Question of the Day

Question: What needs 600 hands, 600 legs, 300 hearts and a love of libraries?
Answer: The new Southside Library! (in the form of 300 volunteers)

Three hundred volunteers are needed to help with planning and
staffing events, special projects, and providing community awareness for the new Southside Library.        Although the Southside Library will not be open until late summer 2006, the Volunteer Committee for the Southside Library has created plans to bring awareness and raise funds for the new branch of the Santa Fe Public Library STARTING NOW!
       What would you like to do to help make this Library a reality? What talents of yours can we tap? Come and share with us at the volunteer recruitment meeting. Volunteers are already staffing information tables at City events, delivering flyers to schools and churches, serving as models for photography sessions featuring library users, raising money and talking to community service organizations.
       Join with family and friends at a Volunteer Recruitment meeting on Tuesday, April 26 at La Farge Branch, 1730 Llano Street at 6:30 p.m. to sign up and hear about the exciting plans and how you can be involved. Age is no limit—we have volunteers age 10 through 80!
       Refreshments will be served. Not sure you can attend until the last minute? That’s okay, just show up. We’ll save a cookie for you.

Friend or Frog : Pre-School Story Time

In this morning's Story Time the 2- and 3-year-olds heard Marjorie Priceman's Friend or Frog, and then they did a craft project and made frog puppets. The 4--5-and-6-year-olds heard Big Red Tub by Julia Harman, One Snowy Night by M. Christina Butler, Bedtime in the Southwest by Mona Hodgson, Who Took the Cookies from the Cookie Jar? by Bonnie Lass, and The animal fair : animal verses, compiled by Jill Bennett. Fun for both the kids and the librarians!

       Pre-School Story Time at La Farge happens on Tuesday mornings, and runs two groups simultaneously: 2- and 3-year olds meet from 10:30 to 11:00 AM; and 4-5-and-6-year-olds from 10:30 to 11:15 AM. It runs in six week cycles. The current cycle began on April 12 and runs through May 17. It is still possible to register. Call the children's department at La Farge, at 955-4863.

Letter to Poets

We received this note from a publisher looking to hear from New Mexico poets:       'Hello to the Blog. I am a Canadian poetry chapbook publisher spending some months in Santa Fe to go to school. I'd like to invite New Mexico poets to send poems to my site, where I publish a feature called "Monday's Poem." It's always wonderful to have new voices there.' Ursula Vaira, Publisher, Leaf Press
Monday's Poem guidelines

Putting the Newest On Top

How do you do that trick of sorting your catalog results by date?
       Search for an author (or title or subject). Now, notice the search-and-sort bar above the results.

Pull down the menu and choose "Newest First".

Click on "Sort". Voila!
       If you continue entering your searches into this bar instead of going back to one of the search pages, it will retain your "Newest First" request.

Newest New Orders

Some of what we have lately ordered (the links below get you all of a given author's works in our catalog, sorted by date with the most recent on top; to place a hold, first click on the title you are interested in):
       new mysteries by Philip Craig, Andrew Vachss, Jeffery Deaver (yes, a Lincoln Rhyme novel), Edna Buchanan, Lee Child, Kathy Reichs, Stuart Kaminsky, Sara Paretsky, Olen Steinhauer...

       new novels by Umberto Eco, Michael Cunningham, Melissa Bank, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, Adriana Trigiani, Linda Howard, Reynolds Price...
       new non-fiction from the Dalai Lama, Christopher Hitchens, Gerry Spence, and Kinky Friedman; and about Christopher Columbus, about wine, about the Beatles, about Atlantis, about Guantanamo...

Hidden Away : Business Information

Hidden away in the Thomson-Gale magazine databases which we (and all libraries in the state) get through the State Library is the Business and Company Resource Center. (Wait! before you click, call the library for the password to use to get into the Gale databases from home). It's much more than a magazine resource. Yes, there are full-text articles in there, from 2000 or more general and specialist periodical titles. But that's only the beginning. There are 500,000 company profiles, with investment reports, rankings, financials, industry overview, company history, etc. as available. This is professional-level business information, coming to us because financial-information giant Thomson bought Gale, the database company which serves the library market.
       It makes interesting browsing. If you choose Advanced Search, then Company Profiles, and ask it for New Mexico as the state/country, it comes up with 1321 profiles. I wish we had known about the Industry Overview feature when we had the library user who wanted some information about the history of tobacco.
       Call the library for the password. Then, starting from the magazine database page, choose "Gale Group", put in the password, and choose Business and Company Resource Center. Other databases can be reached from the same starting point: newspapers, health information, and several other Gale databases as well. And all available from anywhere, once you call us for the password.
       Don't forget that from inside the library you also have access to FirstSearch.

