Library news, book chat, resources, and more
What a difference a few months makes. Saint Francis on the corner of the lawn at City Hall seems to be discussing the weather with his friend the prairie dog again. It's tempting to try to give the prairie dog a little beach towel, or a tiny-tiny frisbee. 
In 1991 the number was amended. The 'scaled adjusted' height is now given on the data sheet as 6992.76 feet. "The orthometric height was determined by differential leveling and adjusted by the NATIONAL GEODETIC SURVEY in June 1991. WARNING-Repeat measurements at this control monument indicate possible vertical movement."
Possible vertical movement?! The data sheet link we have here is a local copy. If you want to see it at the source, you can pick your way into the datasheets from the National Geodetic Survey home page , but there doesn't seem to be a way to construct a direct link.
The Santa Fe Public Library Board is pleased to announce the naming of the Southwest Room of the Main Library, located at 145 Washington Avenue, for Pedro Ribera Ortega and the Children's Room at the Main Library for Esther Martinez."When soliciting names for the new southside library, the Library Board was struck by the accomplishments of many of the nominees whose names were submitted. The Board decided to take this opportunity to honor two of Northern New Mexico’s leaders by naming rooms for them at the Main Library," stated Michele Huff, Library Board president.
Jennifer Jaramillo, Library Board vice president noted, "Both Pedro Ribera Ortega and Esther Martinez have given so much of themselves to the Northern New Mexico communities. The Library Board honors them for their contributions to the rich heritage of New Mexico."
Pedro Ribera Ortega was a well-known teacher, who instilled a knowledge and love of New Mexico in his students. He researched and often wrote his articles and books in the Southwest Room of the Main Library. The Southwest Room was once the City Council chambers and embodies the history of books and research. His popular book Christmas in Old Santa Fe captures a part of the rich, cultural history of Santa Fe. Ribera Ortega was known for his commitment to the New Mexico Spanish language, culture and history. As a teacher at Santa Fe High School, he always encouraged Hispanics to learn their language and history to help them keep their heritage. He conducted research in archives in Spain, Santa Fe and Mexico. He was a founder of the Caballeros de Vargas, which commemorates the return of Governor De Vargas to the Pueblos in 1693, with the annual festival which is held annually as the Santa Fe Fiesta. He also was the recipient of the Mayor’s award for excellence in the arts, the Governor’s Arts Award and was named a Living Treasure of Santa Fe. As a relative stated, "I can picture him hunched over at one of the old tables, reading and writing under the lamp in the Southwest Room; naming the room for him would be very appropriate."
Esther Martinez, also known as P'oe Tswa (Blue Water), was a storyteller and linguist of the Tewa language spoken in the Pueblos of New Mexico. At 94 years old, she received the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement. The noted Ohkay Owingeh storyteller, was dedicated to preserving the Tewa language and serving as an educator. Martinez wrote the initial San Juan Pueblo Tewa Dictionary and a children’s book, The Naughty Little Rabbit and Old Man Coyote. The contribution Martinez made to language and cultural preservation has not gone unrecognized. A few of Martinez’s honors include the National Association for Bilingual Education, Pioneer Award (1992), Living Treasure Award from the State of New Mexico (1996), Indian Education Award for Teacher of the Year from the National Council of American Indians, Woman of the Year Award (1997), New Mexico Arts Commission Governor's Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts. Among Pueblo people, Martinez is best known as the San Juan Storyteller. Martinez recently published My Life in San Juan Pueblo: Stories of Esther Martinez.
The Library Board and the Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library will hold a special reception for the recipients later in the year.
There are several new and/or republished titles by Thich Nhat Hahn; a lot of business books and art books in the nonfiction; a short list of seductive southwest titles, such as Understories : the political life of forests in northern New Mexico by Jake Kosek, and Eli Levin's Santa Fe Bohemia : the art colony, 1964-1980. Lots of mysteries, lots of DVDS & CDs, and more.
The Museum is free to New Mexico residents on Sundays, and yes, it really will be open Monday. Summer Hours for the Museum begin May 28. The museum will be open 7 days a week from Memorial Day, May 28 through Labor Day, September 3.
