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For those of you that attended the Missouri Library Association Conference last week (or for those that missed it!) here is the booklist of titles I talked about. I'd love to hear your thoughts on them and if you have any favorites of 2016!

Trends:
Origin Stories & Retellings (fairy tales, classics, history retold, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland)
Sequels and Series
Contemporary Fiction continues to rise
Creative formats (Replica by Lauren Oliver, Between Worlds by Skip Brittenham)

Middle Grade/Young YA:
Ghost by Jason Reynolds
Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier
The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill
The Inquisitor's Tale by Adam Gidwitz
It Ain't So Awful, Falafel by Firoozeh Dumas
Pax by Sara Pennypacker
Save Me a Seat by Sarah Weeks & Gita Varadarajan
Shadow Magic by Joshua Kahn
Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo
Some Writer! by Melissa Sweet
Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk

Young Adult:
And I Darken by Kiersten White
Exit, Pursued by a Bear by E. K. Johnston
Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse
The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig
The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle
Highly Illogical Behavior by John Corey Whaley
Holding Up the Universe by Jennifer Niven
If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo
The May Queen Murders by Sarah Jude
Passenger by Alexandra Bracken
Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton
The Reader by Traci Chee
Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys
The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon
The Unexpected Everything by Morgan Matson
We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson
When We Collided by Emery Lord

This title sounds fancy but mostly I needed to play catch-up and this seems like the best way to do that. Hi. In the past month I’ve done two public speaking type things that went well and some other stuff. I’ve been remiss in sharing them in a timely fashion. So now I’m sharing them in a list fashion.

• I went to Mississippi for the MLA Conference which was a great time. I led a facilitated discussion pre=conference which is the first real time I’ve done something like that. You can read the slides here: The Digital Divide and You which includes input from the discussion part of the afternoon. I stuck around for the conference and was very glad I did. I put some photos up here. Thank you MLA, the Mississippi Library Commission and especially MLA President Amanda Clay Powers for showing me a good time.
• VLA hosted a table at VT’s first annual ComicCon. This was a hugely fun event and terrific for library outreach. We had free stickers and reading lists, a display of banned graphic novels and people could get their photos taken in our “Vermont Comic Reader’s License” booth which netted a ton of delightful photographs (more on facebook). We also sponsored one of the special guests — Dave Newell, Mr. McFeely from Mister Roger’s Neighborhood) and he did storytime at the booth with puppets. I staffed the table one of the days. Such a good time. Huge shout-outs to other planners: Helen Linda, Sam Maskell and Hannah Tracy.
• Another MLA! This time the Massachusetts Small Libraries Conference (also the “first annual”) and I was the keynote speaker talking about how to Future-proof libraries. A combination of talking about what the challenges and unique positions small and rural libraries are in as well as some ways to nudge people towards getting interested in the online world. Notes and slides here. Big thanks to the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners & the Massachusetts Library System.
• I started writing for The Open Standard, Mozilla’s new online-writing thing. My first article, After Some Victories, the Time Has Come to Legally Define ‘Fair Use’, has been up for a while now. I’d love to know what you think.
• Also I’m not sure if I was explicit in my “I’m moving on” post about MetaFilter but I’m still at least somewhat looking for work. I love Open Library and my local teaching but I’ve got a few more hours in my schedule and would be happy to do some more speaking, some consulting or some writing. I have a one-pager website that summarizes my skillset. Feel free to pass it along to people.

I gave a really quick “How to do an elevator speech” talk after lunch at MLA (the one in MA, not the one in MS) and it was really fun. All librarians should practice their elevator speeches. Here’s my one slide from that talk. You can probably get the gist of it.

I am very excited to present on Need to Know Teen Lit (and some Middle Grade!) at the Missouri Library Association Conference. Here is the list of books I talked about. Let me know if you have any others to suggest!

Trends: 
#weneeddiversebooks-be sure to check out the Tumblr page

"The Fault in Our Stars meets Eleanor and Park":

This past week I presented a talk on "Keeping up with YA" for the Missouri Library Association Conference. I'm all about sharing resources with other librarians and readers, so I'm posting a copy of my handouts here on the blog. The first list is the books I booktalked, the next additional reading suggestions in each genre. These lists in no way cover everything, but are supposed to be a starting point for books to know for 2011.

