Miscellany: iPhone + book = PhoneBook, stats from IMLS, and Hugo Cabret in production

July 1, 2010

My last few posts have been pretty long, so how about some short snippets?

I recently linked to Laura Miller’s New Yorker article on dystopian YA lit; Kaitlin Ward of YA Highway responded to that with a blog post on the difference between dystopian and post-apocalyptic lit (which I found via Melissa of Librarian by Day).

This Japanese YouTube video demonstrates how a book and an iPhone (iPhone + book = PhoneBook) can combine to create something clever, cute, and fun:

During my last semester of my MLS I worked on an independent study group project with a number of other students and a professor to help create a community digital repository with a library in northeastern Indiana. That library, the Eckhart Public Library, recently celebrated its 100th anniversary and got a write-up in one of the Fort Wayne papers that includes some neat photos. (More on our project)

The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) issued a press release today announcing–among other things–that public library visits and circulations per capita had increased 20% from 1999 to 2008 but that the number of librarians per capita had remained the same (about 4 librarians per 25,000 people), so the same number of librarians are handling more patron visits and more circulations. The press release also mentions the availability of computers (doubled in the last ten years), attendance at children’s programming (up 13.9%) and overall programming (up 17.6%), and “the distribution of library outlets by state and geography type” (in 16 states more than 50% of library outlets are in rural areas).

Brian Selznick’s Caldecott Award-winning THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET is being movie-fied by Martin Scorsese; the cast includes Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield, Chloë Moretz, Jude Law, Ray Winstone, Christopher Lee, Helen McCrory, Frances de la Tour, and Richard Griffiths. The film is going to be in 3D and production recently began in London. As always I’m nervous about movie adaptations, but I’m really excited about who’s involved with this one so I’m letting myself get my hopes up.

And finally, more book art! This time it’s by Su Blackwell and it’s amazing. These are just a few examples; you’ll have to check out the artist’s gallery for more.

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Tags: 601 project, dystopian lit, imls, library cuts, miscellany, movie adaptations, news, videos, ya lit