Today marks World Book Day, and to celebrate the occasion, the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) has released 10 new titles in its Quick Reads series for emergent readers.

Now in its third successful year, Quick Reads 2008 features works by well known British authors including Gordon Ramsay, Colin Jackson,  and Josephine Cox.  For sci-fi fans, there’s even a new Dr. Who story to read and enjoy.

In addition to specially developed learning resources, instuctors, tutors and their learners can also visit  the Podcasts area of the Quick Reads Web site to hear this year’s authors speak about their books and their works.  There’s also an interview with Minette Walters who wrote one of the most popular Quick Reads for 2006 – Chickenfeed.

For more information about this and previous years’ Quick Reads titles, visit the Quick Reads Web site.  If you’re interested in using Quick Reads with adult learners and emergent readers in your community, check out your local library, or visit Grass Roots Press  or Amazon.ca to buy them.

Happy International Adult Learners’ Week!!! March 3rd-9th is International Adult Learners’ Week in a number of countries, including Canada, and there are number of events both here and abroad that I’ll be telling you about.

The first one happens this coming Thursday, March 6th, at 3:00 p.m. ET, when the OLA Education Institute will be presenting a one-hour audio conference that focuses on adult learning.

Entitled Literacy Lessons at the Library, this workshop will explore how adult and children’s collections can be effectively incorporated into adult literacy and ESL programming. The presenter, Marguerite Weibel, is a widely published author in the field of libraries and literacy.

Register today for this exciting and informative session.

If, in the midst of gearing up for the New Year, you missed your chance to register for the Forest of Reading Golden Oak Award audio conference, you’re in luck.  This exciting and information-rich audio conference has been rescheduled and will be presented by Brenda Livingston and Tina Natale, veteran Golden Oak facilitators from Toronto Public Library Adult Literacy Services, this coming Valentine’s Day, February 14^th at 12:00 ET. 

If you and your colleagues are library or adult literacy workers who are keen to promote library services and encourage reading for pleasure among new adult readers in your community, this audio conference is definitely a “must-attend”.  For further information and complete registration details, visit the Education Institute Web site.  If you registered for the January audio conference, your registration still stands.

For more information about this year’s Golden Oak Reading Program selections visit the Forest of Reading 2008 Web site.  Information on previous years’ programs and book selections can be found on the 2007 Golden Oak Web site.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted Dawna Rowlson’s account of Building a Library in Indonesia.  I logged into Dawna and Katherine’s Blog today for an update on what’s been happening since they took off from Pearson on January 4th to begin the third of their five missions to the Aceh  province of Sumatra, Indonesia.

This ’self portrait’ was taken in Vancouver prior to taking off for the 14 hour flight to Hong Kong.  After that it was onto Jogjakarta to meet up with the Sigli library team for idea-gathering library tours, then to Singapore for more tours, and finally back to Sigli to continue to work together to brainstorm, plan and develop effective library services for the Sigli community. For more details and lots of fun reading, visit (or re-visit) Dawna and Katherine’s Building a Library in Indonesia blog, and keep your eye on the cluster map to see if Dawna and Katherine have had a chance to log into Literacy at our libraries and set their red dot on the map.

Now in its sixth year, the Golden Oak program encourages new adult readers to read and discuss books that have been specially selected for them by librarians and literacy specialists.

 On January 16th at 3:00 p.m. ET, you can find out more about this exciting program and how you can encourage and promote reading for pleasure in your community by participating in a special Ontario Library Association Education Institute hosted by Brenda Livingston and Tina Natale from Toronto Public Library’s Adult Literacy Services. 

Two Toronto Public Library managers are working on a library project in Indonesia.  Katherine Palmer and Dawna Rowlson are participating in the Federation of Canadian Municipalities libraries initiative in Indonesia.  The project is focused on the Aceh province of Sumatra, Indonesia and specifically the public library in Sigli, roughly on the northern tip of the island.

They have been on two missions to date and leave for their next trip on January 4, 2008.  There are five short missions; each mission is two to three weeks duration.  In addition, there are assignments in between missions for all of the parties working on the project.  A first largely fact finding mission was completed in June  2007. The focus of Mission 2 wass on sharing information and training on performance measures, community assessment, collection development and space planning.   The January mission will consist of tours of libraries in Singapore and Indonesia.  There will be customer service training delivered, as well as training on how to deliver library programs.

AlphaPlus kindly donated 75 titles to the Sigli library, which Dawna will be delivering in January.

There is a blog to keep everyone updated on the experience. 

http://libraryindonesia.blogspot.com/ 

It’s been six months since we met at the Summer Institute on Libraries and Literacy and over five months since Maria Moriarty created this Literacy at our Libraries blog.  Since that time, we’ve gone through a topsy-turvy time here AlphaPlus, what with the closing  our library and the decentralization of our collections (more on that later), and a move to new office space.  We did find time over the summer to submit a proposal to Knowledge Exchange Program of the Canadian Council on Learning. We asked for funding to develop this baby blog and help it to grow into a viable national/international community of interest.  Unfortunately, the proposal didn’t ‘fly’ the first time round. But we’re going to revise it and try again in the New Year, and we’re hopeful that it will be successful the second time around. 

 In the meantime, we can, at least, begin to populate the blog with comments and updates on what we’ve all been doing and what we’ve accomplished in the area of library/literacy initiatives. Being able to show CCL that blogging is a viable vehicle for sharing knowledge and building community will be a big help to us when we re-submit – and so please do join the conversation, and show us your geographical presence by clicking on the Cluster Map that we added to the site earlier this week.

Welcome to our new blog - a place for librarians, library staff, literacy providers,policy makers and researchers to share our work, our knowledge and experience and answer each others questions about literacy in our libraries.

This blog is one of the many positive outcomes of the Centre for Literacy’s Summer Institute in Montreal June 27-29, 2007.

  This institute (more in a later post) was an opportunity for library folks across Canada, in the U.S. and as far away as the U.K. and Tasmania to share their perspectives , to exhange knowledge with literacy providers, and to bring each other up to date on the literacy work that is going on in libraries and to meet with and exchange knowledge with literacy providers
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