DCCC Library Books and Bytes

Banned Book Week is from Sept 25 through October 2, 2010. Library policy supports our First Amendment right which ensures freedom of the press. Popular novel s that have been repeatedly challenged over the years (and are available in DCCC’s collection) include: The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Color Purple, Catch-22, The Great Gatsby, and several of the Harry Potter series by Rowling. In fact, a dictionary was challenged in January by a parent in a California elementary school. (CV)

Several articles have appeared in the news lately that expose the perils of mobile technology in the jury box. Tweeting, texting, blogging, emailing and surfing even on break time have caused mistrials when information is shared or researched. But requiring jurors to avoid Blackberries, cell phones, iPods and other mobile technologies during jury deliberations will not be easy. New regulations and calls for standardization of rules in courtrooms are on the table. For more information on this technology-based cultural phenomenon, see
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1948971,00.html     (cv)

The American Library Association announced the winners of the Newbery Medal for children’s fiction and the Caldecott Medal for best illustrations at their Midwinter Meeting in Boston last month.  Artist Jerry Pinkney won the 2010 Caldecott for his stunning, detailed drawings of the classic Aesop tale The Lion and the Mouse.  Rebecca Stead won the Newbery Medal for When You Reach Me, which is a mystery about a 12 year old girl living in New York. (cv)

Using plagiarism-detection software, Sir Brian Vickers, a professor of literature at University of London, has discovered a new play co-written by William Shakespeare. Authorship of The Reign of Edward III, a play from the late 1500s, has been the subject of debate among scholars for centuries. Employing the software Pl@giarism, Vickers was able to compare strings of words in this play with those in Shakespeare’s known body of work and discovered an overlap of 200 such phrases. Similarly, this method was used by Vickers to determine the identity of Shakespeare’s co-author of the play, namely Thomas Kyd, a successful playwright who was one of the Bard’s contemporaries. Read more about this discovery at http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091020/us_time/08599193097100 (hb)