NYS Summer Reading – YA Books Widget

One of the many fun projects that I have the privilege of working on is the New York State Summer Reading program website. We’ve been working on some redesigning, which is always a work in progress, and also lots of updates for this summer (not done yet)

I was checking stats today to see what pages were getting hits and was pleased to see the Teen Booklists (boring name I know) was the top hit getter. teenreads

Since I’m in no way an expert on YA titles, I wanted an easy way to add titles that appear on the many booklists available from different sources.  But also wanted something that had some graphic appeal. Since it’s a statewide site, I couldn’t pull a list of covers from a library catalog and link directly back to the titles.

Enter LibraryThing. I added titles from lots of different lists and used their widget building tool to create a widget that randomly displays 15 titles at a time.   There’s also a YouTube playlist of book trailers (again, that needs updating)

It’s easy enough to build your own widget, but if you want to use ours, here’s the code you can use to embed it on your own website.

<div id="w3ea6ee67fbfdc058028747e08628acc8"></div><script 
type="text/javascript" charset="UTF-8" 
src="http://www.librarything.com/widget_get.php? 
userid=summerreadingnys&theID=w3ea6ee67fbfdc058028747e08628acc8"></script> 
<noscript><a 
href="http://www.librarything.com/profile/summerreadingnys">My Library</a> 
at <a href="http://www.librarything.com">LibraryThing</a></noscript>

If you have suggestions for the booklist or the booktrailers widgets, let me know.   Maybe I’ll spend my summer vacation reading YA lit? What do you suggest?

(post was originally published on June 3 2014, republished for 2015 summer reading program)

2 thoughts on “NYS Summer Reading – YA Books Widget”

  1. Polly,
    Is there a way to change the links to our local catalog instead of librarything? I think there should be…. right?

    1. I don’t know Ellen. Since it’s a free Librarything widget, I suspect the first ‘stop’ will be Librarything. You might be able to choose which links show up below the book titles on LT though. Tell me if you figure it out! If you can’t so it, no one can! 🙂

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