Cat Therapy Program

On Thursday, August 4, 2005, Carole Wilbourn, founding mother of cat therapy and author of several books about cats, will speak on cats' behavior, their underlying motivations, and how they communicate. It will be at 7 PM at the Main Library.

Cruisin' the Blogs About Books

Sarah Weinman at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind has an astonishing array of numbers showing where best-sellers get sold. Considering the number of authors who obsessively check their Amazon ranking, this is pretty interesting. Few people would think to check their Walmart rankings even if WalMart had rankings available to be checked... MJ Rose has a discussion of Sarah's numbers, and quotes some other authors.
       A good many authors blog about the working process. For example, Sandra Scoppetone included all interested readers in the excruciating process of creating the second book in her series about Faye Quick, a private eye in New York City during World War II. The first in the series is just out, This Dame for Hire. We have it, it's pretty good. After an additional draft and a total reconstruction (she works without an outline), she recently completed the rewrites on the followup volume in the series, Too Darn Hot, and shipped it back to her editor. Phew! (There's a long list of authors who blog in the right-hand column at Beatrice. Neil Gaiman, anyone?)
       There are a lot of blogs where readers (not necessarily librarians, reviewers, editors, authors, but 'just readers') like to talk about books, such as Nikki's World, and one I have lost (please let me know if you have the URL) where someone who has kept a reading log for the past several decades is blogging about what she's reading now and simultaneously about what she read thirty years ago this date.
       Grumpy Old Bookman is recommending Robert Littell's thriller, Legends. (We don't have it, will try to order).
       Literary Saloon points out points out that the Man-Booker Prize longlist comes out on August 10, and also that Forbes recently did a best book blogs list. These are mostly the same sites as were turning up in magazine articles months ago. Is the era of ferment in the discovery of a new medium already over?
       LitBlog Coop is still talking about Kate Atkinson's Case Histories. They've also been posting about the nominated books they did not select. One of those is Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Embroideries. It's on order.
        You could do this kind of thing all day. Or just read a book.

Spanish Market This Weekend

It's the height of the summer season. This weekend is Spanish Market, and the streets of downtown will be aswarm with natives and visitors. There's a website with lots of good information, including a schedule of events, a link to the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts, descriptions of traditional arts, and other resources.
       The city bus system, Santa Fe Trails, will have Special Event Park & Ride service both days, from Santa Fe Place (formerly Villa Linda Mall) and from DeVargas Mall. Call 955-2001 for details. There will also be special Park & Ride service for the Girls, Inc event August 6-7 ; for Indian Market August 20-21 ; for Zozobra on September 8, and for the Children's Pet Parade on September 10.
       P.S. The Main Library's parking lot is very popular, but it is just for library users. Don't risk a ticket.

Kennewick Man in the News

A patron came in Wednesday evening to find out whether Indian Country Today had written anything about new developments in the scientific study of Kennewick Man. We didn't find it in the paper newspaper, but their website has a story, posted on July 25, Study Begins on Kennewick Man.
       We have a couple of books about Kennewick Man--and he figures in any fairly current book about North American archaeology--but of course nothing in books is as current as this month's news. There's a July 19 New York Times article available from the Proquest Newspaper database. (It will ask you for a username; call the library). An editorial in Wednesday's Seattle Times pointed out that the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is holding an oversight hearing on NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), so we can assume there may be lots more political news before there is much scientific news.

Some New DVDs

Here are a few of the DVDs added to the database in the last week or so. They are on order or were recently donated. Either way, you can place holds on them, and they will be available shortly. (Reasonably up to date lists of all our DVDs, videos, books on CD and books on tape are always available in the catalog).

• Autism is a world
• The cat and the canary
• Road to Bali (includes also My Favorite Brunette)
• SOS Coast Guard (1938? Bela Lugosi? huh?)
• Undersea kingdom
• Show boat
• Betty Boop (23 Betty Boop cartoons)
• Tarzan
• El Norte = The North (in Spanish, with English subtitles)
• Joseph Campbell and the power of myth. Program 5, Love and the goddess
• In America
• Barabbas
• For Love of the Game

Southside Library Is On Its Way

Another hurdle successfully surmounted. Take a look in today's New Mexican, on page C-3. We can't say more until it goes to the full Council. But stay tuned for announcements!!

