of you.

I hope you are finding wonderful books to read. I’m too tired to tell you about them now, though. I am taking some lovely books home tonight, including:

The Schwa was here / Neal Schusterman
Penny Dreadful / Laurel Snyder
My year with Eleanor / Noelle Hancock
Heart of the City (about NEW YORK!) / Ariel Sabar.

You might think *that* would be the piece of information that would tickle me to pieces and have me go all over the Internet to find out more information about Herr Docktor Seuss. You would be wrong.

No, the tidbit that caught my fancy was this, about William Spaulding, Houghton Mifflin Reading Division head, and his army buddy Theodore Geisel:

Wanting to outstrip his competitor, Scott Foresman, who published the bestselling Dick and Jane series, Spaulding believed there was another way to approach the teaching of reading. He told Seuss that if he could wed what he knew—how to entertain children—with what reading specialists believed, reading instruction in the United States could be revolutionized.

I have been piecing together children’s publishing history. You might say it is my current hobby. I’d been reading Leonard Marcus‘s Dear Genius and every Charlotte Zolotow book (books that she wrote, books that she published), thinking I wanted to write a paper on Charlotte Zolotow as an editor at Harper & Row. I gave myself a deadline for a rough draft. And on the day of my deadline, I hadn’t written more than a few sentences and I kept wondering on the bits and pieces that I knew about Virginia Kirkus, who was the first children’s editor at Harper & Bros, in 1926.

It was a quiet Saturday afternoon at the reference desk, so I just started doing any search I could think of to find more bits and pieces. Soon I had printed pages and pages of information.  So now I have an ambition: to write a paper, maybe a book, on VK. I have no idea when I’ll write this paper, since Summer Reading is upon us, my sister is getting married in August and I don’t have any NEW information about VK, except that her papers are at Vassar. From all the information I’ve gleaned, Vassar is closed for the summer.

Here is what I know, more or less: VK was the first children’s editor at Harper & Bros from 1926 to 1932.  She was a teacher before that, and a freelance journalist.

I have been using the tidbits I have with the tidbits in Minders of Make Believe, (Leonard Marcus, again).  I have been taking copious notes on the chapter called “Sisters in crisis and in conflict: the 1930s.” And all this time, I had been wondering what had happened to Scott, whose name I had seen here and there but knew was no longer a working publisher.

So when I saw that name, Scott, in Anita’s post this morning, I let my fingers do the walking and came across an obituary in the New York Times of William Rufus Scott. His publishing house, W.R. Scott, was the one where Margaret Wise Brown was Children’s editor for a while. (Thanks again, to Anita, a few weeks ago, when she wrote about Caps for Sale.)

And relief, what relief, that Scott Foresman was NOT the house that published Caps for Sale…wouldn’t that be awful, to have Margaret Wise Brown on staff in one era and be publishing Dick and Jane in another?

More to come, it’s time to start cataloging for the day.

Since then, big things have happened!! Such as…I got published! My first piece is in a column called Balance Point in Serials Review, a journal for Serials Librarians. I wrote about children’s magazines, where they are and where they are going in this digital environment. I was thrilled to learn that magazines are still read and subscribed to, though they aren’t used in the same ways as when I was a girl. Information for papers is found online, either through databases, or just search engines. A far cry from The Readers to Periodical Literature, which I used in high school, college, and possibly into library school. Serials Review is hosted online by Elsivier, which is mostly used by academic libraries. I have yet to put my hot hands on a copy of the actual journal, but the editor of the column sent me a PDF of the article, which I immediately sent off to my parents. (Of course they loved it.)

AND, I’ll be presenting at PALA (the Pennsylvania Library Association) in the fall, using research from my article and more. I’ve expanded the subject matter to magazines for all ages. The presentation is called, “Not Dead Yet: Print Magazines in the Digital Era.”

The sunny side of all this magazine research (not that there was a cloudy side) is that wow, who knew, I am in love with magazines, and they are a viable thing to research in a library context.

