Ver-r-r-y Interesting

Google has released its zeitgeist for 2006, the most popular searches and the most popular news searches. It's always fun to see what people are thinking about, although perhaps a little discouraging to discover that a) there are number of things that the whole rest of the world is searching for that I didn't recognize, and b) our collective taste in news topics is relentlessly trivial (Paris Hilton?!?). Two of the top 10 searches are Spanish language sites. This might be telling us something about the global use of the Net...

Time-Out In Saint Francis's Town

City offices, including the libraries, will be closed today, December 20, 2006, due to inclement weather.

On the corner of the lawn at City Hall, Saint Francis and his friend the prairie dog discuss the weather. It looks like someone has dressed up the prairie dog for the season, as often they do; but all covered with snow like that it's hard to see more than the ribbon scarf...

P.S. The place names book goes on for several paragraphs about Santa Fe, and says that there is no documentation for the idea that the full name of Santa Fe is La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís. On the whole it seems that a place's name, like a family's, should be assumed to be what its people say it is...

Live Search Books

Microsoft recently dove into the books-on-the-web universe with Live Book Search. Read some of the original news stories: (1) (2) (3). They have begun with works out-of-copyright, apparently choosing to tread carefully since Google's scanning project got into so much trouble with the publishing industry; and are offering full downloads in PDF format as an alternative to reading the work online.

ResourceShelf has a detailed discussion, with some comparison to Google Book Search. The Google book search has developed considerably since we looked at it a few months ago; and as of this fall also began allowing full view of out-of-copyright works, and PDF downloads in some but not all cases. If it's got a PDF button you can download it, though it's not at all clear why, though the book is out of copyright and you are able to read or print every page, some still don't allow download.

Resource Shelf earlier pointed to a New York Times article about Google's book search and copyright woes. In anticipation of the Live launch, Forbes put together a special report on books with short articles on books, publishing, and their mutual future; and with a sidebar in which a number of writers finish the two sentences, 'To me books are...', and 'The last significant thing I read was...' Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who whose Open Content Alliance is another digitization project, was recently interviewed about Google's book scanning, and that video is kicking around the web.

The longer-established sites with full text books are still growing; unlike the big scanning projects they are mostly text-only. Better, in fact, for searching, as the texts tend to have been carefully coded and human-checked. Carnegie Library of Philadelphia has a nice list of sites. Slippery Rock University also has a seductive list of sites.

Slight Change in Holiday Hours

City offices will close at 1 PM on December 22nd and on December 29th. The Main Library will stay open until 5 PM on those days, but La Farge will close at 1 PM both days. So now the schedule for the next couple of weeks reads as follows:

Friday, December 22nd
City offices will close at 1 PM
Main Library will be open, 10 AM to 5 PM
La Farge Library will be open 10-AM to 1 PM.

Saturday, December 23rd
Main Library will be open, 10 AM to 6 PM
La Farge Library will be CLOSED.

Sunday and Monday, December 24th and 25th
Libraries will be closed in observance of Christmas

Thursday, December 28th
"Snake Conservation and Awareness"
2:00PM - 3:00 PM at the Main Library
Join us for an educational program to learn about and experience snakes
For more information call 955-6837.

Friday, December 29th
City offices will close at 1 PM
Main Library will be open, 10 AM to 5 PM
La Farge Library will be open 10-AM to 1 PM.

Saturday, December 30th
Main Library will be open, 10 AM to 6 PM
La Farge Library will be open, 10 AM to 6 PM.

Sunday and Monday, December 31st and Janaury 1st
Libraries will be closed in observance of the New Year

Telephone Notices Have Begun

As of December 18th, people who have expressed a preference for telephone notices are receiving their hold pickup notices by phone. If you've chosen this as your preference, and you did not receive a phone call about your hold, please stop by the circulation desk and let us know. Bear with us as we fine-tune this new function!

If you would like to change your notice preference, all you need to do is log in to your record, and then click on the 'Modify Your Personal Information' button. You will be able to choose mail, telephone or email for your notices.

Raisins Stuffed With Sleeping Powder

This is not very important in itself, but what the 'Net makes possible is so pleasing. Earlier this week on the Public Libraries email list, a librarian asked,

Subject: [Publib] Quails and Sleeping Pills?
Here's one. A lady here wants to find a book she read in junior high, sounds like a YA novel. All she can recollect of it is that there was an incident in the story in which a little boy fed sleeping pills to quails, and when they were asleep, collected them and took them to his father. We can find nothing.

and in about two hours, someone (gleefully) answered to the list

Subject: Re: [Publib] Quails and Sleeping Pills?
Ooh! Ooh! I think I know this one!
Try Danny, the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl. It's pheasants, and he feeds them raisins stuffed with sleeping powder. I loved it.

When we wrote to ask permission to quote this little exchange, the first librarian replied that he had received the answer by email off-list "within ten minutes or so of my putting the question out there... My response to her was that it was the right book, and the lady who wanted it was still in the building." Is that magical, or what?