Bradford County Public Library (FL)'s construction project has made great progress since we last peeked at it. And so has the Jesse M. Smith Library in Harrisville, RI. West Long Branch (NJ) gives us lots of large cover images. (Makes every title look seductive.) Papercuts at Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library points out that today is the 100th anniversiary of John Wayne's birth (!), and gives lots of good links. Sites and Soundbites (Menasha, WI) always has good links.
And onward. The Galway Public Libraries (yes, in Ireland) have a blog. So does Wellington, New Zealand, and the Sutherland Shire Libraries in New South Wales have a slide show pulled in from Flickr that we have to learn how to imitate ASAP.
Enough. There's a huge long list of library blogs on the Blogging Libraries Wiki, some alive, some dead, some entertaining, some boring. Why not just try a few?
Update: Roy Tennant, until recently at California Digital Library and now at OCLC, said on twitter, "across a few sites of my media empire, I see a range of 7-plus % to 12% Mac users. I think it's on the rise." So maybe the proportion is everywhere higher in libraryland than out in the wider world.
It displays like this (and making it was the most fun we've had in weeks); go take a look.
Santa Fe author Jeanette Boyer will be reading from her new novel, Junkyard Dreams, set in Santa Fe. By the subject headings it's about 'automobile graveyards' and 'real estate developers', and ought to be irresistible. Main Library Community Room, 7 PM, Thursday, May 24th.
It's time for Summer Reading. The theme this year is "Paws, Claws, Scales & Tales", and registration will begin on June 12. Soon there will be a printed calendar. Meanwhile, early news about the programs which are being planned is available on the Summer Reading Page. For more information call La Farge: 955-4863, Main: 955-6783, Southside: 955-2828.
It's pretty green and summery out there already, so we will give you again the summer soundtrack, the old English round "sumer is icumin in". Go to the full soundclip link for the best effect. The words are kind of nice too. 'Groweth sed and bloweth med and springth the wude nu. Sing, cuccu!' (The seed grows; the meadow blossoms, and the wood alivens anew. Sing, cuckoo!)
This is the poem which Santa Fe's Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze, read at the grand opening of Southside Library, and whose last lines are inscribed into the glass of the clerestory windows. We lost the text on our desk for a while, but here it is: (thank you, Arthur)The day can become a Zen garden of raked sand
or a yellow tanager singing on a branch;
feel the terrors and pleasures of the morning:
in Tianjin all the foreigners are sent to a movie
and they must guess at what the authorities
do not wish them to see; dream a rainy landscape:
the Jemez Mountains breaking up in mist and jagged light
into a series of smaller but dazzling ranges;
to distinguish the smell of calendula from delphinium
is of no apparent consequence, but guess that
crucial moments in history involve an unobtrusive
point flaring into a startling revelation;
now be alive to the flowering chives by the window;
feel the potato plant in the whiskey barrel soak up sun;
feel this riparian light,
this flow where no word no water is.
Joshua M. Neff pointed out Neil Gaiman's charming piece about the role of Dr. Who in his childhood. (The title of this post is from his essay.) Steve Cohen of Library Stuff found an article from Harvard Journal of Law & Technology on Social Isolation and American Workers: Employee Blogging and Legal Reform. Karen Schneider highlighted a post on the consequences of the new postage rates for small presses, and her own take on the campaign to save book reviews.
PS It's an interesting compositional challenge to reduce what you're doing (and what you're thinking about it) to 140 characters...
Galleycat has a discussion with further links, and a followup.
John Brandi, a native of Southern California, graduated from Cal State Northridge in 1965 with a BA in art and anthropology. In 1971 he moved to New Mexico, published That back Road In, and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.
John is a painter as well as a poet and has held solo exhibits throughout the United States. Among his honors are a Witter Bynner Translation Grant, the Just Buffalo Writers Award, the Portland State University Poetry Prize and numerous poet-in-residence awards from state arts councils. Among his poetry books are: In What Disappears, Water Shining Beyond the Fields, Heartbeat Geography, Weeding the Cosmos and That Back Road In. His works of prose include A Question of Journey and Reflections in the Lizard’s Eye.
