Central Massachusetts Year of the Teen

There’s a new photo of ULTRA, the teen advisory board in Upton, on the Region’s Flickr site. Check out their awesomely cool new shirts!! The Friends of the Upton Library paid for the shirts for them. How cool is that???

Here’s the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmrls/sets. (Look for the Upton ULTRA set.) If you have photos you’d like to include in our Flickr gallery, be sure you have permission to put the people’s photos online, then email them to Maureen at CMRLS. (mambrosino@cmrls.org) We’d love to see yours on there too!

I just heard about a new website that will help you translate the IM slang you get when chatting with teens. Go to http://www.noslang.com/extras.php and type in any of these, or maybe another one you’ve seen — click a button — and you’ve got the answer! There are even plug-ins for your browser so you can copy blocks of text into the translator without going to the website. Check it out!

(Just in case you were wondering, these are Laughing Out Loud, Be Right Back, and Mom Over Shoulder.) ttyl!

Please share this contest with your teens! From author Colleen Gleason’s website:

This is your chance to nominate a friend for a one of a kind opportunity: to be immortalized by being a character in a published book. (And there’s something in it for you too!)

Colleen Gleason, author of The Gardella Vampire Chronicles, is giving away the chance to name or be a character in the third book of her historical vampire hunter series, due to be released in early 2008.
Go to the Contest webpage for more details, the official rules, and the entry form. Good luck!

Next week, November 19-25 is National Games Week. While it might be too late to plan a program (and our libraries will be closed part of the week anyway) check out the official website! My favorite part of the site is their Top Games of 2005, a list of the top 100 games as determined by members of their organization. It would be a great resource for libraries looking to start a video game collection or add to an existing one. Board games are included too! So if you need some ideas of what to do with all those relatives over the holiday weekend, go play a game!

I just read about a new service — AskMeNow.com — on the Ypulse blog. (See the link to the left in the Blogroll section.) Get this: you can text message a question using your cell phone to askmenow, and for $.25 they will text an answer back to you within a few minutes. I dug around on their site and they are very vague about who actually answers the questions, but are very clear about what they will/will not answer. They claim not to answer exam/test questions, but a student quoted on Ypulse talks about using it for cheating. An interesting dilemma … what do you think about it? What about your library offering text-message reference?