From Your Editor

Welcome to e-YLR 2003!

An editorial for an electronic journal is a curious thing; in a hard copy you can expect your readers to start at the beginning and read through, so the editorial’s job is to encourage them to read on, to ensure that they don’t miss an article that you know to be too fascinating and/or important for them to miss. This is not how an e-journal is read: the site is set up so that the reader can go, at the click of a mouse, to any part of the journal. Therefore there is a great chance that this Editorial will never be read!!! So for those of you that have found it – I thank you!

Now you are here I would like to highlight a few articles that you simply must read – though of course all the articles are fabulous!!

Firstly, I hope you have all read the longed for news that Bookstart has finally received government funding for 2004-05 – fingers crossed the funding is extended…for infinity!!

I have to say that the response to our call for copy for Your News has been amazing – quality and quantity, an Editor’s dream!! Mobile Library services are obviously coming into their own and continuing to expand the role they can play. The Reading Rocket is a mobile solely for children & young people and has been designed to take library services into Derby’s 12 priority Neighbourhood Renewal Areas. Jane Harrison’s article is one of several that have started to draw links between the activities we engage in, in libraries and the Start with the Child report, a direction we should all be going in!

When I read Eileen Armstrong’s article The Reading World Cup my admiration for her soared to new heights!! Anything that can raise the profile of reading in schools and at home is wonderful and the Kids’ Lit Quiz, imported from New Zealand, certainly seems to succeed in its aim to do just this. Eileen is gearing up for next year’s quiz, and desperately trying to find sponsors, so please get in touch if you can help, or if you just want to know more!

As you know I love to bring you any research relevant to our profession and Dr Andrew Shenton & Pat Dixon’s paper Adults as Information Facilitators: the relevance of the role to public libraries is just such a piece of research. If you have put in place any strategies to tackle any of the issues it raises I would be delighted to hear about them. The one that struck a cord with me was the perennial one about raising teachers’ awareness of what resources are, and are not, available in our libraries. If there are any teachers reading this, please feel free to comment/give suggestions.

I have tried my up most this year to make you feel that you were there at the 2002 CILIP Carnegie & Kate Greenaway Award Ceremony on July 11th 2003 in The British Library. I have included nearly all the speeches, including our guest speaker Martha Kearney’s, and I have a great range of photographs to illustrate them, courtesy of the lovely Louisa at CILIP! As an alternative you can immerse yourself in a fabulous Shadowing party that took place on the same day in Durham Light Infantry Museum, in honour of the shortlisted book The Shell House. You decide who had the classiest venue – it’s a close call!!

For the first time this year I have included a piece by Karen Usher, YLG Conference Manager, in response to the Conference Evaluation Forms you kindly filled in – Feedback on Evaluation Forms. What becomes clear is that, in spite of a surfeit of mushrooms, most of you felt the 2003 YLG Conference was a success! Well, lets face it, with a title like “With My Brains and Your Looks, we could go places” it was never going to be dull!! We had a wide range of speakers that fascinated and informed us. I was particularly interested in Sue Wilkinson’s presentation on the ‘inner workings’ of Re:source, if only because several of my friends seem to be getting jobs there – first it was Jonathan Douglas and now Sarah Wilkie!! Unfortunately for those of you who were not there the speakers almost exclusively used PowerPoint presentations and as you know these are rarely intelligible without the speaker!! We are working on a cunning plan for next year to persuade those busy Keynote Speakers to produce something that can be published in this journal. And I do assure you that the lack of papers reproduced in this edition is NOT a ploy to make you come to Conference next year – honest!!

In the absence of a section all of it’s own – which it deserves – the update on Their Reading Futures has been given pride of place in the News from the Book World section. You MUST read Tricia King’s brilliant report on the Their Reading Futures training day in Hertfordshire – inspiring stuff!!

Last but not least, please follow the link to the results of the consultation on the CILIP Carnegie Kate Greenaway Awards. YOU contributed to the research by filling in the questionnaire, so this is your chance to find out what other people thought and to hear what the working party had to say in response.

Please keep your amazing articles coming; the work you are doing out there deserves to be shared!! And a huge great big thank you to all of you who have contributed to the journal this time, you are wonderful.

Thank you –

Louise