And yes, we have the book.

Bosque del Apache

This is an odd year. At the beginning of the month, most of the sandhill cranes who usually winter on the Bosque del Apahe National Wildlife Refuge down below Socorro (see map) were still hanging around in fields in the San Luis Valley in Southern Colorado, feasting on a late grain crop. The numbers are slowly increasing, and the Refuge managers don't seem to be worried, but in the count posted on December 8th there were still only 7620 sandhill cranes; last year there were 12,000 by Thanksgiving. By the December 13th count another 1000 cranes had arrived, but it's more complicated than that: the website says "8600 cranes roost on the Refuge ponds and 5600 are feeding on it during the day. 3000 cranes are feeding in farm fields to the north of the Refuge."
Sandhill cranes at dawn, November 30, 2006

Reminder: Children of the Portal Art Show and Sale

Don't forget the Children of the Portal Native American Artists Show and Sale! On December 16th and 17th, the children of the Palace of the Governors Portal Program vendors will be having an arts sale in the Community Room at the Main Library. The hours are Saturday the 16th, 10AM-4PM; and Sunday the 17th, 1-4PM. The kids' parents will decorate the Community Room, and the holiday tree on the balcony. There will be storytellers in the childrens room during the event. The Library is proud to host this outreach program.

Flight Patterns

Are you going to be in the air this season? You won't be alone.

The people on the Next-Generation-Catalog-for-Libraries email list were talking about Casey Bisson having won a Mellon Award for his work on library search software. A link took us to his blog... and the previous post took us to Aaron Koblin's animation of aircraft activity based on FAA data, as posted on youtube. It's extremely nifty. Koblin's website, if you can avoid getting entranced by the entry screen, has more of his work, and a lot more about Flight Patterns.

Looking Good...

... but not ours yet. Figure two months from when we take delivery on the building to Doors Open. And we're close....

Remember the Bradford County Public Library, whose construction blog we pointed to a couple of months ago? They are making amazingly fast progress. And not that we're jealous or anything, but they are going to have a butterfly garden outside their children;s room window... Other libraries also blog their construction projects. In Harrisville, Rhode Island the new New Jesse M. Smith Memorial Library is in process. Westbank Community Library in Austin, Texas, isn't started yet (but their blog is ready to track it!); Darien Library in Darien, Connecticut just had their plans approved by the Architectural Review Board (Congratulations!); San Diego is starting a branch but we've lost their blog; and just for fun (big academic libraries are different from you and me), UC Santa Cruz is building an addition on a scale that is practically frightening.

The Season of the List...

'Best of the Year' lists are appearing hourly (well, almost). The New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2006, for example, has been online for a week and came out in print in yesterday's paper. Their list:
       Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan
       The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
       Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children
       Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land
       Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
       Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth : A Memoir
       Lawrence Wright, The looming tower : Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11
       Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower : a story of courage, community, and war
       Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma : A Natural History Of Four Meals
       Rory Stewart, The Places In Between
We'll order the Trussoni. The others are already in the system, and Santa Fe readers are already standing in line for them.

Or try the American Library Association's Notable Children's Books, 2006 and School Library Journal's Best Books 2006 ; about.com's Top 10 Books of 2006; Washington Post's Book World's 10 Best of the Year ; Slate's The Year in Books ; Publisher's Weekly's Best Books of the Year – Graphic Novels ; and on and on. Too many lists to reproduce here, and way too many for choosing cover images.

As always, if there's a title which is not already in the system that you think we should have, please make a suggestion for purchase, either online or on the familiar blue postcard. We really do get nearly everything that our users ask for. It may be slow, but it happens.

P. S. We found an audio clip of Donovan's 1967 song, "Season of the Witch", which irresistably suggested itself as soon as this post had a title.

Where Will Wheat Grow?

One of our readers sent us a link to a startling graphic showing that the wheat-growing region in North America will have moved entirely north of the US/Canadian border by 2050. The graphic is being passed around on environmental blogs. Its intermediate source appears to be a BBC story, New Crops Needed To Avoid Famines; ultimate credit goes to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, but we can't find the source story or the graphic on their website.

The Glamour Hour

Southside Library in beautiful Santa Fe light. The Field Reports tend to have a sameness about them as the contractors' crews work on finishing up and delivering the library to staff some time this month. Our director's commentary includes: "The fascia panels have been installed on the building, facing Jaguar. The staff is calling it the great concha belt in the sky. A gorgeous addition... Cisterns have been placed... Engraved donor bricks were delivered to the site on Tuesday, December 5, and will be placed as the brick walkway is laid in under north Portal on either side of the entrance..."

A second group of donor bricks will be placed in February.

Action on the Sun

Both Sky and Telescope and Spaceweather.com are telling us about a very active sunspot region, and the potential for radiation activity (and big auroral displays).

