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The Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) conducts many activities each year, based on its four key messages:
* To promote quality literature to young Australians.
* To support Australian writers and illustrators of children's books.
* To promote the role of library and literature professionals in bringing children and books together.
* To celebrate outstanding contributions to Australian children's literature through the annual CBCA Book of the Year Awards.
Children's Book Week is one of the major events on Australia's literary calendar and the CBCA offers a range of different activities and resources to support Book Week celebrations. While traditionally teacher librarians (TLs) were seen as the main group promoting this worthwhile activity, we have become more aware of the work that public librarians and home schooling parents also do to encourage a love of recreational reading in their clients and children respectively.
At a national level, the obvious and most enduring of activities is the administration of the CBCA Book of the Year Awards. These have been running since 1946, in various formats. The Early Childhood category, for example, has only been in existence since 2001. Even though there continues to be lively discussion about categories, the number of categories and who should judge which categories, it is clear that the awards themselves are an integral part of the Australian children's literature industry and, as such, remain a prestigious and commercially important honour for authors and illustrators. There are several programs to support the awards.
One area of the website that attracts a lot of attention is the Book Week Ideas page. The CBCA encourages input from anybody who prepares lessons or resources on the shortlisted books or on the Book Week theme. The CBCA website hosts these resources, provides links to websites or offers contact details if it is a product for sale. The statistics indicate that this is a page frequently visited, so, on that basis alone, it is achieving its aim of allowing people to share their ideas and their hard work with others (http:// cbca.org.au/bookweekideas.htm).
The most recent activity hosted by the National Executive has been allowing libraries to send in pictures of thendisplays to showcase the amazing and creative work being done by staff, students and, in...