Right now, I’m surviving the first week of Summer Reading. It’s crazy busy one minute, slow the next, and then people show up at the reference desk in clumps. We generally get around 2,000 kids signed up to our program each summer, so it’s all hands on deck, which often means two people at the Children’s Reference desk, plus a teen volunteer.

Other excitement:

• My new favorite blog is Anita Silvey’s Book a Day Almanac.
• I’m doing research (in my ha! spare time) on Virginia Kirkus, who not only started the Kirkus Reviews but also was Harper Collins’ first Children’s editor, from 1926 to 1932, back when the company was Harper & Bros. She also was the first editor to publish Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book Little House in the Big Woods. (Not the first editor to accept the manuscript, but that’s a story for another day.)

It was the moment after Harrison Ford says, “you’ll know when to go live.” Ford’s character, a has-been news anchor turned reluctant breakfast television host, lured Rachel’s character upstate to the governor’s summer house on false pretenses (a sauerkraut festival? really? but we bought it, hook, line and sinker.) Back in the studio, you see the earnest weather man scrambling, carrying multiple weathervanes, preparing to do the story he’s pitched every day for a week, everyone scrambling to find some story, any story, to cover the gaping hole that was meant for a feature on the sauerkraut festival and then you see the story unfold at the governor’s summer house, majestically… (no, I’m not one of THOSE reviewers. You will have to go see the movie for this one majestic moment, or I’ll tell you in person if you are not a moviegoer. Put it on your Netflix queue, or go pay six dollars. Because even if the script paid too much attention to Rachel’s romantic foibles and not enough on the main relationship, the one between Rachel and Harrison, the acting in this movie was superb.)

I was reminded of this moment in the movie on my morning walk, because I walk past the Pittsburgh Seminary, which has a weather vane atop its clock tower. I don’t suppose it’s an actual working weather vane, but it is the kind of tower jewelery you see on a church building, either a cross or a rooster. And the reason a clock tower would have a rooster for its top? Because Jesus said to Peter, “Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.” (Matthew 26:34, KJV)

Indulge me for a minute, while I go down this unrelated stream of thoughts: why did I use the King James Version, with its dusty, archaic language? I’m so glad you asked! It is one of the few English versions that is in public domain, that is to say, there are no copyright violations for using it in a creative piece. (Although I used such a small piece that if I had quoted the New International Version, I would not be in copyright violation, but you’re indulging me, remember?)  I also used it because it is the version that uses the word cock in such a way that you might not giggle at it. As I started writing this piece, I was going to use the word cock where I put rooster, but in my mind Samantha Jones was giggling. Does everything come back to Sex and the City, in the end?

But back to the movie. Harrison Ford, ever the curmudgeon who goes a little soft, never disappoints. When I emailed her about this movie, one of my friends referred to a Christine Lavin song, which I haven’t heard. (What a treat to discover on YouTube, eh?) I don’t have time for it now, as I must run off to ready for work.

Moral: if you think about a movie five days after you saw it, it was worth the six dollars and fifty cents and the two hours.

[Author's note: it has been ages since I have wanted my walk to end just so I could get home, fire up the laptop, and write. Huzzah!]

Stick a fork in me, I’m DONE!

So here are the five books I put aside to look at further:

Beyond the family tree: a book you can use to get the interview process going with relatives if you are trying to do an oral history…questions, forms, colorful typography, cool design…what more can you ask for? A bargain at $15.95.

The dragonfly effect: quick, effective, and powerful ways to use social media to drive social change. So this is how you leverage Facebook or Twitter or [your favorite social network] to start a blood drive, or something bigger. Bonus: I just found out Mark Z. (of Facebook) has a sister, Randi, who does PR for FB. There you go.

50 modern artists you should know. I am a sucker for any book of artists. For two seconds my freshman year of college, I considered being an art history major. Folks that are household names (Van Gogh, Monet, O’Keefe, Pollack) are in here, side by side with folks I’d never heard of (Moore, Twombly, Barney, Beuys.) This is not a book to give to your art history major, as the book is a QUICK intro, but if you’re a “wanna be” like me, it gives you enough that you’ll want more. And I learned in the glossary the actual meaning of “installation art”: installations are three-dimensional works of art. Well, I sort of knew that, but now I know the actual definition. YAY!

