Ann Arbor kids are writing some amazing book reviews at World of Reading, an open collection of reviews written by children from around the world. Angell, Slauson and AADL are represented, and a big variety of titles are showing up, such as Into the Land of the Unicorns, by Bruce Coville. This very cool AADL site lets you search book reviews and browse reviews by hometown. Tip for teachers: E-mail support@aadl.org (list name, school, town, state, country) and list what books students will be reviewing this fall (if you know). The AADL staff can arrange for most reviews to show up right away! World of Reading was originally created by Mary Pat Timmons as a project for the Internet Public Library at the U-M School of Information.

Let’s say you’re trying to locate an old article from The New York Times. Go to www.aadl.org, click on the research tab, and there it is: New York Times Historical, with stories and images from 1851 to 2001. Or maybe you’re moving to a new house, and you’d like to get a list of new neighbors. Reference USA can help. Those two databases are on a long list to which AADL subscribes, providing library users with gold mines of information about magazines, newspapers, arts, literature, biography, business and investment, college, careers, and education, genealogy, health, history, kids and teens, legal resources, and science and technology. And here’s a tip: You can access these databases from home, business, or school, through the library’s web site.

No, we don’t put the books in Styrofoam containers, and no, you can’t have fries with that. But in other respects the Library’s hold system works quite a bit like restaurant carryout. You get in touch with us—in person at the library, by phone, or through your online account—and place an order for items from the “menu,” the library catalog. When each item is ready you’ll be notified by mail or e-mail and you have seven days to pick it up. All you have to do is...

Summertime encourages lighter reading, and for some teens, Underworld by Catherine MacPhail may be a good choice. Sign up at DearReader.com to get excerpts by e-mail - or check out the book from the library. The story is intriguing: Zesh, Liam, Fiona, Angie, and Axel hate each other at school, but when they are trapped together by a rock slide, well, changes happen. MacPhail is a prize-winning author who lives in Scotland. When her book came out last year, it received mixed reviews. School

For help putting together your own personal best 2006 Summer Beach Reading List, here's an option: Click the Research tab above, choose AADL Select Sites on the left, then pick Books and Reading. Presto - lots of links to lists of books you very well may want to read this summer. Use these lists to make your own list. Remember, if you check these books out from the library, you can set up your account to keep track of your personal reading history. Very easy, very fun, very likely to keep you making more lists and reading more books in our Summer Reading program, which starts June 19.

Amazing how many people love to network socially on sites such as Facebook and Myspace - millions of you. John Cassidy nails this trend - and the companies it supports - in his article "The Online Life: Me Media: How hanging out on the Internet became big business," in the May 15 issue of The New Yorker magazine. Read this article - virtually - from General Reference Center Gold electronic database, or actually from the actual May 15 issue of The New Yorker magazine at the library.

With graduation season upon us, here's a good book to read or recommend: Character is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember, by Sen. John McCain, with Mark Salter. We have this book in the library or you can receive five-minute excerpts in your e-mail through DearReader.com where this book is the current teen pick. The book offers 34 stories about diverse inspirational characters including Thomas More, Joan of Arc, Gandhi, and Dwight Eisenhower.

The Consumer Price Index [CPI], published by the United States Department of Labor, is the most widely used measure of price changes and inflation. It represents a weighted index of a fixed market basket of goods and services and is published monthly for the Unites States and bi-monthly for the Detroit-Ann Arbor Area. There's a lot more information about the CPI at the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics website. For your convenience, the format of the CPI table on the AADL website enables users to compare price changes over a ten-year period in an easy-to-use one-page format.

David Bach wants to teach readers how to become millionaires, which is why he wrote the 2004 book The Automatic Millionaire: A powerful one-step plan to live and finish rich. If you think you might want to read this book - but you’re not yet sure enough to buy it or check it out from the library - why not sign up for daily, five-minute, e-mail excerpts at DearReader.com. This convenient, new service offers not just business books, but also other nonfiction, fiction, audio books, teen, science fiction, good news, romance, mystery, horror, pre-publication, and classics. For busy readers, DearReader.com is great because who can't find five minutes a day to read an excerpt?

When you search the library catalog and find a title there is a new link to “Card Catalog Image”. Clicking on this link brings you to a yellowed old catalog card for that title (A note says: “This service is somewhat experimental and is here as a novelty”). You are offered the opportunity to add your marginalia to the catalog card. I larded one of my favorite recent reads, Tropic of Night by Michael Gruber, with remarks. Years ago the library used to stick a Reader’s Comment sheet in the front of fiction titles, with room for brief comments from six to eight patrons.

The library has two books by H. J. Jackson on marginalia:
Romantic Readers: the Evidence of Marginalia and
Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books

Nicholas Basbanes, who has written numerous books on books and reading, has a little about marginalia in Every Book Its Reader: the Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World.

My wife has a copy of one of her grandfather’s college textbooks in which his roommate, Reginald Marsh, had drawn a variety of sketches.

(please note: the library definitely discourages writing in library materials)