The American Library Association (ALA) and Target Corporation today announced their partnership in Target’s nationwide Target Read With Me campaign to help increase the reading proficiency of children.

As part of this partnership, ALA is providing support and resources for a dedicated website that is focused on encouraging adults to read to children. The goal is to help foster a love of books and reading, and significantly increase a child’s ability to read on their own by the end of third grade.

As the popularity of young adult literature continues to soar and teen musical artists dominate the airwaves, thousands of teens will participate in Teen Read Week, October 17 – 23, 2010, celebrated this year with a theme of “Books with Beat @ your library®.”

Teen Read Week, sponsored by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), is an annual literacy initiative celebrated in libraries and bookstores that provides parents, caregivers and teens with resources to encourage recreational reading habits. The “Books with Beat @ your library®” theme encourages teens to listen to audiobooks and read poetry, books about music, and more, just for the fun of it. 

Sunshine Week is a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include news media, civic groups, libraries, nonprofits, schools and others interested in the public's right to know. 

Though created by journalists, Sunshine Week is about the public's right to know what its government is doing, and why. Sunshine Week seeks to enlighten and empower people to play an active role in their government at all levels, and to give them access to information that makes their lives better and their communities stronger. Sunshine Week is a nonpartisan, non-profit initiative.

In celebration of 85 years of sharing the joy of reading, Direct Brands' Book-of-the-Month Club is announcing the first-ever Donate a Book Day, beginning on Thursday, April 14 during National Library Week.

This "Day of Donation" is facilitated by a partnership with the Association of Library Trustees, Advocates, Friends and Foundations (ALTAFF), a division of the American Library Association (ALA).

On April 14, readers across the U.S. will be encouraged to donate new or gently used books to their local libraries. Books not added to the library's collection will be given to the Friends of the Library, who use donated books to stock their book sale fundraisers for the library.

To honor the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird,  the ABA Journal and The University of Alabama School of Law  have created THE HARPER LEE PRIZE, to honor former Alabama  law student Harper Lee for the role model she created.

Atticus Finch has inspired generations of readers—to become  lawyers, to take on unpopular causes, to behave honorably. As Atticus reminds us, “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

The Prize will be given annually to a book-length work of fiction that best exemplifies the role of lawyers in society, and their power to effect change. Only works first published in 2010 qualify. Completed entry forms must be submitted by the publisher prior to April 8, 2011. There is no entry fee.