News from the Literary Community

Wahoo! A new lit magazine in town! They sent us the following invitation: "THE SANTA FE LITERARY REVIEW, the new magazine at Santa Fe Community College, will celebrate its first issue on Thursday, May 5, 5-7 pm on campus. Reading by contributors at 5:30, with dessert and coffee. Poetry and short fiction by credit students, non-traditional students, staff, faculty, and the extended community. Join us in the atrium, downstairs in the west wing."

Digital Books Redux

A while ago we posted about Project Gutenberg, the eldest of the electronic text projects on the internet. But there are certainly lots of others. We have links to electronic text sites on our Books & Literature Page, focussing on free texts. SearchEngineWatch had an article last fall which pointed to resources covering both free and fee texts. One of them counts 100,000 digitized texts out there--and the Million Book Project and Google have barely started their digitization projects so far...
       Some of the activity is coming from commercial publishing. A fascinating article turned up about a traditional publisher's venture into electronic books. Baen, a science fiction publisher, has been giving away some texts and making previews of other titles available very inexpensively via the Web, and has found that this practice increases their sale of printed books.
       Eee, this is all so complicated and so important for us as readers and the servants of readers; it's hard to even get near it in a short blog posting. News about yet another aspect, the intersection of ebooks and digital publishing and the print-on-demand market, can be found at It's-All-Good.
       PS. For an inside-academia look at the Google project, try Confessions of a Mad Librarian. For more about the Internet Archive and its Million Book Project, try this Slate article, and a detailed explanation from Carnegie-Mellon University, respectively.

Scribble

Scribble was the first word I looked up in Webster's Online Dictionary: The Rosetta Edition. Then I tried sanderling. The results knocked my socks off. Definitions, images, rhymes, quotes. The 'sanderling' information includes a migration map, photos, how to spell it in braille, morse code, semaphore, sign language, etc. Rosetta's not finicky about proper names, either. Extensive results for 'Sophocles', and it did a fine job on 'New Mexico'.
       We were led to this astonishing resource from Peter's Digital Reference Shelf for April.

More about Maps

A while ago we posted about Yahoo Maps having traffic reports. Now Librarian in Black points out that Google Maps has satellite photos.
       Hard to keep up, isn't it? It's almost a relief to know the service isn't perfect. If you look up the library, it points instead to the bank across the street.

Which Web Pages?

The web pages on our site which people most frequently use:

the Home Page (used three times more often than any other page)
New Mexico & Southwest Links
About Books & Literature
Southwest Reference Collection
Internet Starting Points
About the Library
New Mexico & Southwest Links (2nd half)
Library News
Gateway to Magazine Databases
Poetry and Poets of New Mexico
DVDs in the Library
Statistics and Demographic Information
Doing Local History in Santa Fe

       The big mystery is: how are users finding the Southwest Reference Collection page? The link is about three clicks down from anywhere you start, but people are finding it. From where?

Another Country Twice

In England they have something called Public Lending Right, which funnels a publicly funded royalty payment to authors, based on their library circulation. (What a cool idea.) A press release from PLR includes links to lists of their 'top lending authors'. Children's author Jacqueline Wilson is at the top of the list. Who? We do have Jacqueline Wilson in our catalog , but she sure isn't among our first couple hundred most popular authors. Thanks to Gary Price's Resource Shelf for pointing to this item.
       Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, CBC's Canada Reads event this spring gives us another 'Who?' moment. They highlighted five titles, only one of which, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, our own library already owns. We have of course heard of Leonard Cohen, but don't have his 1966 experimental novel, Beautiful Losers (yikes, what a Cohen-esque title!). The other three authors and works are unfamiliar: Rockbound, by Frank Parker Day (published in 1928); Volkswagen Blues, by Jacques Poulin (1984); No Crystal Stair, by Mairuth Sarsfield (1997).
       It makes you wonder what people are reading in Australia...

