This Books Gonna Be a Good Book...

I seriously would cry tears of joy if someone entered something in the teen video contest this great:



From Marin on our Collection Developments blog:

Oprah interviewed the students on Friday’s show via satellite and delivered the news that along with the help of a corporate sponsor, the school’s library will receive 2,000 new books and brand new computers. pretty cool.

Awesomesauce!

Legality of Teens as Sexual Beings

Ever since I attended the ALA annual meetings in Chicago last summer, I've been following the blog of Dr. Marty Klein: Sexual Intellegence: Sex--and Culture, Politics and the Media--and Sex. I was immensely impressed with Dr. Klein, who spoke at YALSA's program Sex in YA Lit: From Blume to Block and Beyond. He is a sex therapist who has very solid opinions about how to raise healthy teens, most of which focus on recognizing that they are sexual beings whether we like it or not, and that teaching them to feel ok with themselves is immensely important.

Today he posted a piece about the recent court decision that determined teens can not be tried for child pornography for sexting photos of themselves:

Court Finally Limits Persecution of Teen Sexuality

The good news is that our judiciary has finally told prosecutors enough is enough. A U.S. Appeals Court just upheld a preliminary injunction barring local prosecutors from filing felony child-porn charges against a teenage girl who took a topless photo of herself with her cellphone...

Hopefully none of this will effect us in libraries, but it is a very interesting part of the bigger picture of teen rights, development, and culture that is worth knowing about.

The Future of Publishing

From DK, how the next generation feels about publishing:



Which, if you know, is a take on this:



But obviously, they have the same core message.

Awesome Interactive Storywriting Idea

One of the interesting things coming out of SXSW is an interactive storywriting competition:

Starting this Friday, March 12th at 10 AM central time, we’ll be hosting an interactive storytelling exquisite corpse-esque competition over at The Future of the Story. How it works:

Follow us on Twitter to receive the kickoff sentence for each story (contributed by some of your favorite web storytellers)

@ reply to @itwasadarkand with what you think happens next; your sentence will show up here

Vote up the best sentence

Every round, the winning sentence becomes part of the story and it’s time to write the next!

Once each story closes, we’ll be adding it to our story archive where it will be given a title and illustrated by Figure-1. AND (just to make things super extra saucy fun) we’ll be choosing one contributor from each story at random to win a choice of radtastic books (either Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More, or Jeffrey Zeldman’s A Book Apart), AND the original, signed illustration that accompanied their story!

I know Kathleen's writing group at Mukilteo Library already does some group writing with elements of this. Seems to me this could be a fun contest in person or online!