Award Buzz
Billingsley, Franny. Chime. ISBN: 0803735529
King, A.S. Everybody Sees the Ants. ISBN: 0316129283
Schmidt, Gary D. Okay for Now. ISBN: 0547152604
Selznick, Brian. Wonderstruck. ISBN: 0545027896
Sepetys, Ruta. Between Shades of Gray. ISBN: 0399254129
Taylor, Laini. Daughter of Smoke and Bone. ISBN: 0316134023

Contemporary
Beam, Chris. I Am J. ISBN: 0316053619
Nelson, Blake. Recovery Road. ISBN: 0545107296
Marcus, Kimberly. Exposed. ISBN: 0375866930
Polisner, Gae. The Pull of Gravity. ISBN: 0374371938
Walker, Melissa. Small Town Sinners. ISBN: 1599905272
Wealer, Sara Bennett. Rival. ISBN: 0061827622
Various. Dear Bully: Seventy Authors Tell Their Stories. ISBN: 0062060988

Magical Realism
Asher, Jay & Mackler, Carolyn. The Future of Us. ISBN: 1595144919
Hodkin, Michelle. The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer. ISBN: 1442421762
Martin, C. K. Kelly. My Beating Teenage Heart. ISBN: 0375868550
Suma, Nova Ren. Imaginary Girls. ISBN: 0525423389

Humor
Angleberger, Tom. Darth Paper Strikes Back. ISBN: 1419700278
Bray, Libba. Beauty Queens. ISBN: 0439895979
Harris, Carrie. Bad Taste In Boys. ISBN: 0385739680
Herbach, Geoff. Stupid Fast. ISBN: 1402256302
Schreiber, Joe. Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick. ISBN: 0547577389

Romance
Forman, Gayle. Where She Went. ISBN: 0525422943
Griffin, Paul. Stay With Me. ISBN: 0803734484
Hautman, Pete. The Big Crunch. ISBN: 0545240751
Leavitt, Lindsey. Sean Griswold’s Head. ISBN: 1599904985
Perkins, Stephanie. Lola and the Boy Next Door. ISBN: 0525423281
Sales, Leila. Past Perfect. ISBN: 1442406828

Fantasy
Carson, Rae. The Girl of Fire and Thorns. ISBN: 0062026488
Chima, Cinda Williams. The Gray Wolf Throne. ISBN: 1423118251
Dixon, Heather. Entwined. ISBN: 0062001035
Murdock, Catherine Gilbert. Wisdom’s Kiss. ISBN: 0547566875
Paolini, Christoher. Inheritance. ISBN: 0375856110
Ursu, Anne. Breadcrumbs. ISBN: 0062015052

Paranormal
Cabot, Meg. Abandon. ISBN: 0545284104
Coakley, Lena. Witchlanders. ISBN: 1442420049
Dolamore, Jaclyn. Between the Sea and Sky. ISBN: 1599904349
Fallon, Leigh. Carrier of the Mark. ISBN: 0062027875
Fitzpatrick, Becca. Silence. ISBN: 1442426640
Hawkins, Rachel. Demonglass. ISBN: 1423121317
Stiefvater, Maggie. The Scorpio Races. ISBN: 054522490X

Science Fiction
Mafi, Tahereh. Shatter Me. ISBN: 0062085484
McEntire, Myra. Hourglass. ISBN: 1606841440
Revis, Beth. Across the Universe. ISBN: 1595143971
Ryan, Amy Kathleen. Glow. ISBN: 0312590563
Sheehan, Anna. A Long, Long Sleep. ISBN: 0763652601

Dystopian
DeStefano, Lauren. Wither. ISBN: 1442409053
Lu, Marie. Legend. ISBN: 039925675X
McCafferty, Megan. Bumped. ISBN: 0061962740
McMann, Lisa. The Unwanteds. ISBN: 1442407689
Oliver, Lauren. Delirium. ISBN: 0062112430
Roth, Veronica. Divergent. ISBN: 0062024027
Young, Moira. Blood Red Road. ISBN: 1442429984
Zevin, Gabrielle. All These Things I’ve Done. ISBN: 0374302103

