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Get Caught Reading Month~ USA

National Share-a-Story Month~ United Kingdom

Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month~ USA

Asian Heritage Month~ Canada

Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature to be Announced~ USA

USBBY - Bridge to Understanding Award Winner to be Announced ~ USA

Discovering Ethnic Minorities - Storytelling Workshops for Children~ Hong Kong

5th Annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature~ ongoing until May 3, New York, NY, USA

35th Buenos Aires International Book Fair~ ongoing until May 11, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Books Illustrated Traveling Exhibition: An Australian Menagerie -Australian picture books~ongoing until mid Jun, China

Exhibition of Prize Winning Works of 16th Noma Concours (2008) “Palette of Dream Colours IV”~ ongoing until Jul 5, Tokyo, Japan

The Child and the Book Conference: This Land is Our Land~ May 1 - 3, Nanaimo, BC, Canada

BOOKFEST - The Vancouver Island Children’s Book Festival~ May 2, Nanaimo, BC, Canada

IRA’s 54th Annual Convention: Reading, Writing and Conversations~ May 3 - 7, Minneapolis, MN, USA

ALOUD: a Celebration for Young Readers~ May 4 - 6, Toronto, ON, Canada

WordPower~ May 4 - 8, Fort McMurray, AB, Canada

Tehran International Book Fair~ May 6 - 16, Tehran, Iran

Mapfre Hay Festiva~ May 7 - 10, Alhambra, Spain

Once Upon a Time: Children’s Book Illustrators, Then and Now~ May 8 - Jun 14, Oakland, CA, USA

Mt. San Antonio College’s Children’s Literature Day~ May 9, Walnut, CA, USA

Children’s Book Week~ May 11 - 17, USA

New Zealand Post Book Awards Festival~ May 11 - 20, New Zealand

Forest of Reading, Festival of Trees~ May 13 - 14, Toronto, ON, Canada

Auckland Writers and Readers Festival~ May 13 - 17, Auckland, New Zealand

Surabaya Book Fair~ May 13 - 17, Surabaya, Indonesia

Seoul International Book Fair~ May 13 - 17, Seoul, Korea

The 5th China International Cultural Industries Fair~ May 15 - 18, Shenzhen, China

African American Book Festival~ May 15 - 16, Mt. Vernon, NY, USA

Mother’s Day Readings With Authors Mitali Perkins, Christina Seid, Pooja Makhijani, and Others~ May 16, New York, NY, USA

Children’s Books Ireland Conference: Challenge and Change in Children’s Books~ May 16 - 17, Dublin, Ireland

National Black Book Festival~ May 16 - 17, Houston, TX, USA

Sydney Writers’ Festival~ May 18 - 24, Sydney, Australia

The Foundation for Children’s Books New England Voices Series with Author/Illustrators Grace Lin and Giles Laroche~ May 19, Boston, MA, USA

Bisto Children’s Book of the Year Awards Presentations~ May 20, Dublin, Ireland

The Guardian Hay Festival~ May 21 - 31, Hay-on-Wye, United Kingdom

WriteAway Conference: Something Old, Something New -approaches to classic literature, culture and heritage in education~ May 22, London, United Kingdom

Storytelling Association Singapore Presents Silver and Gold: Precious Stories to Inspire Young and Old~ May 23, Singapore

World Village Festival~ May 23 - 24, Helsinki, Finland

Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences and Annual Book Fair~ May 23 - 31, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Library and Information Week~ May 25 - 31, Australia

National Simultaneous Storytime~ May 28, Australia

International Latino Book Awards Presentations~ May 28, New York, NY, USA

Reading Matters Youth Literature Conference~ May 28 - 30, Melbourne, Australia

BookExpo America~ May 28 - 31, New York, NY, USA

Thessaloniki Book Fair~ May 28 - 31, Thessaloniki, Greece

The National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature Exhibit: The Wizards of Pop -Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart~ May 28 - Sep 19, Abilene, TX, USA

Canadian Library Association National Conference and Trade Show~ May 29 - Jun 1, Montreal , QC, Canada

World Book Fair~ May 29 - Jun 7, Singapore

Justyna Zajac, Publicity

In honor of National Library Week 2009, OUP will be posting everyday to demonstrate our immense love of libraries. Libraries don’t just house thousands of fascinating books, they are also stunning works of architecture, havens of creativity for communities and venues for free and engaging programs. So please, make sure to check back in all this week and spread the library love.

Each library has its individual appeal and we at OUP recognize that, so we combed the world to seek out some of these rare gems and put the their trademark qualities into a quiz to test your love of libraries. Make sure to check back in at the end of the day when the answers are revealed.

1) Which library is the apple of this city’s eye?

2) Egypt may be known for its wondrous pyramids, but its library architecture is no small feat.

3) This Danish library has a modern take on royalty.

4) This library’s unorthodox shape is unlike any other building in the rainy North American city  it resides in.

5) This library belongs to arguably the best law school in the U.S.

6) Located in three buildings in the U.S. capitol, this library was established in 1800.

7) Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Well no worries if you don’t, this library speaks the universal/ecological language of green.