What Fun It Has Been...

Friday is the Summer Reading Party. All participants from the Talking Books Reading Club and Reading Buddies Programs are invited to attend the end of the summer party. More than 400 children participated this summer, so it could be a BIG party! There will be a Magic Show by Clan Tynker.
   10:30 AM - 11:30 AM, La Farge
   2:00 - 3:00 PM, Main

       It's probably also your last chance to see reference and circulation staff running around in their Summer Reading t-shirts. :-)

Mining ResourceShelf

ResourceShelf is one of the most fruitful sources of links to high quality websites. Some of the sites they have recently pointed out include:
   Best Places to Live 2005 from CNN/Money ;
   Failed Banks, from the FDIC, including lists of banks, historical statistics, information about unclaimed funds, etc.;
   GamesForTheBrain, games and mental exercises for grownups; some of them definitely look addictive...;
   a discussion of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) resources;
   a discussion at Peter's Digital Reference Shelf about Lonely Planet Online and Sidestep;
   a Pew Internet Report on spyware;
   Trailers of Historically Significant Films, from the University of Houston Digital History website (wow);
   a federated search tool for engineering, mathematics & computing at EEVL Xtra (detailed discussion at Resource Shelf);
   International Shark Attack File, from University of Florida; and,
   charts from the World Bank ranking the countries of the world by GDP and some other measures, including a nifty one called 'purchasing power parities';
       This list barely scrapes the surface of their recent offerings. They have an RSS feed if you want to keep up with them.

Questions, Questions

In part of an afternoon shift we had:

• a hold for Philip Roth's American Pastoral;
• Interlibrary Loan requests for a book about Federal Taxation of Debt Instruments, for Tolkien's book of essays with Beowulf in the title, and for something else I didn't scribble on my little list;
• a man who wanted to figure out what kind of business he was applying to before faxing them a resumé (only an address and fax number given in the classifieds) ;
• visitors who wanted to find material about the TB sanatorium that was once at Valmora, NM;
• a man who couldn't figure out how to do a find-and-replace with diacritics characters in Word;
• someone researching a magazine article about exploration disasters and outdoors disasters, and already had enough Everest and enough polar material (gave him Timothy Treadwell, the Burke and Wills expedition, and some Sahara books) ;
• and someone who needed the microfiche of the November 2003 issue of Harper's Magazine to copy a perfectly wonderful story by Annie Dillard, "The Two of Them". I got him set up and left him back there to make his copy. He returned with TWO COPIES so he could give one to me!

       You don't have to be on the desk to learn what people need. You might be simply walking in the stacks, and find a questioner who needs to go in three directions at once: to Children’s for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to Reference to put a hold on Potter, to the right shelf in fiction for 1984.

Good Heavens

Yesterday was the anniversary of the first moon landing, July 20, 1969. So Google gave us Google Moon.

Reading In Oz

A couple of times lately we've wished we had information about what books are in demand in the part of the English-speaking world that's on the opposite side of the globe. An email buddy in Brisbane, Australia, has passed on links to a bookstore chain in Australia & New Zealand, Dymocks, that maintains various bestseller lists; and to some bestseller lists and recommended reading lists at the Brisbane Public Library. Whitcoulls, another New Zealand chain, also has lists.
       Hmmmm. Mostly familiar stuff: Harry Potter, Kathy Reichs' Cross Bones, Janet Evanovich's Eleven on Top, Elizabeth Kostovo's The Historian, The Da Vinci Code, and so on; a couple we don't know: The CSIRO Total Well-Being Diet by Noakes and Clifton, Robin Hobbs's Shaman's Crossing...
       As we said the other day, demand for The Da Vinci Code is tapering off locally, though it's still on the NYT bestseller list as well as the lists in England and Canada. The diet book is apparently not available in this country. The Robin Hobb title won't be available here until September; we'll order a copy.