Mystery
Black, Holly. Red Glove. ISBN: 144240339X
Halliday, Gemma. Deadly Cool. ISBN: 0062003313
Harrington, Kim. Clarity. ISBN: 0545230500
Hilmo, Tess. With a Name Like Love. ISBN: 0374384657
Johnson, Maureen. The Name of the Star. ISBN: 0399256601
Wells, Robison. Variant. ISBN: 0062026089

Horror

Talking about the digital divide in Connecticut is a lot different from talking about it in Texas, or even Vermont. Unlike most states I’ve looked at, Connecticut really doesn’t have a large population of people who live in an area where they can’t get broadband. I’m sure it has the same numbers of offline people, generally speaking, but whatever their reasons for being offline are, they’re not for lack of access. I admit, I played this for laughs a bit at my CLA since I know that people aren’t going to confuse broadband access with technological know-how and will still see that there is work to be done.

All my talks went well. Here’s what I’ve been up to recently

• Last Thursday I was on a panel with some interesting people including the soon-to-be-president of ALA Molly Raphael. We answered some provocative questions about the future of libraries and mostly had a great time.
• Friday I gave my talk about developing a technology curriculum for libraries. For those of you used to my usual stuff, this was a departure. Not heavily attended–it was in one of the last timeslots of the conference–but I was pleased with it. If you’re considering a technology curriculum, you might be interested in my short set of notes/slides. I got to present with Anna Fahey-Flynn who is Curriculum Development Librarian at Boston Public and it was really interesting to see how their tech instruction program is coming together.
• Over the weekend I walked around in the sun in Massachusetts and then headed to CT for the CT Library Association conference. Before attending the conference I was interviewed for public acess TV in Manhattan about the Google Books project and copyright and a few other things. No idea when this will go live, but if you think you’ve seen me on tv talking about Google Books, you may have.
• Tuesday I gave a talk about myths about the digital divide, similar to my Texas talk but with some local examples.

As usual, I also got to attend some great presentations including a talk by BPL and the Internet Archive [at MLA] about how they’re working together to provide digital access to library content via Open Library. This may be a personal thing, but I’m always excited when libraries test boundaries and tell us “We checked with our lawyers and they think this is an acceptable level of risk.” I also saw a CMS smackdown/comparison [Drupal vs. WordPress] by Polly-Alida Farrington and Shanon Clapp which was full of good information and delivered with a friendly “you can do it!” approach. I also saw John Palfrey’s closing keynote talking about the digital divide and some of what Harvard’s Library Lab has been up to, and the DPLA and other things. I’ve mostly seen him in contexts where he was talking to non-librarians so it was fun to see him explaining a lot of these big idea projects on my home turf.

I’m home for a bit, back to teaching my Know Your Mac classes, staffing drop-in time, filling in at the public library and waiting for my book to be in print [this week, here's hoping] and then travelling to Portland at the end of the month for the Oregon Virtual Reference Summit.

Speaking at library and library-type conferences seems to mostly keep me busy for March – May and October – November. This week I’ll be headed down to Danvers MA for MLA and then on to Stamford CT for CLA. In both cases I’m speaking but also trying to attend as much of the conferences as I can given my night owl tendencies. Here’s where I’ll be, please say hi if you see me, or come to one of my talks.

MLA – Thursday the 28th at 1 pm – I’ll be on the Future of Libraries, or, What the Heck are You Thinking? panel along with Scot Colford, Kieth Michael Fiels and Maureen Sullivan which is sure to be interesting and probably fun.
• MLA – Friday the 29th at 10:30 I’ll be talking about Curriculum Development for Public Libraries along with Anna Fahey-Flynn from BPL. Sort of a new direction and I’m looking forward to it.
• CLA – Tuesday May 3rd at 2:40 I’ll be talking about the myths we believe about the digital divide and offer some researched based statistics as to what’s really going on.

In june I’ll be doing a talk for NELA-ITS and heading over to Oregon for the Oregon Virtual Reference Summit in The Dalles. This is all a good way to channel fidgets since I’m all “EEeeeeee” waiting for my book to come out. Thanks in advance for saying hello.

