From the Director's Desk...The ballots have been cast and the votes counted (all 14,313 of them!) and My Lucky Day by Keiko Kasza is the winner of the 2004 Ladybug Picture Book Award. Sponsored by the Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library, the Ladybug Picture Book Award was established in 2003 to promote early literacy and honor the best in recent children's picture books.

Voting for the Ladybug Picture Book Award occurred during Children's Book Week in November. Children from pre-school through the 3rd grade were eligible to vote, and more than 100 New Hampshire preschools, elementary schools and public libraries participated in the voting. Here are the complete results:

• My Lucky Day by Keiko Kasza ~ 2,445 votes
• Diary of a Worm by Doreen Cronin, pictures by Harry Bliss ~ 2,402 votes
• Tub-boo-boo by Margie Palatin, illustrated by Glin Dibley ~ 2,367 votes
• Miss Smith's Incredible Storybook by Michael Garland ~ 2,039 votes
• How I Became a Pirate by Melinda Long & David Shannon ~ 1,563 votes
• Buster by Denise Fleming ~ 1,212 votes
• Hey Pancakes! words by Tamson Weston, pictures by Stephen Gammell ~ 684 votes
• Bob by Tracey Campbell Pearson ~ 630 votes
• A Frog in the Bog by Karma Wilson & Joan Rankin ~ 542 votes
• One Dark Night by Lisa Wheeler, illustrated by Ivan Bates ~ 429 votes.
  

It is appropriate that voting for the Ladybug Picture Book Award occurs in the same month as Thanksgiving, because the Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library had a lot of Ladybug stuff to be thankful for:

• The 2004 Ladybug Picture Book Award was supported by a generous donation from the Toadstool Bookshops. Thanks to this support we were able to create "I voted" stickers and spine labels for use by participating libraries and schools. Over 16,000 voting stickers and 7,500-plus spine labels were sold to schools and libraries this year. Visit our website to see what they look like and to order your stickers for next year.
• Thanks to an anonymous donation we were able to make available for loan a set of the nominated titles for 2004. Eight different schools/libraries borrowed the set during the summer for about two weeks each.
• Thanks to donations from the publishers of the nominated titles, we were able to give a complete set of the nominated books to the Russell School in Rumney ~ their ballot was drawn at random from the Ladybug ballots received for the 2003 Award. A second set of nominated books was raffled off at the CHILIS Spring Conference and went to the Sandown Public Library. Thank you to everyone (nearly 90 people) who bought raffle tickets to benefit the Center for the Book at the NHSL.
• Thanks to Ann Hoey, and a committee of New Hampshire children's librarians, we had a great list of picture books for 2004 and they are already at work putting together the list for 2005. To be considered for nomination, a picture book has to meet the following criteria: it must be published within the last three years, it must be in print, either the book's author or illustrator must be from the United States, it must have strong child appeal, it must have artistic quality with text that supports the illustrations, and it must not have been previously nominated for a Ladybug Picture Book Award. If you would like to suggest a book, or to find out what has been nominated previously, visit the Ladybug Picture Book Award web page at www.state.nh.us/nhsl/bookcenter/programs/ladybug.html.
• Last, but not least, thanks to all the libraries and schools who have made the Ladybug Picture Book Award an exciting event for New Hampshire children!