Schooliblit

Thursday, August 21, 2003

Book Groups for Teens
Book Groups Spur Teens (The Washington Post, August 17) Reading groups have found new life among teenagers, and the signs are all around -- from bookstores sponsoring monthly reading groups for middle school and high school students to publishers including book-club discussion questions at the end of novels targeted at teenagers. [via the NCTE Inbox, Aug. 19, 2003]
This is good to read about. I wonder how I can get a book discussion group going with my students.
8:28:59 AM

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It's Not Just Common Sense
Fishing for Information? Try Better Bait. As the Web gets larger and more complicated, it can help to know a few not-so-obvious tricks to mine even richer results from search engines. By Lisa Guernsey. [New York Times: Technology]
I love this sentence:

Give people an empty search box and a button to click on and somehow they know exactly what to do.

Or at least they think they know what to do, but we librarians know how often people are frustrated and how often they don't really understand how what they type in that search box affects what is returned. One of the problems in school is that the students assume, as the writer of this article does, that just typing in any old thing will find just what they want, as if the computer could read their minds. Anyway, I'm glad to see an article about some of the helpful resources for correcting this in the august New York Times.
7:38:25 AM

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What's a Classic?
How They Sell Now: Classic Bestsellers. Heres A Neat Chart from BookMagazine that shows how well the "classics" are selling these days. It's a look at the best selling classics in 2002, according to BookScan. The top 5 are: The Hobbit, Catcher in the Rye, Red Tent, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lord of the Flies. [LISNews.com]
This is sort of fun. The list includes everything from Wuthering Heights to She's Come Undone. I guess their definition of a classic is anything published more than two years ago that's still selling. Hmmm.
7:23:03 AM

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