I gave a talk at MLA on Social Software and Intellectual Freedom. It’s hard to sum up the topic in 75 minutes. I did abotu an hour of talking and opened the floor up to questions which seemed to go well. If my talk had a thesis it was “Make sure your privacy policy expands to include social networking; don’t chastise people for what you know about them online; don’t be frightened.” but I think it was a little rambly. It did, howerver, come with a huge list of links which is what more and more of my talks lately have. I talk about 30 things and then give a lot of well-curated “and here’s where to go for more” sources. In case anyone is curious, the sldies and links are here

• Social Software & Intellectual Freedom

Thanks to MLA for having me down to Springfield. It was a nifty conference in a nice new building.

When you write a nonfiction picture book, a biography (of any length) or other nonfiction topics, how much do you document? Do you use end notes, foot notes, or what?

Well-Documented Nonfiction Sells a Manuscript

Original Sources. You should use as many original or primary sources as possible. Go back to the original diary, the first photographs, the newspaper account of the time, letters, etc. I’m not talking here about how/where to research, but it’s worth saying that nonfiction for kids relied on original research.

The documentation of primary sources, though, is harder than with published resources. When I taught Freshman Composition, I told my students to put in more information than you think necessary. The main thing that documentation does is to let your reader know how they, too, might access that documentation to check your facts, or to dig deeper. If in doubt about “proper” documentation, look up the MLA or APA formats; my students liked using Easy Bib, an online service that will ask for infomation and return it properly formatted. If you are at a place where you can’t look it up, then record more than you think necessary. If you have found an original diary, then include everything you can about the diary: beginning date, ending date, # of entries, location that the diary was written, name of author, maiden name of women author, birth date and death date if available, and anything else about your access to it that seems important.

Be sure to document everything: written text, photographs, objects, film, recording, websites, multimedia, etc. Everything.

Writing the Manuscript. Make sure that as you write the manuscript, you are noting when and where you draw information from the source. I prefer to keep an ongoing bibliography and then follow the MLA format of adding the author’s last name and page number at the point where the info occurs.

Nonfiction should use original sources for information (Pattison).

Submitting the Manuscript. Ah, here’s where things get tricky. If you’re working with an editor and can ask preferences, do that. Endnote, footnote, in-text citation - it’s a matter of personal preference or house preference and should be followed if you know it.

If you don’t know, then pick one method that seems reasonable, given your topic and your research, and stick with it. Then, in the cover letter, explain what you’ve done. That’s it. Don’t stress out over this or try to go into too much explanation or apologize for the method of presentation. Just be straight forward about what you’ve done and if the publishing house is interested, they can ask you to re-format the revision a different way.

Creative Non-fiction. What if you write creative non-fiction and it reads like fiction and you don’t want those footnotes to interrupt the flow of the story. Then, you have two choices: the least intrusive method of documentation is end notes, where you put a super-numeral at the position the documentation is appropriate and at the end of a chapter or the end of the manuscript, you list the end notes.

OR, you can send in two versions of the manuscript, one with no documentation and one with documentation. That would give the editor the option of which to read and some editors would choose one, some the other.

Basically, do the original research, document the research, document the places in the manuscript where the documentation is used, and format either to an editor/publishing houses specifications, or if that is unknown, then the method that seems most reasonable. Then, submit.

Post from: Revision Notes Revise Your Novel! Copyright 2009. Darcy Pattison. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Novel Hooks
2. Picture Books: Those Confusing 32 Pages
3. Rough draft of Declaration

I gave a talk today at the Michigan Library Association: What Works: More My Library Less MySpace.

It was an all new from-the-ground-up talk about appropriate social technologies with some decent (and local!) examples of libraries that are doing Library 2.0 stuff, especially Twitter. I almost always rewrite my talks somewhat, but using the excuse that I wanted to learn to use Keynote, this time I started from scratch. Unfortunately I don’t have a sleek 150K html page to share with you, but I do have the slides in PDF or flash format. The librarians in Michigan are always excellent to talk to and with, and have a great sense of humor about forever being compared to Ann Arbor District Library in things technological. They liked my John Blyberg joke. I heard that Kevin Yezbick was supposed to be live Twittering my talk but blogocoverage seems to be thin. I have gotten a few Facebook friend requests, Twitter adds, and one really nice MeFiMail (MetaFilter’s in-house mail system) from a member who came to my talk and enjoyed it.

