From the Director's Desk...

by Mary Russell, Director
Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library
www.nh.gov/nhsl/bookcenter/

As the winter comes to an end and (hopefully!) spring begins, the focus of the Center for the Book is awards of various kinds. We are involved in three different annual award programs: The Ladybug Picture Book Award; the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and the Letters About Literature writing competition. Spring is the one time of year when there is news about all three programs at once.

The nominees for the 2008 Ladybug Picture Book Award have been selected and were announced on our blog (nhbookcenter.blogspot.com) in mid-March. Voting for the 2008 award will be held in November, but the list is announced in the spring so libraries and schools may order the books and plan their storytimes. New Hampshire children from preschool through third grade are eligible to vote for the Ladybug winner. To be a Ladybug voting site, all you have to do is share the books with eligible voters and have an election by the deadline. This year's deadline is the Monday after Thanksgiving, December 1st, 2008. Results should be sent to us by mail or van delivery using the tally sheet that will be posted on our website (www.nh.gov/nhsl/bookcenter/programs/ladybug.html) in June. You will also find a picture ballot (available in June) and an order form for Ladybug "I voted" stickers and spine labels on the site which you may want to use in holding your election.

The Dublin Award committee is currently in the process of reading the shortlist of books that we have compiled over the past year. The committee compiles the list by reading as many works of fiction as possible from the target year for the award we are working on (the nominees we will select this year were published in 2007 and will be nominated for the 2009 award). If one of us finds a novel that we feel is a work of "high literary merit" (the main criteria for the award) we tell the rest of the committee about it. This process typically results in a huge list of books. To whittle the list down to a shorter list, other committee members will read the same book that was recommended and either agree that it merits consideration or make a case for why it should be crossed off the list. This process goes on for most of the year. The Dublin Committee chair, currently N.H. State Library Reference Librarian, Charles Shipman, has the task of wrangling the committee toward a final short list based on the suggestions and discussions that have gone on during the year. Once this short list is settled upon, committee members are expected to read all the books on it so they may discuss the relative merits of the books and vote on them to choose up to three to be nominated. This voting process has to be completed by late April as the nominees are due in Dublin, Ireland in early May. If reading and evaluating novels of "high literary merit" is something you enjoy, please consider joining the committee for next year. The Dublin Committee website (www.nh.gov/nhsl/bookcenter/programs/impac.html) has contact information for joining the committee.

Letters About Literacy (LAL) is a reading and writing promotion program of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, presented in partnership with Target Stores and coordinated in New Hampshire by the Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library. To enter, young readers wrote a personal letter to an author explaining how his or her work changed their view of the world or themselves. Readers selected authors from any genre - fiction or nonfiction, contemporary or classic. There were three competition levels in the program: upper elementary, middle school, and secondary. The contest theme encourages young readers to explore their personal response to a book and then express that response in a creative, original way. This year there were 220 letters received from New Hampshire students. Twenty-five semi-finalists were selected at three competition levels (upper elementary, middle school, and high school) by a panel of judges here in New Hampshire who selected the winners. This year's judges were N.H. State Library Youth Services Coordinator, Ann Hoey; author Diane Mayr; attorney Donna Esposito; Susan Jenna, a teacher from Three Rivers School; Kristen Truncellito, an English teacher at Concord High School; and poet Mimi White. Each judge considers the letters at only one competition level and the semi-finalist list is reviewed by each judge ahead of time to make sure they don't know any of the students on the list. Ms. Jenna did not judge the elementary school letters as many of them were written by her students. The winning letters and a list of the 2008 New Hampshire semi-finalists are on the LAL website (www.nh.gov/nhsl/bookcenter/programs/letters.html).