Another reader pointed out an article about the quirkily personal Prelinger Library in San Francisco, from the May, 2007 Harper's Magazine. Curiously apposite to Professor Wesch's Digital Ethnography, Gideon Lewis-Kraus's article, A world in three aisles: Browsing the post-digital library, is available in full on the Harper's website, and also from the magazine database; and we have the paper issue if you'd rather.
And if you have a spare half hour or so, there was a discussion of digitization on NPR's Talk of the Town Science Friday earlier this month. It's available for listening. The interviewees were Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg; Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive; and Michael Keller from Stanford University. The really really scary part was when they agreed that the US Congress will continue to move copyright law in the direction of perpetual copyright, and there will be very little left in the public domain in the United States...
Some of the other book blogs we lately cruised include Literary Kicks, a website with a long track record (they brag about having been at it since 1994*) now modernized with a blog. The top entry at the moment is about a new adult novel by classic YA author S. E. Hinton, Some of Tim's Stories. They have a sweet essay, Great Chick-Lit of the 70's (or, the Books That Raised Me). Sarah Weinman's Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind is a rewarding mix of publishing industry and crime fiction news, and she has great links in her sidebar. (Well, most of the litbloggers do a good job of leading you outward with links to other bloggers...) Another entertaining blog to track for publishing gossip is M. J. Rose's Buzz, Balls & Hype.
The Waterboro (ME) H2Oboro Lib Blog is as usual full of fascinating links. For example: this definition of 'classic' from the Ex-Classics Web Site: "What is a classic book? Some people confine it to ancient Greek and Latin works; others use it to describe books by Isaac Asimov or Barbara Cartland. Our definition is a book which has been read, enjoyed, and had an influence on people over two or more generations. In the final analysis, there is no other test than survival." And a piece from the Guardian's book blog with the irresistible title, How we ditched sex and fell for thrillers. "About 20 years ago readers became sated with sexy novels - sex was after all no longer the mystery it once was. And that's when the thriller entered the literary mainstream..."
Want more? New Listings from the Online Books Page. Really delicious-sounding YA titles from propernoun.net which we mostly don't have and are going to have to do something about ordering. Grumpy Old Bookman gives us a start on following the discussion raging in both print and the biblioblogs about the dismal direction things are going with newspaper book review sections. One of the participants on The Millions, a literary blog with several authors, maintains a reading queue in the sidebar; and as the author explains, the next book he will read is chosen from this vitual To Be Read pile using a random number generator. (A strangeness worth several exclamation points!!!) Mostly you can start anywhere in the book blog world, follow links from the articles or sidebars, and soon find yourself somewhere congenial.
* P. S. We too claim a long-history-in-web-terms. Our home page went up on September 22, 1994...
which serves Santa Fe’s southwest bus riders (Airport Road, Tierra Contenta and Santa Fe Community College) beginning Saturday, May 19, 2007.Westbound Route 24 buses on Airport Road will turn left at the Country Club Road traffic signal, head south on Country Club road to Jaguar Road, turn right on Jaguar Road to Paseo del Sol West, turn right on Paseo del Sol West to Airport Road, then turn right on Airport Road to return to complete the loop and return to Santa Fe Place Transit Center.(See attached map.)
"Two self-checkout machines were installed, at La Farge and Southside, and patrons are beginning to use them on a regular basis. These machines allow staff to devote their time to patrons with questions or other duties.
"The Summer Reading Program is gearing up for a summer of reading, special programs and fun. The theme of "Claws, Paws, Scales and Tails" will feature pets, real and imagined. The program is funded by the Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library, which provide entertainers, rewards and a special end of Summer Reading Parties for all participants. The program runs from June 11- August 3rd. A calendar of events and more information will be available sooon.