This morning I wandered around downtown Lansing and marvelled at some of the lovely buldings including the downtown library. I’d show you some photos but despite all my blabbing about 2.0 Tech, I left my USB cable at home. I get back to New England tomorrow and will be chatting Scriblio with Casey before heading home to a snowy Vermont and a sock sale. Thanks very much to everyone in Michigan for making me feel so welcome.

I extended my trip to Mass, by a day so that I could go to more MLA. My goal when I speak at library conferences is always to see some programs as well as give mine, but I only sometimes manage that. This conference was fun, accessible and enjoyable both to present at and to attend. Here are a few thoughts, my apologies for lack of thoroughness.

I already mentioned that I thought my talk went pretty well. This was despite the weird room temperature, the last minute “can someone find a longer cable for the projector!” issue and the flaky wifi. Big thanks to Scot and Michael for making this happen as well as the local IT guy. I hung out with Andrea a lot of the first day as she was covering the day for the MLA Conference Blog. We went to the banquet with Tom Ashbrook (the NPR guy) and I was a little underwhelmed. Ashbrook seemd to have a stump speech and didn’t seem to have prepared too seriously. Compared to seeing Pete Hamill last week it was night and day. Good food and company, including getting to talk to a woman who runs the Suicide Prevention Resource Library and has what seemed to me to be a very interesting job. Then Andrea and I went back to the hotel and planned to go to karaoke, but sat upstairs laptopping instead.

The next day I got up and went to a session called Privacy Rights of Minors - A training session for policy and beyond. It was run by Ruth LaFrance, the chair of the MA Intellectual Freedom Committee who attended ALA’s Law for Librarians program. I found the program good, but somewhat frustrating. The upshot was that the Massachusetts law is fairly clear about the privacy status of library user records and does not in any way state that these rights do not extend to minors. So, librarians try hard to help minors’ library records stay private. However, there are many wrinkles in this situation which make this difficult to deal with.

- Parents are financially responsible for their children’s overdue fines and missing books. This is true even though the library will not, if they are properly applying the law, tell the parents what books their child has out. I wonder about this in terms of contract law and whether you can make someone pay for something and not reveal what it is.
- Parents often have to approve of their child getting a card in the first place. A minor cannot legally give consent in a contractual sense which means to the extent that a parent “owns” a child (I am not agreeing with this assessment morally, just saying that the laws tend to support this except in extreme cases) they also own thir debts and obligations. Keeping a teenager’s record private makes one sort of sense in that a teenager can make their wishes known, but with a 3-4 year old it’s really hard to gauge what the intent of the child is.
- Often libraries maintain a child’s privacy only to let someone else reveal it. So if you are a library that sends overdue notices home — this was an example they gave at this session — then it’s between the parent and the child who has access to that notice or letter. I think this is a cop out. I think the whole issue is sticky, but if you think privacy and the law is this important, you don’t just let the post office blow a kid’s privacy when you won’t or can’t.

A lot of the session was about what the session leader called “add-ons” basically codicils in a library’s privacy policy that would make a minor’s records easier for a parent to obtain. It was clear that this wasn’t a direction that Ms. LaFrance agreed with entirely, but it was equally clear that many people in the audience thought the idea of minor privacy was overblown and impossible to enforce. A lively session but ultimately I left with many more questions than answers. I also left with a Star Wars gym bag full of books because I won the raffle. Actually, I won the raffle twice. I bought three tickets (one of my “How to be a gracious presenter” tips is “Always buy the raffle tickets”) and both of them were winners. I passed on the second prize to someone else.