Deanna Favre (yes, Brett’s wife) wrote a book! With a guy whose last name is also the name of an Ivy League school, Shane Stanford. The Cure for the Chronic Life: overcoming the hopelessness that holds you back actually looks a lot less hokey than most of the books you find in the 248. 4′s (Christian life and practice) in most public libraries. Looks to be a 40 day guide, so maybe something good for Lent. Any book that uses a book called “Mad Church Disease” as an example of how we are screwed up about how we think about church can’t be bad. It looks like the sort of book Anne Lamott might like.

And this one, it was painful to not explore, as I am such a patient. The empowered patient: how to get the right diagnosis, buy the cheapest drugs, beat your insurance company, and get the best medical care every time. How can you not love a book where the first chapter is “How to be a ‘bad patient.’” (As in, question your doctor.) The second chapter is how to fire your bad doctor after you’ve found “Dr. Right.”

And the book that was the hardest to put aside, that I broke down and looked at a little bit: Masters: Collage. Collage is one of my favorite hobbies. ‘Nuff said.

And now, my dear ones, it is time to turn off the computers, head on out to enjoy the wonderful weather I understand we had all day. (Darn those windowless cataloging offices!)

Well, no.  I had a once in a lifetime chance to see Carole King/James Taylor as the last concert at the Mellon Arena (fondly called the Igloo) here in Pittsburgh, and I’m recovering from a bout of Shingles. But I’ve attended at least 3 ALA conferences (Toronto, Chicago, Chicago) and 2 PLA conferences  (Boston, Minneapolis) so I have some conference experience…

…and I’ve spent at least 11 years of my life in and outside the Beltway, so I thought I’d give you some tips about DC and some thoughts garnered from last year’s conference.

• 5 day forecast from wunderground. DC is hot and humid, but any librarian worth her (or his) salt knows that the cardigan fits nicely in one of those Demco/B&N/Brodart/your vendor’s name here bags. You will be going in and out of the conference center, hotels, Metro stations…so dress for the weather (hot, humid) but carry a cardigan.

Last year before the conference, I went all out and bought Mephisto sandals. Pricey, but so worth it. I did a lot of walking (Chicago’s ALAs are extremely spread out) and having that cloud under my feet was especially good for walking the blocks. One time, another librarian and I walked a mile side by side, not talking, just power-walking. We didn’t know each other, we didn’t talk. But the side by side walking kept both of us going to our final destination. I doubt I would have continued walking had it not been for the silent competition/comradery we had going.

• Get a Metro pass. My sister, who is a true Washingtonian, recommends that tourists (that’s you) use a daily pass. That way you don’t have to worry about adding money every time you go somewhere.  They cost $9, which is a bargain if you think about how much cabs cost.  Here’s the link to purchase one online. Scroll down a bit. They are good after 9:30 on weekdays (like today and Monday and Tuesday) but work all day on weekends (Saturday, Sunday)

I was staying with my friends in a darling Chicago neighborhood called Lincoln Square. I got lost a couple of times, but by the end of my short time in Chicago, I knew my way (at least back to their apartment.)

• Are you staying with family/friends? (Congrats on your networking skills, it’s a great way to attend conferences on the cheap.) Tell them about the exhibits only passes. Any Jim or Jane off the street can pay $25 at the registration booth inside the conference center for a one day exhibits-only pass. Link here for what’s in the exhibits…lots of great stuff! Even better,  offer to pay for their pass–it’s a great host/hostess gift for any book lover.  (What’s $25? You could be paying for a hotel room, remember?)

The friends I stayed with had just gotten married, so I got them something off their wedding registry. And I gave them a lot of my vendor swag…my friend is considering becoming a librarian someday, so she loved hearing about what I’d done each day.

• Network. And I don’t just mean in your meetings. Are you waiting in the taxi line because the shuttles are all gone and you have to get back to your hotel? Ask the folks waiting if they are going to your hotel or nearby. Sharing cabs cuts the cost. Or, if you have an internet enabled phone (you lucky dog!) you can try out a new service in DC, called CabCorner, which creates an instant cab-pool.