"The Southside branch is partnering with the Santa Fe Institute (funded by the National Science Foundation) to offer "Project G.U.T.S.—Growing Up Thinking Scientifically" (see flyer)(and website) August 6-17 at the Library. The project is free to any student entering the 7th or 8th grade this fall who has an interest in science, technology, and engineering careers and is interested in developing computer skills. It is free. The program will be taught by Spanish and English speaking instructors. For more information call 988-9685.
"Power Readers, a new program for encouraging kids to read over the summer, is being funded by the Buckaroo Ball, Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation and the Santa Fe Community Foundation. The 6 week program will pair middle and high school students with reluctant readers to encourage reading. The students will receive a stipend for their mentoring work. Both La Farge and Southside Branch will host the program. The grant includes a half time, contract librarian to create and coordinate the program, select materials and supervise the mentors. Another outcome of the program is to create Teen Advisory Boards at both locations to help guide the library in selecting materials and planning programs relevant to teens."
Overall, the changes are complicated, but the biggest basic change is the new distinction between letter-sized mail ($.41 for the first ounce) and business-sized 9x12" envelopes—what the Postal Service calls 'flats' ($.80 for the first ounce). Postcards went up to $.26 . The Postal Service blames it on a decline in first class mail volume, and rising labor and fuel costs.Also, there will be a Forever Stamp. Provided you want to let the Postal Service hold onto a pile of your money, you can buy a monster supply of stamps which will always be good no matter how much rates go up in the future; then you just need to put them in a place you will surely remember years down the road.
"Writing in an Age of Silence. In her new book Writing in an Age of Silence, Sara Paretsky claims that the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library asked her to tone down her remarks when she spoke on the night the US invaded Iraq. Library officials vehemently deny the charge, which seems now to boil down to a difference in what each party recalls...." link to news story ; Review of Writing in an Age of Silence. Source: Library Journal, May 3 2007
"MySpace end run in library. Interview with Linda Wilson, City Librarian, Monterey Park Bruggemeyer Library (CA) "Wilson: A Monterey Park Police Officer came to me and said that they had a report of a 14-year-old runaway. She had a fight with her mother and took off. They were sure that she was still around, and her friends said that she would come to the library to check MySpace. The officer wanted us to put a block on her library card so that she could not sign-up to use the computers and would come to the Reference Desk to find out why she could not sign-up...." Source: LibraryLaw Blog, May 4, 2007.
"Follow the latest library filter lawsuit. You can now get updates on the latest library filter lawsuit via RSS feed. Justia just added Bradburn et al v. North Central Regional Library District to its featured case list. Read the complaint (i.e. the library doesn't disable its filters upon request) and the answer (the library has always had a procedure in place for dealing with such inquiries), as well as the upcoming schedule (plaintiffs' experts filed by July 6; defendant's experts by August 3)..." (more). Source: LibraryLaw Blog, May 1, 2007
"Library coalition comes down hard on National Security Letters 'A coalition of library organizations which includes the American Library Association (ALA) sponsored a gathering this week in Washington DC to promote awareness and advocacy on a broad assortment of political issues that impact libraries. The ALA's priorities for the National Library Legislative Day (NLLD) include advocating net neutrality, promoting copyright reform, and voicing concerns about the Real ID Act and the Patriot Act.' Source: ARS Technia
"ALA joins anti-National ID Campaign. 'The American Library Association (ALA) has joined a large and diverse group of 43 organizations to launch a campaign against the first national identification system, REAL ID. The groups joining in the anti-National ID campaign are concerned about the increased threat of counterfeiting and identity theft, lack of security to protect against unauthorized access to the document's machine readable content, increased cost to taxpayers, diverting of state funds intended for homeland security, increased costs for obtaining a license or state issued ID card, and because the REAL ID would create a false belief that it is secure and unforgeable. The draft regulations to implement the REAL ID Act are open for comment until 5:00 p.m. EDT on May 8, 2007. To make comments go to http://www.regulations.gov or send by fax to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS): 1-866-466-5370. Include Docket No. 2006-0030.' Source: ALA, May 1, 2007 "
And, she tell us, the Library of Congress now has a blog. Thanks, Geri.
