Monday, December 31, 2007

Newbery Project format changes

Newbery Project members:

We're a victim of our own success! There are enough of us that our posts threaten to overtake the list of books on the left side of the page. In an effort to streamline our page AND still allow us to read all the posts on a given book, I ask for your help making a format change.

On January 1, I will remove the left-margin links to individuals' posts on various books. In the interim, if you wish to have your posts grouped by book, please take advantage of the "Labels" feature by putting the title of each book as one of/the post label(s).

In this way, clicking on the label for a given book will take the reader to all posts on that title.

Please continue to use any other labels you wish.

I apologize for the inconvenience this may cause, but I hope that it will make the blog more manageable in the long run.

Finally, if any of you are familiar enough with HTML to help me include a list of labels somewhere on the page (or, better yet, to hyperlink the list of Newbery winners to the corresponding labels) please e-mail me at the address listed in the "how to join" info.

7 comments:

Amanda said...

Alicia, thanks for your great work on this! The university interim is coming up, and I hope to get back to reading some Newberys - particularly some of the ones from the early years that no one has yet posted on (since we have them all in my library).

Question about the labels: Should we leave off leading A-An-The, as well as anything after a colon? For example, should The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread be just Tale of Despereaux in a label?

Amanda said...

Never mind, I think I discovered the answer when I went back to add tags to my posts. Include leading A-An-The, leave out punctuation (like commas), and leave out stuff after a colon.

Juliette said...

Alicia - Thank you for all you do and continue to do. This is a really interesting and worthwhile project. I am learning lots! I am sorry but I am unabe to help on the techie side but will get on with the labels post.

Amanda - I am managing to obtain many of the books but am having trouble with some. On Librarything many of the Newbery winners look like they are part of a reprinted series. I have also seen them on the American amazon but not co.uk! Would you be able to shed any light on this?

Amanda said...

Juliette - Well, since the Newbery is a USA award, that might have something to do with why some are on the American Amazon but not the UK Amazon.

I'm supposed to order most of my books through our jobber (Baker & Taylor), and I have not been able to find all the Newberys there. We have all the winners in our library (which has been in existence about as long as the Newbery Medal has been), but some are pretty shabby and I'm trying to add additional copies of those.

I think at this point, especially for anything not published recently, it's going to be a reprint of some sort. I've had pretty good luck getting some of the books (including an additional copy of 1926 winner Shen of the Sea and 1927's Smoky, the Cow Horse - they may be some sort of 80th anniversary editions).
Others are only turning up in paperback (which we won't buy for our library; they just don't hold up) or secondhand (which my library also can't do). I wish I could offer more suggestions; perhaps someone else has some ideas!

Sandy D. said...

Done! Thanks, Alicia. :-)

Alicia said...

Thanks for the questions. Yes, Amanda, use the full title, including "A," "The," etc. The beauty of labels is once they've been used, they'll auto-populate in the future. So typing "The" will bring up all titles starting with "The" and then you just select the appropriate one. Similarly, if you label all your posts with you name (you can have multiple labels), future labeling will usually involve typing only one or two letters of your name before the matching label appears for selection.

Thanks, too, for your encouragement. I just want there to be as little reliance on me as possible. I don't want to let people down when I can't get to the behind-the-scenes coding.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Doulicia.