I went out for a walk and ran into Michael and Jenny walking down the street and we went and grabbed sandwiches an ate them on the Sturbridge town common and spent some nice quality time walking around looking at things which included popping into the labyrinth at St Anne’s for some contemplation time. It was nice to see those guys; with all the running around they do, it’s hard to find the time to just goof off for a little bit. We went back and hung out on the porch and talked about public speaking in libraryland and I was encouraged to start a more professional “about me” page (in process still). We went out to dinner at a Thai place called Thai Place and I got a glass of water spilled into my lap which translated into 30% off dinner.

I got back too late to be on a team for the trivia evening, but it was in full swing by the time I got back. I sat with Jenna and Eric in the back of the room and said hi to Keith Michael Fiels and Steve Abram and other folks. Nora Blake, who was my capable and gracious host, was the one running the trivia night and her advice for other trivia-planning librarians is “always cite your sources” since the librarians got ornery with small errors of fact. It was a great idea for a library conference evening because the drinkers could drink, the non-drinkers could socialize, it got people into a room for an auction and a silent auction fundraiser, and it was right in the hotel. I had a great time. Stayed up late drinking with radical librarians.

Got up the next day and went to two sessions, Jenna and Eric’s RadRef session. They are a great librarian/techie tag team [and married couple] she talks about Radical Reference and he talks about open source software for libraries in this matter of fact “hey this is actually pretty simple” way. Their sets of slides are on this page on the Radical Reference site. I caught up on email while other people went to the luncheon and came back in time to see Jenny and Michael and Jessa Crispin of Bookslut fame do their blogging panel discussion. I have to say, it was strange.

If you don’t know Bookslut, it’s another early blog, more book-oriented than library-oriented but it has a lot of librarian readers. Jessa is a well-spoken writer and reader who now does the site full-time (I think) as her job. Michael and Jenny are Michael and Jenny and do their blogs as sort of side projects within their regular jobs. As a result, the two “sides” of this program had vastly different approaches to blogging which sort of made for lively conversation but sort of just made me feel that it would have been nice to have one or the other. Jessa blogs for work, then she turns off her computer and goes outside (her words). Her blog doesn’t have comments. She says she doesn’t read blogs. She tells new bloggers often to not bother. She’s not a techie, and not even tech curious. She says MySpace “scares her” as does the idea of having comments on her blog. She reads books and seemed to have some level of disdain for people who couldn’t find time for reading. I may be misreading this, but I just got a weird vibe off of her, that despite her making a job out of her blog, she maybe felt that bloggers were nerdish and dorky and self-absorbed and … lame.

I think part of this may be the general vibe I get from these conferences where pretty much everyone is approachable and personable and while there are a lot of introverts there are rarely any “too cool for school” people who you couldn’t just walk up to and/or have a drink with. I thought Jenny and Michael did a good job of explaining why blogging could be useful — and not in that “everyone needs a blog” way that I think has mischaracterized their position for a while now — but I felt that they and Jessa were talking across each other. Jessa was discussing blogging as a job and Michael and Jenny were discussing it as a tool. In any case, it was my last session of the conference and then I headed home to think and type and bring some of my free books back to my tiny libraries. Thanks for having me, MLA!

I just got done giving a Tiny Tech Talk about good tech tools for small and rural libraries at the Massachusetts Library Association conference. In a country where “small” is often defined as libraries with 50,000 people or fewer, there is a real need for services that work for really tiny libraries serving populations of a few thousand or less. This talk is a variant of my Tech Tips talks but with a lot of the actual words being about specific things that work where there isn’t much access or tech know-how, much less cash. It went well. I enjoy library conferences.

I’ll be giving a talk in Massachusetts on Wednesday afternoon about technology tips for tiny libraries at the MLA Conference. I’ll be getting in late on Tuesday and staying until early on Thursday. MLA is one of those conferences that only pays your registration for the day you are scheduled to speak so I’m not sure how much other MLA stuff I’ll be doing but this is just to say that 1) I’ll be there if folks want to come to my talk, get some lunch or walk around in the exhibit hall 2) I’ll be attending the dinner Wednesday night and would probably love company so look for me 3) I’ll be missing all the cool stuff later in the week (trivia, Keith Michael Fiels, Michael and Jenny and Jessa) because I have to get back home and staff my drop-in time, but I hope it’s great.