One hot Chicago afternoon, going from the conference center into downtown, my fare got paid for by some ladies who were at the other conference in the conference center. When they found out I was a librarian, they paid my way. While at first I found it a little ego-bruising, I decided in the end that it was really sweet of them, and graciously thanked them.

I seem to remember it was a day when I was exhausted and just needed to get OUT of the conference area. Which brings me to…

• Don’t just go to the exhibits and meetings and presentations…especially if you are paying your own way. Take a diversionary trip. The Metro is very easy to navigate, and a lot of the museums are right on the Metro line. Go to a Smithsonian or two. And hey, they are FREE.

It was the ONLY day I’d have a chance to go to the Art Institute…so I went. I stood in front of my favorite painting for almost a half hour. Yes, it meant I missed hearing Cokie Roberts, but it’s not every day I’m in Chicago.

• Always read people’s name tags. You never know who you’ll meet. Do you know someone from their state? This is a great way to meet the person you’ll eat lunch with today. Are there empty seats at a table in the crowded caf? Don’t be afraid to ask if you can sit with people–they may become your new best friends!

I’ve met Robert Munsch’s brother (Toronto, ’02), Richard Peck (same), and last year, darn it, a really great children’s poet. (Write this stuff down!!) We were on the escalator and I read her name tag and said, are you x, the poet ? And she was!

• Do you twitter? follow the hashtags #ala10, #aladanceparty, and for fun, @alatotebag, who tweets such gems as this:

Who had the bright idea to hold #ALA10 in a 100 degree swamp? Librarians don’t keep well in the heat. Cardigans will spontaneously combust.

A few other librarians have written GREAT conference advice posts:

Librarian by Day: ALA Conference Survival Tips #ala10

Free Range Librarian: ALA Conference Survival Tips — 35 Conferences Later

Elizabeth Bird at SLJ: Remembering what I’ve forgotten

I’m planning to pursue a Ph.D in Children’s Lit next year. So what better time to start reading more kids books and hey, writing about it, since that’s my new direction?

I’ll start with two (no, three) I pulled off the re-shelve cart. Books that I was supposed to, um, re-shelve.

The first one is the size of a Beatrice Potter book.  It is 15 cm. in height, according to our catalog, and is about a mouse, which seems to fit its diminutive size.

Mouse Letters: a very first alphabet book by Jim Arnosky.

Arnosky, whose website is titled “Jim Arnosky’s Wildlife Journal,” is a “renowned naturalist, as well as author and illustrator of many books for children about animals and nature. He wrote Mouse Letters and its companion book Mouse Numbers, twenty years ago as a gift for his young daughter, who now has a child of his own” (from the back jacket-flap of Mouse Letters.)

This book depicts a mouse trying to make the letters of the alphabet by arranging and sometimes manipulating twigs. The U, which is made as the mouse falls onto a twig bridging a small gap, is followed by the harrowing image of the mouse holding on for dear life at the middle of the now letter V. Wordless, it takes me back to its watercolor pictures again and again.

(I’m excited that there is a companion title. More on that later, maybe.)

The second book I couldn’t shelve was a bigger tome, One Frog Sang, by Shirley Parenteau. The cover shows a happy green frog with the onomatopoeia, “Ka-blu-urp!”

Parenteau’s website is based on her second book, Bears on Chairs, and you need Flash installed to run it. Apparently One Frog Sang was inspired by hearing frogs singing by the road. They stopped singing when cars drove by. Parenteau is not new to writing, but as books go in and out of print, her other titles aren’t listed on her website. I dug a little and found one in our catalog: A space age cookbook for kids, from 1979. Call me a librarian, but I think a book is still interesting if it is no longer in bookstores and I think all books an author wrote should be listed on their websites. (Surely at the very least they own a copy, and could be photographed holding it, if nothing else.)

Ah, but you want to know about the book. Well, I haven’t even opened it yet. I’ve been helping patrons put holds on the latest Harlan Coban book, or renew their library card registration, and find the third book in the Percy Jackson series.

