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Friday, July 17, 2020

#MidLibFaves20 Results

LibFaves is an off shoot of the popular Twitter Galley Chats that originally began on EarlyWord. Library workers gather monthly [now the first Thursday of the month] to talk about what pre-pub titles they are reading and enjoying using #ewgc. You can learn all about the galley chats and see the round-up posts on EarlyWord.

Each year in December, the Galley Chatters organize year end event on Twitter-- #LibFaves-- and then they attach the year on it. Here is the link to my post about #LibFaves19 with this explanation of the project by last year's Chair, Andrienne Cruz, Librarian, Azusa City Library (CA):
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. By2018, there were 1,873 books mentioned, 875 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. 9th to Dec. 18th and tag their tweets with #libfaves19. 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. 18th. The list of all the books will be shared on Dec. 19th.  
#Libfaves19 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 2019, 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.  
That was a specific explanation for last year, but they have been running this for a few years now, and they always post a detailed spreadsheet of every title mentioned and how many times it was mentioned. Click here to see my post with 2019's spreadsheet and my directions on how to find past spreadsheets. I also write about how to use these spreadsheets to help readers in that post

This year, since 2020 has been so disorienting and different from all other years, the #LibFaves team decided to give everyone something fun to Tweet about. And so, they hosted a 1 day Twitter event, #MidLibFaves20 where participants could tweet up to their top 6 books with 2020 pub dates. So rather than unveil 1 a day for 10 days, they cut  to the chase and had a full day of sharing favorites. 

Here is the spreadsheet for #MidLibFaves20 for you to see and use  to help patrons. And as one of the moderators said, it will be very interesting to see how many of these titles end up on the year end version of LibFaves.

Sorry [not sorry]  in advance for exploding your TBR.  I have this popular post on how to handle TBR Anxiety to help with that too.

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