the home page,Below there, the numbers drop off fairly rapidly, and some of the pages singled out by your mouse clicks are bafflingly specific. The next most-visited pages are
the New Mexico & Southwest Links,
and this blog.
library hours and locations
Internet Starting Points
Books and Literature
About the Library
the Southwest Reference Collection
Most Popular Authors 2003
Doing Local History in Santa Fe
Poets and Poetry in New Mexico
the Other Libraries section of "New Mexico & Southwest Links"
the Southside Library Page
Southside Library construction photographs
Whenever we look at this, we have to wonder: Where are people picking up that link to the list of Southwest titles which are only in the reference cases, and why do they care? What's special about the most popular authors in 2003, why aren't they more interested in, for example, last year's list?
The other thing we always look at when we think about the web traffic is, what browsers people are using. Our visitors are using
Internet Explorer 70.87%The numbers have changed only a very little since last summer, but the trend is still away from Internet Explorer. Firefox and the Mac browser Safari continue to gain ground.
FireFox 18.98%
Safari 7.80%
Now it also tells you plainly that the results are presently sorted by relevance, and presents the option to change to a title or date sort.
Childs is a terrific writer, and a man who hikes the wildernesses he writes about; the application of his unique on-the-ground perspective to questions of Chaco Canyon and Anasazi history is riveting.
There's a passage where archaeologist Jonathan Till is showing Childs and another archaeologist a Chacoan road in Utah. "Till led us down to where flat stones had been wedged, forming a staircase, some of the steps now gone, fallen into oblivion. Till reminded us to be careful. He was talking not about preserving our lives, but about not dislodging any of these placed stones, protecting the route. It had been used rarely in the past eight hundred years."
Or try this one. He has found an olivella shell in the dirt outside the ruin of an Anasazi granary deep in Canyonlands: "In all these years I had never encounted a single shell artifact in Utah, and now I could not suppress an astounded smile, the rush of promise quickening my blood. In my imagination lines of trade routes suddenly fired across the continent, long threads winding through deserts, over austere, cracked mesas to arrive here. It completed a triad for me: feathers from Mesoamerica, bighorns from the canyons, and a shell all the way from the sea... I slipped the shell back into the ground, and the three of us sat on boulders below the granary, looking across the dry mouths of farther canyons."
We have, of course, many many books about Chaco Canyon, about Puebloan archaeology, etc. They keep being published, we keep buying them. Some of the newer titles which bear on this train of thought are The great houses of Chaco by John Martin Campbell ; The peopling of Bandelier : new insights from the archaeology of the Pajarito Plateau, edited by Robert P. Powers ; The archaeology of Chaco Canyon : an eleventh-century Pueblo regional center, edited by Stephen H. Lekson ; Puebloan ruins of the Southwest by Arthur H. Rohn and William M. Ferguson ; Canyon gardens : the Ancient Pueblo landscapes of the American Southwest, edited by V.B. Price and Baker H. Morrow.
There is a new icon on the city's web page, a link to the GIS (Geographic Information System) Department's new Online mapping tool. This is a whole lot of fun to play with. You can choose various layers of information (the list at right shows only some of the options), zoom in and out, learn new things about your own neighborhood (or anyone else's).
Give it a whirl...
Main Library Community Room. May 17th, 7 PM
The 'new' J. R. R. Tolkien novel, The Tale of the Children of Hurin, an unpublished prequel to the Lord of the Rings material, edited by Tolkien's son Christopher, is getting a lot of press (1)(2). 
This happened to one of our users recently and he was quite taken aback. "I thought there was Open Access," he said, when we told him he could not have immediate electronic access through any of our databases, but would have to wait for a paper copy to come through Interlibrary Loan. On the whole, somebody has to have a subscription. (For example, both College of Santa Fe and Santa Fe Institute have partial JSTOR subscriptions and would let you get access by coming into their library— but no institution in Santa Fe is paying the $40,000 or so dollars per year for a complete package.) But he was also right that the Open Access movement continues to develop. Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter has a good summary of, not so much where things stand as which way they are moving.
