Break out the cake and candles: Loan Stars has just turned one! To celebrate, we've compiled some stats and facts from the first year and we're giving you a chance to win a pizza party for your library branch in a new contest!
Loan Stars, the readers’ advisory service that allows library staff across Canada to collaboratively select their favourite forthcoming adult titles, has had a fantastic first year! (If you work in a Canadian library and want to know more about how to participate in Loan Stars, go to the end of this post for more details.)
Over the last 12 months, library staff chose their favourite 120 books – 10 books each month. As it turns out, Loan Stars voters love fiction by an impressive margin!
What kind of fiction has made it on to the top 10 lists the most, you ask? We're glad you did, because we put together this pretty illustration. One-third of the Loan Stars fiction picks were literary fiction. Library staff seem to love books about the human condition.
Library staff also love Canadian books: 30% of all Loan Stars top picks so far have been Canadian-authored! And it's no surprise that library staff know good books; they saw the quality even before award juries did. Are library staff the OG hipsters? They did like it before it was cool.
We would like to say thank you to all the library staff who have participated in Loan Stars this past year.
But we didn't want to just say the words, we wanted to do something, too. So we decided to give away a pizza party for your library branch, courtesy of Panago Pizza. To enter, all you have to do is send us a picture of a Loan Stars Top Pick in the wild.
Get your whole branch involved! Tag us in your photos on Twitter (@LoanStarsCA) and Facebook (/LoanStars), or email them to us if you're not on social media. One entry per picture, up to a limit of 10 entries.
Be sure to send us your pictures before midnight EST on Monday, April 17, because that's when the contest closes. We'll choose one lucky winner to be the pizza party hero of their library branch. Good luck, we hope it's you!
And, here for all your sharing needs, is the full Loan Stars Turns One infographic:
Just what is Loan Stars?
Loan Stars is the new readers’ advisory service that allows library staff across Canada to collaboratively select their favourite forthcoming titles. Using CataList, the online catalogue tool available free to libraries, library staff can nominate their favourite adult fiction and non-fiction titles, the most popular of which will be promoted to readers through the Loan Stars website, social media and email marketing, media partners, and digital and physical promotion in libraries across the country.
I work in a library. How do I get involved?
It's easy and free! You can go to the Loan Stars website for all of the details, but, in a nutshell, there are five easy steps:
Sign up for CataList.
Log into CataList to find new titles and request digital galleys.
Start reading.
Vote for your favourites. You can even leave a review or link to one you've written on the web.
Repeat – You can vote more than once!
How do I get advanced reading copies?
We encourage you to sign up for NetGalley to get digital copies of forthcoming titles. You will find links throughout CataList to all titles that are available in NetGalley. For many of the publishers on CataList, you can also make a direct request to the publisher for a forthcoming title. Start by selecting the “Read Me” button next to a title, which will allow you to either request a copy via NetGalley (if available) or make a direct request to the publisher.
