Eoin Colfer Exhibition

Yesterday at the Arts Council, Eoin Colfer was announced by the Minister of State for the Department of Communications as the third Laureate na nÓg, Ireland's laureate for children's literature.  He follows Siobhán Parkinson and most recently Niamh Sharkey for a two-year tenure.

Born in Wexford in 1965, he is the author of the Artemis Fowl series and many other best sellers. Come see a display of his work extracted from the Library's junior collection - all hugely popular and most particularly so with readers aged approx. 10+

Childrens' Literature Initiative

The English Department’s Centre for Children’s Literature and Culture and the Cregan Library in St. Patrick’s College Drumcondra welcome an exciting new development in children’s books. Pádraic Whyte of Trinity College Dublin and Keith O’Sullivan of the Church of Ireland College of Education have been awarded significant funding from the Irish Research Council to establish a catalogue of children’s books in Dublin over the next two years. The Cregan Library’s important  collection of both literary and pedagogical texts will be included in the overview of children’s books.

Establishing a central catalogue of children’s books held in St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Trinity College, National Library of Ireland, Church of Ireland College of Education, and Pearse Street Library will provide an invaluable tool for the future. Researchers, educationalists, and librarians will be interested to learn that from this catalogue of approximately 40,000 texts (English language at this stage), 1,000 of both literary and educational interest will be selected so that images and digitized versions might be created. In addition, a seminar on the project for May 2015 as well as an edited volume of essays will accompany this major undertaking.

Orla Nic Aodha, Head Librarian of the Cregan Library and Julie Anne Stevens, Director of the Centre for Children’s Literature, have encouraged interest in Cregan Library’s children’s books by compiling
information about its holdings. They believe that the project will offer significant potential for Irish and international researchers in different areas of children’s literature, childhood studies and education, and library studies.

School Placement Resource

World Book Online is an excellent online resource primarily aimed at children and those working with or teaching children.  It is currently available on trial access to all SPD staff and students.

Click here to access the collection - it's also available via our website.

To access this resource you'll need our trial login which will be emailed to your College account.  If you haven't received this, please just ask in the Library or Resource Centre and a member of staff will help you.

This site is presented in four sections - World Book Web, Speciality Sites, World Book Digital Libraries and World Book Classroom.

Together these contain children's literature, encyclopedia articles, primary source collections, educator tools, student activities, pictures, audio, and video, complemented by current periodicals and related websites.

As with all of our trial subscriptions we invite feedback from staff or students, so please let us know if you like it!

Books for School Placement

If you’re about to head out on school placement and are wondering which books to bring with you into the classroom, we can help!

Check out our LibraryThing account @ www.librarything.com (username: StPatsJLibrary / password: farmerduck).

Click on a curriculum strand (see tags) or on a theme (see collections). Then check availability of anything you find interesting in the Catalogue.

This is a work in progress so all comments welcome!

Laureate na nÓg Display

At the entrance to the main Library we currently have a selection of titles from the new Laureate na nÓg Niamh Sharkey on display.

The role was established in 2010 to recognise the role and importance of literature for children, and Niamh takes over from the inaugural Laureate, author Siobhán Parkinson.

Niamh is an award-winning author and illustrator of children’s picture books.  Her first two books, Tales of Wisdom and Wonder and The Gigantic Turnip won the Mother Goose Award for the Best New Illustrator and The Bisto Book of the Year respectively. Her most recent title, On the Road with Mavis and Marge won the 2010 Junior Book of the Year award at The Irish Book Awards and was shortlisted for the Bisto Book of the Year Awards.

Laureate na nÓg is an initiative of the Arts Council with the support of the Office of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Children’s Books Ireland, Poetry Ireland and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
www.niamhsharkey.com
www.childrenslaureate.ie

Children's Literature Resource

As well as alerting you to subscribed or trial databases, we like to draw your attention to worthwhile open access resources which are available online free of charge.

One we've come across recently is International Children's Digital Library (ICDL), a project of the University of Maryland founded with the Internet Archive.

The ICDL Foundation aims to make "the best in children's literature available online free of charge" and it currently contains 4365 books in 54 languages, all readable not just in full text but with quality scanned images of every page.

The collection can be searched or browsed in various ways - by location, language, year, author or reader age. The books could be used with a projector and there's a teacher training manual with ideas on how to apply the resource in the classroom. There's even an iphone application which allows you to browse and read titles from the ICDL on the move!

Have a look!