The Randolph Caldecott Medal annually recognizes the preceding year's "most distinguished American picture book for children", beginning with 1937 publications.  It is awarded to the illustrator by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA).  The award is named for Randolph Caldecott, a nineteenth-century English illustrator.  Rene Paul Chambellan designed the Medal in 1937.  The obverse scene is derived from Randolph Caldecott's front cover illustration for The Diverting History of John Gilpin (Routledge, 1878, an edition of the 1782 poem by William Cowper), which depicts Gilpin astride a runaway horse.  The reverse is based on "Four and twenty blackbirds bak'd in a pie", one of Caldecott's illustrations for the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence".  Beside the Caldecott Medal, the committee awards a variable number of citations to worthy runners-up, called the Caldecott Honors or Caldecott Honor Books.  Recently there are two to four annual Honors.  The Honor Books must be a subset of the runners-up on the final ballot, either the leading runners-up on that ballot or the leaders on one further ballot that excludes the winner.  See Caldecott medal winners and runners-up from 1938 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Medal  

See illustrations by Randolph Caldecott at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolph_Caldecott and http://www.randolphcaldecott.org.uk/works.htm 

Find online books by Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886) at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Caldecott%2C%20Randolph%2C%201846-1886

RANDOLPH CALDECOTT:  THE MAN WHO COULD NOT STOP DRAWING by Leonard S. Marcus   In 1861, Caldecott sold his first drawing to the Illustrated London News.  In 1878, he published his first two picture books, The House That Jack Built and The Diverting History of John Gilpin.  In 1883, he drew his only book populated entirely by animals in human dress, A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go.  In 1884, Rupert Potter bought two illustrations from the frog book.  The collector's daughter, Beatrix (creator of Peter Rabbit and other picture book characters in human dress) enjoyed them and studied them.  In 1938, the first Caldecott Medal was presented by the American Library Association to Dorothy P. Lathrop.

Randolph Caldecott:  the music video performed by the Effin' G's.  See Caldecott medal winning books in an amusing 2:56 video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMIjWQQavcY

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York celebrates in 75th anniversary in 2014.  Link to information including ABNER (American Baseball Network for Electronic Research), the online library catalog, at http://baseballhall.org/

The Recorded Media Collection of The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum contains approximately 14,000 hours of moving images and sound recordings in a wide variety of formats that date from a 1908 Edison Cylinder recording of Take Me Out To The Ball Game.  The archive includes 78 rpm radio discs, phonograph records, 8mm home movies, reel-to-reel tapes, films, videotapes, along with compact and digital video discs.  Recorded on these diverse media are interviews and oral histories; radio and television broadcasts; play-by-play and other commentary; feature, documentary and animated films; popular songs and other music; and Hall of Fame events.  Researchers may gain access to this archive during a research visit to the Giamatti Research Center.  Requests should be filed in advance of your visit, preferably when making a research appointment.  Two weeks advance notice is preferred, and initial inquiries may be directed to:  Email: research@baseballhall.org
Telephone:  607-547-0330 or 0335.  For researchers unable to visit the Giamatti Research Center, inquiries regarding rights and reproductions issues may be directed to Jim Gates, Library Director:  Email:  jgates@baseballhall.org  Telephone:  607-547-0311  Fax:  607-547-4094  US Mail:  Jim Gates, Librarian National Baseball Hall of Fame 25 Main Street Cooperstown, NY 13326  http://baseballhall.org/node/492  See Cooperstown Chatter, official blog of The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum at http://community.baseballhall.org/chatter/

Conjunctive Adverbs  An adverb is a part of speech that modifies a verb, adverb, adjectives, clauses, and sentences, anything but a noun.  Many adverbs end in -ly, although not all of them.  A conjunction is a part of speech that connects phrases and clauses.  Therefore, a conjunctive adverb is a type of adverb that joins together two clauses. These clauses are usually independent clauses, otherwise known as complete sentences.  To correctly punctuate a conjunctive adverb, a writer will use a semicolon or period at the end of the first independent clause.  The conjunctive adverb is then used followed by a comma and the next independent clause.  Example:  I will not be attending the show. Therefore, I have extra tickets for anyone that can use them.  Find list of conjunctive adverbs at http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/parts-of-speech/adverbs/list-of-conjunctive-adverbs.html