Rain Forest Program

Tuesday afternoon there will be a program for school-age children. Carolyn Newell will be presenting "Exotics of the Rain Forest". She'll bring exotic parrots, reptiles and insects that inhabit the rain forest--critters for children to see and touch. Tbe program will be at the Main Library at 1PM, and again at La Farge at 3:30 PM.
       That's Tuesday, April 12th. See you there.

Blogging Books

A lot of the library's readers are into mysteries and crime fiction. One of the most interesting crime fiction blogs is Sarah Weinman's Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. Interesting publishing gossip, great links to pertinent websites and blogs...
       For general literary gossip, The Grumpy Old Bookman is an entertaining place to go, likewise has a great set of links to take you further into the parallel reality of blogging about print. (He told us a couple of days ago that the Pulitzer prizes had been announced, complained about the lack of vigor in modern Pulitzer choices, and put down one of the titles without having read it, based solely on Amazon reviews. Huh? One of his readers promptly called him to task for that one.) (I'm happy to report that the library already has all the Pulitzer book titles except the drama choice, John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, a Parable. The winning novel, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, has been leading a lively life among the library's readers for some time.)
       Another reliable place to go for literary news is the Waterboro Public Library's ...H2Oboro lib blog, stylishly maintained by Molly Williams and full of a wide range of bookish topics.
       Let us know at library@santafenm.gov if you have some favorite literary blogs and websites.

Book Sale Reminder

Don't forget about the Friends of the Library's Spring Book Sale this weekend. Saturday and Sunday, April 9 & 10, at the Main Library.

Bestsellers?

Someone asked the other day for a website which shows bestsellers year by year. Cader Books has such a list, covering 1900-1998.
       We found this link on the Minneapolis Public Libray's Bestsellers page. In pointing to several different 'bestseller lists' they are also pointing out that there is nothing canonical about the New York Times' list. Our own "Many Holds" list, or Library Journal's weekly Books Most Borrowed in US Libraries are still other ways of approaching the topic at the core of public library service: trying to understand what people want. (And trying to give it to them.)

Harry, Too

It's not due out until July, but Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is in the library's catalog, and you can put a hold on it. Just keep in mind that you are still going to have a lo-o-o-ong wait before it arrives.

Searching TV

We found this at Redwood City Public Library's Liblog a while ago, and forgot to tell you about it. They quote a New York Times article, "Google and Yahoo Are Extending Search Ability to TV Programs" and explain, "The searching is done on text captured from the closed-captions used on many programs. Google's search will return transcripts from the show (with a still picture); Yahoo's will return 60-second clips."
       Google's (still beta version) Video search is at http://video.google.com/. Yahoo's is already a tab on their main page. I tried some of my standard searches on both services, didn't find anything to speak of; they are still both building their databases. When asked, Yahoo cheerfully provided lots of sites for the video clip of the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. But we already knew that one was out there....

It's In There

Yes, we now have copies of Rudolfo Anaya's Jemez Spring and of Ian McEwan's Saturday.
       As usual, a quick look through the most recently ordered titles yields some entertaining prospects:

• Some videos of local interest: Will Shuster's Zozobra de Santa Fe, & several Santa Fe Institute lectures--Henry Tutwiler Wright, Raising civilization; Martina Morris, Partnership networks & HIV global consequences of local decisions; Maria Zuber, The carbon cycle, climate variability, and the history of water on Mars; and Hillard Kaplan, Babies, brains & lifespans : the bioeconomics of the human life course;
• A couple of interesting sounding nonfiction titles, What Lincoln believed : the values and convictions of America's greatest president by Michael Lind, and Wilt, 1962 : the night of 100 points and the dawn of a new era by Gary M. Pomerantz; and
• Isabel Allende's new book, Zorro : the legend begins

       Zorro?

The Browsers Hitting Our Web Pages

The browsers hitting our web pages in March were of course mostly always Internet Explorer, but the growth of Firefox (and Safari) usage can be seen:

Internet Explorer Firefox Safari Netscape Mozilla Opera Konqueror Unknown	82.65% 7.89% 4.42% 2.65% 1.80% 0.48% 0.05% 0.05%

For purposes of comparison, the same numbers for March, 2004:

Internet Explorer Netscape Mozilla Safari Opera iCab Unknown

89.58% 5.13% 2.39% 2.25% 0.53% 0.08% 0.04%

      Konqueror? iCab?