This library was intended to engage the imagination and aspirations of its home city, as well as provide stunning views of the Wasatch Mountains.

9) Its Polish home city may have been ravaged during World War II but this “old” library still stands proud as part of the university.

10) This library exemplifies that the Irish know length matters.

Justyna Zajac, Publicity

In honor of National Library Week 2009, OUP will be posting everyday to demonstrate our immense love of libraries. Libraries don’t just house thousands of fascinating books, they are also stunning works of architecture, havens of creativity for communities and venues for free and engaging programs. So please, make sure to check back in all this week and spread the library love.

Maura Smale, is the Information Literacy Librarian at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. She lives in Brooklyn and takes her 7 year old son, Gus, to the library on the weekends. Her Favorite Library Blogs are ACRLog, In the Library with the Lead Pipe, LISNews and she hearts Jessamyn West’s blog librarian.net. In the post below she discusses how her love affair with libraries began and how she tried to pass along that appreciation to her son.

One of my favorite things about being a parent is watching my kid learn. It’s so interesting and enjoyable to see that “aha!” moment when his brain really grabs onto something new.

By the time he was 6 years old my son was a competent reader, but he hadn’t yet developed the enthusiasm for reading that I’d always hoped he’d have. After all, his mom’s a librarian and the walls of our apartment are lined with bookshelves. It’s his destiny to love reading, right?

I remember being a voracious reader as a child. One summer when I was about my son’s age, my mom took me to our local library to sign up for Summer Reading. I felt so confident when the librarian said that I would only have to read six books to earn a certificate at the end of the summer. Six measly books? I could do that in a month, never mind a whole summer. But I loved getting the certificate all the same, and hung the shiny blue ribbon on my bedroom wall.

Watching my son read last summer I realized that while he’d mastered the basic mechanics of putting the letters together and sounding out words, he wasn’t quite reading fluently yet. Sure, he could read the beginner books easily, but books with the level of plot required to hold his attention were still too much work to be truly enjoyable. So he shied away from chapter books and only read when we asked him to.

Driven by my own nostalgic memories of Summer Reading (and armed with statistics from my time in library school about kids losing ground on their reading over the summer), I marched us off to the library to sign up for summer reading. The incentives were enough to convince him to sign up, and they were much more luxurious than mine were: no minimum number of books required, just bring in your list each week and show it to a librarian to get a small prize of stickers, tattoos, pencil sharpeners, and the like.

I love the classic kids’ books, but it was clear that my son needed an extra push to get him over the hump, and that push could only come from his favorite characters: Star Wars, Spongebob and Pokemon. Over the course of the summer we settled into what has become our usual library routine: we find one book together, then he sits on the bench next to the window and reads it while I browse the shelves, bringing back more and more books that pile up in a stack next to him. When I’ve finished hunting and gathering we look through the stack together and pick out the books that he wants, then he digs his library card out of his pocket and we take them up to the desk to check them out.

And it worked! By the end of the summer my son’s reading had vastly improved, and he moved on to reading chapter books on his own without complaint. As he’s become a better reader the library has become increasingly valuable. Of course we do still buy books, but there are many that I can’t possibly buy at the rate he’s reading them. Magic School Bus, Beast Quest, Ghosthunters, Pokemon (still): the library has, thankfully, acquired them all. And my kid’s already a pro: he knows that we can request a book that’s not available in our branch, which he tells me is his favorite thing about the library. (Me, too.)

Justyna Zajac, Publicity

In honor of National Library Week 2009, OUP will be posting everyday to demonstrate our immense love of libraries. Libraries don’t just house thousands of fascinating books, they are also stunning works of architecture, havens of creativity for communities and venues for free and engaging programs. So please, make sure to check back in all this week and spread the library love.

Martin Maw is an Archivist at Oxford University Press, UK.  Keep reading to learn about how he was charmed by libraries at an early age.

Though I never analysed it at the time, the power and charm of libraries took me over at a young age. I grew up in a fairly isolated town, long before anyone had even dreamt of the Internet, and the local library was the only way I had to explore my culture. Consequently, teenage Saturday mornings were often spent ferreting round that glass and concrete cube near the town hall, trying to find an alternative to school texts or to the unfathomably dull novels I knew at home.

It didn’t take long. Like many adolescents, I immersed myself in science fiction – though I read probably more of Ray Bradbury than any other writer. These days, I find Bradbury far too overblown and theatrical, but those are exactly the qualities that appeal to an impressionable 13 year-old: he seemed to be writing in wild colour when everything else I read was a tentative black and white. Bradbury was also the first writer I found who expressed the mystery of libraries themselves. His novel Something Wicked This Way Comes hinges on a small-town library and its caretaker, and exactly evokes suspended, after-hours atmosphere of deserted book stacks – places where anything may be revealed at the flick of a page. Equally, in writing Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury showed that books and stories can be dangerous things in themselves – you might have to memorise a text that was too risky to physically possess, and in some sense be taken over by that book. It wasn’t until much later I understood that Bradbury might be saying something else: that some people can get possessed by texts, that they can become walking repositories of other people’s words and thoughts, and that this can be a deprivation, even a threat to their very sense of self. It’s a theme handled with much greater subtlety – and menace – by Shirley Jackson in her story “The Tooth,” and in M. John Harrison’s work, especially The Course of the Heart: a mournful, visionary fantasy about the futility of fantasy itself, and (for my money) one of the best novels published in the past thirty ears. Needless to say, Bradbury’s implied caution is one you need to observe every day when working as a publisher – or as their archivist.