The cause is Sunspot 930, just now rotating into position so that any explosive activity will be directed toward earth instead of off to the side... The sun image above is from the National Solar Observatory on Sacramento Peak, in Sunspot, New Mexico. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) image from December 5th has a nifty scale at the bottom; yesterday's magnetogram from Kitt Peak (on right), Sacramento Peak's sister facility in Arizona, shows the size of the active area. Both images © National Solar Observatory/AURA/NSF.

December Schedule , and Change in Holiday Hours

There's been a change in our holiday plans: the Main Library will be open on Saturday, December 23rd but the La Farge Library will be closed.

This is one of the least busy days of the year for La Farge; in contrast, it is one of Main Library’s busiest days. (Both branches will be closed Sunday December 24 and Sunday December 31.)

December is going to be very full of activities, so here is a schedule reminder:

Saturday, December 9th

Nancy Bartlit - Silent Voices of World War II: When the Sons of the Land of Enchantment Met Sons of the Land of the Rising Sun

3:00 pm - 5:00 pm Main Library, Community Room

Tuesday, December 12th

Clan Tynker Troupe

Specializing in juggling, clowning, and magic

7:00 pm La Farge Branch Library

Wednesday, December 13th

Sherry Bishop - Holiday ornaments

for ages 8 to 12

3:30 - 4:30 La Farge Branch Library

Register by calling 955-4863

Wednesday, December 13th

Clan Tynker Troupe

Specializing in juggling, clowning, and magic

7:00 pm Main Library

Thursday, December 14th

Barbara Beaseley Murphy will read from her book Miguel Lost and Found in the Palace.

12 noon at the Main Library.

Joining her will be Linda Diemand, with her book-in-the-making Michael the Cowcat. She will be
showing the audience how children[s books are made.

For more information call 955-6837.

Saturday and Sunday, December 16th & 17th

Children of the Portal Native American Artists Show and Sale

On December 16th and 17th, the children of the Palace of the Governors Portal Program vendors will be having an arts sale in the Community Room at the Main Library. The hours are Saturday the 16th, 10AM-4PM; and Sunday the 17th, 1-4PM. The kids' parents will decorate the Community Room, and the holiday tree on the balcony. There will be storytellers in the childrens room during the event. The Library is proud to host this outreach program.

Saturday, December 23rd

Main Library will be open, 10 AM to 6 PM

La Farge Library will be CLOSED.

Sunday and Monday, December 24th and 25th

Libraries will be closed in observance of Christmas

Thursday, December 28th

"Snake Conservation and Awareness"

2:00PM - 3:00 PM at the Main Library

Join us for an educational program to learn about and experience snakes

For more information call 955-6837.

Sunday and Monday, December 31st and January 1st

Libraries will be closed in observance of the New Year

Pearl Harbor Bombing Anniversary

Today is the 65th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. This photo, of the USS Maryland, and several dozen additional photographs, are available from the Library of Congress's American Memory Collection. Search for United States--Hawaii--Honolulu County--Pearl Harbor and they will pop right up.

The Naval Historical Center has a page with other images. New York Times has a special section; and there's probably other material anywhere you look on the web today.

Children of the Portal Native American Artists Show and Sale

On December 16th and 17th, the children of the Palace of the Governors Portal Program vendors will be having an arts sale in the Community Room at the Main Library. The hours are Saturday the 16th, 10AM-4PM; and Sunday the 17th, 1-4PM. The kids' parents will decorate the Community Room, and the holiday tree on the balcony. There will be storytellers in the childrens room during the event. The Library is proud to host this outreach program.

There's more information about the program (and cute kid pictures) in the New Mexican's Feliz Navidad supplement.

Literary Opportunity

Santa Fe Community College's lit mag, Santa Fe Literary Review, is looking for submissions. They need poems, short fiction, creative non-fiction, and art. The magazine is open to all writers.

The deadline is Jan 15, 2006. Submit the old fashioned way, directly to

Miriam Sagan
SFCC
Santa Fe Literary Review Faculty advisor
English Dept, Liberal Arts
6401 Richards Ave.
Santa Fe, NM 87508-4887

Use an SASE and include your e-mail address. Pass the information on to your writing friends, and thanks!

Details

Southside Library. A light in the stacks; patio detail on the southeast corner; shelving in the stacks area.

We're on track for a February opening.

Large Print Lists Too...

When we posted last week about updating the What's-New and media lists, we forgot to mention that the Large Print lists are also updated. Although we acquire them much more slowly than the general collection, new large print titles have been added lately. Among the large-print editions of titles published in 2006 which have come into the collection are :
    Sara Gruen, Water for elephants ;
    W. E. B. Griffin, The saboteurs ;
    Amy Tan, Saving fish from drowning ;
    Anne Tyler, Digging to America ;
    Allan Furst, The foreign correspondent ;
    John Banville, The sea ;
and a whole lot more.