Librarians and teachers tend to be collaborative, both within their selected profession and between professions. Librarians frequently collaborate within their system or school district, developing booklists, programming or lesson ideas, and PR. Teachers commonly co-plan with others in their grade level or content area. No matter the who or where, the end result is always better. The ideas are better developed and implemented; novices to the field are supported; new ideas or fresh takes on the old are generated; interdisciplinary alliances are forged as are alliances between school and library.

Time and money can at times hinder collaborative efforts. Fortunately the Internet helps get around that. List-servs, blogs, social media all can foster collaboration. And now, so does CLCD! Users now have a place to share online content that has somehow helped them in promoting, appreciating, or understanding children’s and young adult literature.

CLCD has long provided links to author pages or curriculum tools; they can be found on the Book Detail page, under listings for Awards, Honors & Prizes or State & Provincial Reading Lists. With CLCD version 3.1, released in April, we offer our users the opportunity to share online content they have found useful or that they have created and put on the web-be it a blog post, book trailer, lesson plan, or booklist. Do you post young people’s reviews (written or taped) on your website? Add a link to it via CLCD’s Member Created Content. Did you record and post Readers’ Theatre or a puppet show? Add a link in CLCD. Find directions for a craft tied to a book? Post the link in CLCD. This is an exciting new feature, limited only by your imagination! Adding a link is simple. Look for the Member Contributed Content box on the right side of the Book Detail page. Give a brief description in the Description Box, copy and paste the full URL, and click Share Your URL. It’s as easy as that.

Your screen will refresh and will now show your link, to be taken advantage of by all. Here is a screen shot of the Detail Page for Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures after I added a couple links. You can see my first name as the contributor, the brief description, and a green thumbs up/red thumbs down icon. Since this content is totally separate from the aggregated content under our Curriculum Links, and not pre-approved by us, we wanted you to be the “Content Police.” If you find a link helpful, please give it a green thumbs up. If it wasn’t helpful or in any way inappropriate, give it a red thumbs down. We will be keeping tabs on these ratings. If a link is receiving a number of red thumbs down, we will check it out and decide if it should remain on CLCD. So taking the extra second to give a rating is critical!

I know how much I trolled the web when I was a practicing librarian. Now that I’m retired and working on the CLCD Newsletter, I’m still out there trolling. I know two heads are better than one! Help your colleagues save time, increase learning, and encourage reading by adding links to CLCD’s Member Contributed Content Section. Virtual collaboration is the name of the game today.