Forthcoming book promotions

Next week sees World Book Day (Thursday 6th March) and, here in Glasgow, the Aye Write Book Festival, including children's and schools' events, starts on the 8th. It's also not long till the start of the National Year of Reading in April - to celebrate this, the National Literacy Trust's Reading Connects has produced a set of case studies to share good practice in promoting reading in schools.

Top 10 children's books

C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, first published in 1950, has been voted the favourite children's book of all time. The charity Booktrust conducted a survey of 4000 people between the ages of 16 and 65 to come up with its list, and nearly all of them are, like Lewis's book, classics. J K Rowling makes it in at number 6 with Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (2005) and Julia Donaldson's Gruffalo (1999) is at number 10, but the rest of the Top 10 were published between 1865 (Alice in Wonderland) and 1969 (The Very Hungry Caterpillar). One reason for this could be that these books have had time to filter through the generations, with many of the older people who voted now reading them to their childen or grandchildren - the survey also found that four in five parents read their children bedtime stories every night.

The Times and The Telegraph both covered this story last week, with the Telegraph listing the Top 50 in full.

Most borrowed children's authors

After a four year reign as the most borrowed author in the UK's public libraries, Jacqueline Wilson has been beaten into second place by the US thriller writer, James Patterson, according to figures for 2006-7 just released by Public Lending Right. Overall, 30% of all books borrowed were children's, young adult and educational titles and half of the top 20 authors are children's writers. They are:

Jacqueline Wilson (2); Daisy Meadows (3); Mick Inkpen (8); Janet & Allan Ahlberg (9); Francesca Simon (10); Roald Dahl (11); Enid Blyton (13); Ian Whybrow (15); Eric Hill (17); Julia Donaldson (20).

Roald Dahl tops the list of Most Borrowed Classic Authors, which also includes Enid Blyton (2); Beatrix Potter (5); C S Lewis (9) and A A Milne (12).

See our library reading list for more about Jacqueline Wilson's books.

Scottish Information Literacy Project

A recent press release from The Scottish Information Literacy Project announced that Learning and Teaching Scotland has provided funding to undertake a project entitled: Adding value to LTS Information Literacy Online Service: Exemplars of good practice.

The results will provide school teachers with an identified standard of information literacy skills and contribute to the development of information literacy and media literacy skills among school pupils.