The end papers are blotches of green on yellow, so that’s kind of fun. The story is a kind of circle (one frog starts, then two, then more, until a car drives by and they are silent. Until…and it starts again as the book ends.) I’m not crazy about the pictures, maybe because in my mind, frogs are from Tuesday and very realistically drawn/painted. I’m not crazy about the onomatopoeia, which seem to be made-up words, not just the “Ribbit Ribbit” that I’m used to. But I do not have a wriggling child in my lap and I am not reading this book out loud. I am reading it to myself as mothers ferry their children over to the circulation desk and out the door, as children and grandmothers peer into the hamster’s cage and watch him take a drink. And taking a closer look, I know that part of my not-love for this book is that I’m not familiar with the frog sounds of the country. I’m a city girl, always was, always will be. But the critic in me says, frogs deserve to be drawn well. Some in this book are, but others are not, and that bugs me.

The last book is one that I found at the second re-shelve cart, and again, I almost re-shelved it but couldn’t. I think this book will go home with me, since I can’t read it all sitting here at my desk.

(Just walked over to paperbacks to get the Island trilogy off the shelf, Gordan Korman.)

DK is a favorite publisher of mine, so already they have my attention when the subtitle of this Anne Frank biography is “a photographic story of a life.” The first photograph in the book is of the actual diary–who knew that she wrote in a book that was red and gray plaid? Inside, as a quick leaf through (who knows when the next youth will come in clamoring for Harry Potter 7?) I discover treasures such as a picture of Anne sunbathing (keep your mind out of the gutter), a picture of an actual ration book, and a little sidebar about Montessori schools, because (who knew?) Anne attended one. When I was in college, I wrote a paper on Anne Frank, using Miep Gies book Anne Frank Remembered as my main source. I remember it for the information, but more than that how clear the writing was. In that book, I learned that Otto Frank loved meeting new people and that he had a gathering at his house every week of all sorts of people (before the war, of course.) I think I will pore over this book tonight, at home.

It’s time to try to shelve some more books, as a young child screams bloody murder over the fact that he will soon have to leave the library.

Well, our library has a camel. Her name is Rama. We have very creative staff members that decorate her monthly with seasonal themes. (Not sure when that started, but now it’s a really fun thing that a lot of us look forward to.)

Last month, I was at a Children’s District Meeting (which was essentially a Christmas party) and afterwards, I had coffee with two librarians. We were talking about Twitter (one of my favorite subjects…) and one of them suggested that the camel should have a Twitter account. Hmmm…

I ran it by a few people, and announced that I’d be the voice of Rama, starting in January. Well, it’s January, and today was the first day that I could devote some semi-uninterrupted time to creating an account. I spent some time researching and gave myself a deadline of 2 p.m. to create the account.

So, without further ado, here she is, Rama, the twittering camel!

Some great* accounts I found while researching:

Finksburg Library in Carroll County, MD

Grand Rapids Public Library in Grand Rapids Public Library

Topeka Public Library (is this David Lee King’s library? Yes, yes it is!)

Some great articles I found:

Twittering Libraries (created by an LIS student, highlights some great twittering libraries along with pros and cons for starting twitter.

The ALA Annual Tweet Report by Michael Stephens, of Tame the Web. It’s from the ALA that was in California, so not like “annual” as in, this will be updated annually, but annual as to a report about the Annual Conference. Really attests to the fact that librarians have just sunk their teeth into Twitter.

Lindy Brown’s list of Libraries on Twitter (with strike-throughs for libraries no longer twittering.)

The Twitter page at the Library Success Wiki.

Update on Friday (started this post Wednesday): I am now following 132 tweeps, mostly Pittsburgh related organizations, and have made lots of lists of resources, and have 17 followers, YAY!

__________________

*great is always subjective. The question I asked was, “does this twitter feed have a personality?” Since I’m blogging from the mouth of a camel, I’m looking for a particular “voice.” So lists of the new books, while a great service to patrons, was not what I was looking for today.