Today, #LibFaves20 begins, the annual, 10 day, library worker Twitter countdown of the best books published in calendar year 2020 and every single one of you can join in.
You do not have to rank the titles in order as all titles mentioned are compiled and ranked by number of times mentioned. You can access past year's spreadsheets on EarlyWord here. All you need to do is Tweet 1 title a day for 10 days. So yes, I am not giving you much warning to prep, but technically you just need one title right this minute. I know you have a definite top title in mind right now to get started today.
We need to all work together to create this massive, library worker generated best list. It is a tool for book discovery for our patrons, it is a way for us to find out about tiles we may have missed that our colleagues have enjoyed. In fact, that is whyI participate and only do my top 10 #HorrorForLibraries titles because often those books would not garner a mention if I didn't get them entered into the mix.
To get you excited the event, I invited the one this year's captains, Robin Beerbower, formerly of Salem Public Library (OR), to give you all a little background and invite you to join.
Take it away Robin:
With plenty of year-end book lists coming out, it’s fun for librarians to join in on the fun, after all, library workers KNOW books! The only difference is that instead of polling and voting for the best of the best (which is what LibraryReads does too), each library worker shares their own top 10 books. So the more library workers that participate, the more books that are promoted!
This Twitter book-extravaganza first started in 2011 under the hashtag #libfavs2011. It was started by two #ewgc galley chatters*, Robin Beerbower from Salem, OR Library and Stephanie Chase from Multnomah County [OR] Library. The most popular book that library workers shared in 2011 was Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.
The list has grown through the years. In 2012, 689 books were mentioned, 399 of those were unique titles. By 2019, there were 1616 books mentioned, 776 of those were unique titles. That is a lot of books to discover!
A lot of library workers who want to join frequently ask, “Do we only share books that were published in the current year?” The answer is yes, because the goal is to highlight and promote discovery of new and fantastic books that librarians read for the year that the list comes out.
To participate on Twitter, library workers will mention one title per day for ten consecutive days from Dec. 7th to Dec. 16th and tag their tweets with #libfaves20. Titles must be in CAPS (for easy readability on the part of the monitor). Volunteers will monitor the titles up until 9 P.M. Pacific Time on Dec. 17th. The list of all the books will be shared on Dec.18th.
#Libfaves20 is open to any and all library workers, so it might be helpful if participants indicate that they are library workers in their Twitter profile for the duration of the event to ensure their vote is counted.
It is also preferred that books shared during this period be adult fiction or nonfiction, but library workers read and love everything, so as long as it was published in 2020, share any book you want.
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*#ewgc is a monthly Twitter chat headed by Nora Rawlinson, founder of Earlyword.com where library workers talk about forthcoming books that they are excited about. For more information, check out the schedule on the website.
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