Online Yiddish and Hebrew Children's Books

This is from Sharon Levin, Bay Area bookwoman extraordiare:

The Center for Jewish History recently completed a pilot project to digitize and make freely accessible online 40 Yiddish and Hebrew children's books, many of which are richly illustrated, from the collections of two of the Center's Partners: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Yeshiva University Museum.

The collection, which is still growing rapidly and also includes books from other CJH partners, can be found online here.

The books were digitized and made available by the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory, the Center's state-of-the-art in-house digital collections-building facility. In addition to making the children's books available through CJH Digital Collections, the books were also uploaded to the International Children's Digital Library (www.icdlbooks.org), thereby making them even more widely accessible to current and future generations.

The Children's Books Pilot Project at the Center for Jewish History was supported in part by funds from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) through the New York State Regional Bibliographic Databases Program. Thanks to the success of this METRO-funded pilot project, the Center has since received a generous gift from the Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund to digitize a further 50 children's books.

Reading the World X This Weekend

Again, I really need to get better at blogging about my exciting events earlier, but better before than after, right?

Reading the World, my favorite conference, is this weekend, Feb. 15-16. It is the only children's literature conference focusing solely on multicultural literature that I know of, and it is an amazing event. This year, keynote speakers include Ashley Bryan, Lawrence Yep, Jack Zipes, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sarah Ellis, Peter Sis, and Doris Orgel. And that's just the keynotes! The two days are also packed with sessions given by authors, illustrators and educators-- an amazing lineup.

There will be two booksellers there this year: ourselves and Hicklebee's. I think we're going to have our hands full, but I'm looking forward to being busy this weekend.

Maybe I'll see you there!

Reading the World X
February 15-16, 2008
University of San Francisco
School of Education
2350 Turk Blvd, San Francisco

The Prince's Diary is on Lookybook

Need I say more?

For the full-size Lookybook experience, click here.