DOL Materials Review Session will take place Wednesday, October 10, at the Brown Public Library in Northfield at 9:00 am.
For many years DOL has presented a series of oral book review sessions of children’s and young adult books for school and public librarians. At the height, there were four sessions at six locations around the state (twenty-four programs each year!). A series of changes in the world and Vermont (the Department of Education no longer has a school consultant to do half of the reviewing; budgets have gotten tighter; the web provides many other ways to get reviews; librarians have a harder time leaving their schools and libraries; and DOL had to slash the amount of time they put into the project) have resulted in fewer and fewer people attending the programs.
Many people do watch the recording on RETN, and the bibliography is downloaded a lot, so we know that the service is still important, and for some, there is no substitute for being able to see and handle the books before they order. So, a compromise: we are now going to have only one session, the one in Northfield. The fall program will be held on Wednesday, October 10, at the Brown Public Library in Northfield, and will, as always, begin at 9:00a .m.. RETN will continue to videotape the sessions; the recording will stream on their website and the bibliography will be on the DOL website, so everyone will still have access to all the information.
For those of you who have never attended a Materials Review session, you are invited to go to the one on October 10 to see what it is all about. Grace Greene, the Youth Services Consultant, will review approximately 75 books orally, from picture books through young adult, and all the books will be there for you to examine. In addition to the ones she reviews orally, there will be a couple of hundred other books that are reviewed favorably either by the review media or by volunteer Vermont reviewers, as well as the newest books in the professional collection of the Children’s Book Exhibit Center.