Informative flights: Blog post 5: Review an electronic resource about delivering services to children or young adults

Tuesday, 30 September 2014

Blog post 5: Review an electronic resource about delivering services to children or young adults – Asian Young People’s Book Awards

1. A detailed description of the activity undertaken:

A new young people’s book award has recently been set up in Hong Kong – the Golden Dragon Book Award. I decided to review the website supporting the award and to compare and contrast that with the websites supporting the other young people’s book awards in Asia, namely the Panda Book Awards (China), Red Dot Book Awards (Singapore) and the Sakura Medal (Japan). What all these book awards have in common is that they have been created for young people attending International Schools, and they therefore feature English Language Books, not necessarily the language of the “host” country of the award, except for the Sakura Medal, which has Japanese books.

	Golden Dragon Book Awards	Panda Book Awards	Red Dot Book Awards	Sakura Medal
URL	http://www.hkgoldendragonawards.org/	http://pandabookawards.wikispaces.com/	http://www.reddotawards.com/	http://www.sakuramedal.com/sakura-medal.html
Type of site	Weebly	Wikispace	Google Sites	Weebly
Country	Hong Kong	China	Singapore	Japan
Founders/Run by	Association of Librarians in English Speaking Schools (ALESS) in Hong Kong	International librarians throughout China	International school librarians Network (ISLN) in Singapore	Librarians from international schools
Year Started	2014	2009	2009	2006
Categories	Four (ages 4-6; 7- 10; 11-14; 15-18)	Four (Younger Readers; Middle Readers; Older Readers; Mature Readers)	Four (Early Years; Younger Readers; Older Readers; Mature Readers)	Nine (Picture Books; Graphic Novels; Chapter Books; Middle School; High School; Japanese Picture Books; Japanese Chapter Books; Japanese Middle School; and Japanese High School)
# Schools	Not mentioned	32	Not mentioned	20
# Students	Not mentioned	Not mentioned	Not mentioned	15,000
Criteria	Not mentioned	No more than 2 years old	Published in English in the last 4 years	No more than 2 years old
Long List	8 books per category	8-10 books per category	8 books per category	25-30 books per category
Resources	Promotional Material including Brochures, Stickers, Book ordering, video, slideshow	Posters and bookmarks	Promotion materials including: voting posters, category posters, stickers for books and badges, bookmarks, printers for big posters, videos / slideshows / images	Downloadable posters
Interactive elements	Not on site – see social media	None	Not on site – see social media	Commenting allowed on site (moderated)
Related competition?	Hong Kong Battle of the Books	None	Readers’ Cup	None
Related social media	Twitter, Facebook	None	Twitter, Goodreads, Diigo group	Flickr

The first thing that strikes one is that the websites are fairly comprehensive, but are very much geared toward the librarian rather than the students. Resources are geared towards promotional material such as brochures, stickers and bookmarks. The Golden Dragon and Red Dot sites had some videos, slideshows and images, however it was not apparent that these were created for students or for the teacher / librarian. Further, none of the sites had any real interactive elements, where available, these were taken “off-site” to Twitter, Goodreads, Facebook or Diigo – again these elements were geared mainly to the teacher / librarian rather than the students.

The nominations or selections for the long-lists was not explicit on any of the sites but appears to be something done by a committee, whereas the voting for the award winners occurs physically at the various schools by the pupils with a variety of criteria (such as students having read a number of the books).

2. Answers to the following questions:

What did you learn?

A website that serves teachers / librarians indirectly is a resource for children or young adults inasmuch as it supports them in delivering a service - in this case access to recent, high quality books as part of a book award selection process.

How was the activity relevant to your professional practice?

In my practice I will probably assist with either the nomination or selection of a long list as well as with the promotion of long-list books and the encouraging of students to read.

Were any gaps in your knowledge revealed? How might you fill those gaps?

Comparing different awards in Asia has allowed me to reflect on the award we run in Singapore and particularly to consider how sites could be made more interactive and more relevant to our students, not just indirectly through helping the teacher / librarians but more directly.