This month, several thousand aspiring authors are attempting to write a novel in 30 days.  They are taking part in an annual event known asNaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, in the hope that the time pressure will spur them on.  For a small community of computer programmers, though, NaNoWriMo has a lighthearted sister competition:   National Novel Generating Month, the goal of which is to teach a computer to write a novel for you.  However, finished NaNoGenMo projects are unlikely to trouble Booker judges.  They include a version of Moby-Dick in which the words have been swapped for meows of the same length (immortal opening line: Meow me Meeeeow); another version in which a few key words have been swapped out for emoji; and a novel made up of unconnected excerpts from an online database of teenage girls’ accounts of their dreams.  “I don’t think anyone’s really taking it seriously,” says Mark Riedl, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Riedl and his colleagues are not taking part, but they are among the many computer scientists working on far more sophisticated digital storytellers.  For the past two years, they have been tinkering with a program called Scheherazade, which learns how to describe tasks by analysing crowd-sourced human accounts, and then attempts to produce plausible short stories about, say, going to the movies or a restaurant.  At its best, Scheherazade writes fairly convincing vignettes:  “You entered the movie theater ... You find the seats as indicated on your movie ticket ... You sat comfortably in your seats.”  But it’s prone to telltale errors.  “For Scheherazade, a successful story is one in which people will read the story and recognise the activity and not find too many obvious errors,” says Riedl.  Novels require more than that, of course.  Part of the challenge is teaching a computer not merely to describe, but to imagine.  This is the goal of the What-If Machine (Whim) project, a venture involving teams at five universities across Europe.  Like Scheherazade, the Whim, as the program is affectionately known, seeks to understand what is possible by analysing vast databases of human prose.  It then inverts or twists what it has learned to produce a new idea that could serve as the premise of a story.  Tom Meltzer  http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/11/can-computers-write-fiction-artificial-intelligence

November 12, 2014  Earlier this week, New Yorkers got their first look at Fulton Center, a new $1.4 billion transit hub that New York magazine describes as "a sort of Grand Central for downtown."  Aside from giving riders an easier way to connect between eleven subway lines, it's also a piece of art unto itself.  The oculus and spiraled dome that architecturally define the project is called "Sky Reflector-Net".  Assembled with nearly 1,000 reflective panels, it gives users a dramatic look up into the sky as they pass through the facility.  It's one of the most ambitious artistic additions to the transit system since the advent of the MTA's nearly 30-year-old station art program.  Coinciding with the opening of Fulton Center is the release of a new book this week that catalogs the entire system's art collection:  New York's Underground Art Museum, by Sandra Bloodworth and William Ayres (Monacelli Press).  The book itself is an update of Along the Way, written by the same authors back in 2006.  Since then, nearly 100 more works have been installed, putting the transit system's permanent collection at 250 pieces.  Launched in 1985, MTA Arts & Design (originally known as "Arts for Transit and Urban Design") has helped the city and its subway ditch their reputations for being dirty and crime-ridden.  Setting aside one percent of the capital budget for every new station or renovation, over the years the MTA has invited over 100 individual artists, from Roy Liechtenstein to Xenobia Bailey, to liven up commutes along the subway system, Long Island Rail Road, and Metro-North Railroad.  Mark Byrnes  See pictures at http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/11/inside-new-york-citys-underground-art-museum/382647/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1219  November 19, 2014  On this date in  1493, Christopher Columbus went ashore on an island he first saw the day before, naming it San Juan Bautista (later renamed Puerto Rico).  On this date in 1794, the United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain signed Jay's Treaty, which attempted to resolve some of the lingering problems left over from the American Revolutionary War.