The enchantment of libraries persisted. I went to university in the Midlands, and discovered an open-shelf treasure house that offered everything from V.S. Pritchett’s short stories to obscure works by the Beats, Lorca, and Burton’s rare translation of the Arabian Nights. None of this was on my syllabus – I endured two months of pointless misery, trying to read law, before switching to a history degree – but that didn’t matter. I was after an education; I got one. Or rather, I started on one. The more you read, the more you realise how little you’ve read.

That came home to me when I started working at the Bodleian Library. Not to experience its spell is, I think, impossible: you seem to inhabit a vast, hushed pavilion of ivory stone, which floats at one remove from the crowded lanes around it in Oxford city centre. But for a reader, its stacks are mania made visible. The gorgeous architecture is just a penthouse. Under it lie five floors of subterranean shelves, some 90 miles in total, holding not only every book you’ve ever read, but also all the ones you’ve never read and never will. You see where Jorge Luis Borges, a librarian himself, got his inspiration. Standing in the midst of the Bodleian’s shelving, it’s easy to imagine that the stacks stretch to infinity, as in Borges’s story “The Library of Babel,” and that their volumes capture every conceivable combination of letters – including this article. It’s said that the ancient library at Alexandria had a motto carved on its wall: “The Place of the Cure of the Soul.” Underground in Bodley, you might well think the opposite. This would be an easy place to go mad.

All of which helps to explain the lasting mystery of libraries, even with the “gimmethat” reach of the Internet. Good libraries are zones outside the mundane. They show you what you never imagined. They can put you in touch with the dead voices, take you to imaginary or vanished places: as in séance, you’re suddenly on those extraordinary blue lawns Fitzgerald glimpsed after dark at ‘20s society parties, or at Einstein’s elbow as he writes, very carefully, for the first time, “E=mc²”. Libraries are time travel on the cheap. But more than that, those ordered books on quiet shelves order ourselves in their turn, and help us keep our small intelligence in perspective: for, as an 18th century rabbi once noted, no matter how many books we absorb in our life, we have not yet truly read the first page.

Justyna Zajac, Publicity

In honor of National Library Week 2009, OUP will be posting everyday to demonstrate our immense love of libraries. Libraries don’t just house thousands of fascinating books, they are also stunning works of architecture, havens of creativity for communities and venues for free and engaging programs. So please, make sure to check back all this week and spread the library love.

As promised, here are the answers to our Library Love 2009: Scavenger Hunt so you can see how your library trivia stacks up, no pun intended.

1. Who was the founder of the Junto Club, predecessor to the Library Company of Philadelphia, created in 1731 and considered to be America’s first public library? (Benjamin Franklin)

2. What 18th century English poet said, “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book?” (Samuel Johnson)

3. The library of the Supreme Court of the United States was created by a congressional act in what year? (1832)

4. Who was named the first librarian of Congress in 1802? (John Beckley)

5. In what city is the Newberry Library located? (Chicago)

6. The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America began at what academic institution? (Radcliffe College)

7. Under which pope was the Vatican Library established in 1450? (Nicholas V)

8. The largest research library in Ireland is located at what university? (University of Dublin, Trinity College)

9. The manuscript division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C houses White House papers and documents of all Presidents from George Washington through which president? (Warren Harding)

10. Name two of the three individuals whose private collections formed the basis for the British Museum and Library, founded in 1753. (Cotton, Harley, Sloane)

Justyna Zajac, Publicity

In honor of National Library Week 2009, OUP will be posting everyday to demonstrate our immense love of libraries. Libraries don’t just house thousands of fascinating books, they are also stunning works of architecture, havens of creativity for communities and venues for free and engaging programs. So please, make sure to check back in all this week and spread the library love.

To kick off Library Week, OUP is providing everyone with free access to Oxford Reference Online (ORO) and to encourage you to check out we have provided the scavenger hunt below. Use ORO to find the answers.  Let us know what you found out in the comments.  Just go here and log in with user: nationallibraryweek and password: oxford.  Let the games begin!  Be sure to visit again this afternoon when we post the answers.

1. Who was the founder of the Junto Club, predecessor to the Library Company of Philadelphia, created in 1731 and considered to be America’s first public library?

2. What 18th century English poet said, “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book?

3. The library of the Supreme Court of the United States was created by a congressional act in what year?

4. Who was named the first librarian of Congress in 1802?

5. In what city is the Newberry Library located?

6. The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America began at what academic institution?

7. Under which pope was the Vatican Library established in 1450?

8. The largest research library in Ireland is located at what university?

9. The manuscript division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C houses White House papers and documents of all Presidents from George Washington through which president?

10. Name two of the three individuals whose private collections formed the basis for the British Museum and Library, founded in 1753.