Kevin Henkes has won the 2005 Charlotte Zolotow Award for Kitten’s First Full Moon. The award is given annually by the CCBC for the picture book with the best text. Kevin Henkes and Kitten’s First Full Moon also won the Caldecott this year for the best illustrations in a picture book.
Three Honor Books were also chosen:
Coming on Home Soon by Jacqueline Woodson
Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems
Polar Bear Night by Lauren Thompson

Libraries across the country are starting to play role playing games (RPGs) with their teens. From D&D to Star Wars, the RPG Sheets site carries character sheets for all of the popular and obscure RPGs. The sheets are free to print and will save a lot of time and effort for gamers.

firstamendmentcenter.org: news offers the sad article that a Florida elementary school has decided to remove Anastasia Again! by Lois Lowry from the school library shelves. A parent had asked for the entire Anastasia series to be banned, but the school board removed the single book.
After serving on a couple of committees for our local school, I wonder what their process was and whether they had a committee of community members and if so what that committee recommended. Both committees that I have served on talked at length about the Freedom to Read and parental rights, conversations that usually lead to the retention of books.

Comic Weblog Updates offers a quick way to find out recent postings on blogs about comic books. The site has an RSS feed.

NPR had a wonderful show on The Connection.org : Telling Tales of War to Children. Two of the books featured are about Alia, the librarian of Basra who saved the book collection from the Iraq war. The larger discussion is about books for children that are set in a war zone.

The Association of College and Research Libraries has an article of interest to public librarians as well. Comic books and graphic novels offers a large selection of comic book sites. Some of the sites are more scholarly than public librarians may need, but many of them are top notch for collection development information or even better for casual reading.

The Complete Andersen :: The Hans Christian Andersen Center
This site claims to have the most comprehensive collection of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales in English online. The site has an amazing array of stories, some very familiar and other new ones to discover.
Via Neat New Stuff on the Net.

Grovel.org.uk offers information on the latest graphic novels, complete with reviews. They also provide a monthly list of the most popular graphic novels, writers, and artists. But best of all, they offer a graphic novel news section that has an RSS feed. Sweet!

TeenWeb is the teen section of the San Jose Public Library website. It is one of the best library teen sites I have seen. First of all, it is up to date and fresh looking. Second, it allows teens to offer content of their own like book reviews. Very nice! Of course, what else would I expect from the 2004 Library of the Year?