Last Night's Beautiful Lightning Storm...

...fried our network connection at the Main Library. For a while today we had no catalog, no internet, not even any printing since the printer is on the network. Finding books and information by dead reckoning (no catalog, right?) kept us busy. It was down and up and down for a few hours, but we seem to be firmly back online now (3 PM).

Recently Added Large Print Titles

These large print titles turned up in the database in the past couple of weeks. They are all new titles, published in 2005.
   Survivor in death / J.D. Robb.
   Blood memory / Greg Iles.
   Saving Cascadia / John J. Nance.
   Fleshmarket Alley : an Inspector Rebus novel / Ian Rankin.
   The family tree / by Carole Cadwalladr.
   Child of darkness / V.C. Andrews.
   Cat's eyewitness / Rita Mae Brown & Sneaky Pie Brown
   The sugar camp quilt / Jennifer Chiaverini.
   The tea house on Mulberry Street / Sharon Owens.
   Black rose / by Nora Roberts.
   A cold treachery / by Charles Todd.
   Everything she thought she wanted / by Elizabeth Buchan.

This Week It's Ghost Stories

Programs are always free. You do need to register for the craft program, so that we can prepare enough materials.

Tuesday, July 19th, 2005, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
      Weave Your Own Basket
      School Age Craft Program. Call 955-6783 to register.
      Main Library

Thursday, July 21st, 2005
      Ghost Stories with Allan Pacheco
      10:30 AM - 11:30 AM, La Farge
      2:00 PM - 3:00 PM, Main
         Allan is the author of Ghosts-murder-mayhem, a chronicle of Santa Fe : lies, legends, facts, tall tales, and useless information. We have a bunch of copies, both in the children's rooms and in the adult books.

Gift Book Meditations

Sorting through the donated books: No, the Main Library does not need another copy of Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife. It's another one of those mysterious differences between our different locations: all of the branch copies are checked out, but all of Main Library's copies are in. Yes, we do need another copy of Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven--all of Main's copies are out and most of the La Farge and Bookstop copies as well. This book has been in continuous demand for two years. Alice Bailey's Esoteric Healing, Carl Hiaasen's Skinny Dip, Alan Toogood's Container Gardening, Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Living to Tell the Tale? Yes yes yes yes.
       ...No on Roadie : a true story (at least the parts I remember) by Karl Kuenning. Despite its wonderful subtitle, it doesn't seem to be something we need. Yes (and zowie) on a dozen shiny new books published in 2005 (from whom? why? but thank you!). Yes (as usual) on half a shelf of other titles we didn't yet have in the collection. See a few of them in the image on the right. They will turn up in the database soon.
       Have we mentioned lately how grateful we are for your continuing generosity with donated books? At the moment, 22% of all the items in the collection were donated. Even more important, 13% of the titles in the collection--22,000 or so of our total of 173,000 titles--have ONLY donated copies. Absent your gifts, we wouldn't have these books and other materials available at all. Whether multiple copies of popular titles, or one single copy of something we would otherwise not have, Santa Feans are richer for the gifts you give us.

Harry's in the Building

The first dozen of our 30 copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince are ready to go. They will be available to the first 12 people with holds on Saturday morning. No-o-o-o, we librarians are not off in the corners of the bulding being the first on the block to read it. They're put away in a closet until Saturday...

Webophilia

This is another one of those non-cohesive postings that really just say, "Golly, I love the Web."
       Fans of KUNM's Sunday afternoon program "Singing Wire" may like to know that you can get Native American music 24x7 on Gathering of Nations Internet Radio ("always eclectically native"). A near-perfect sound stream, too; you can listen for hours without a hiccup in the broadcast.
       Where you came from, do people say 'pop' or 'soda' (or 'coke')? There's a very enlightening map making clear the regional nature of the usages at The Great Pop vs. Soda Controversy.
       Poetry Archives @ eMule.com has a list of the poets most frequently accessed from their database. William Blake leads the pack with 2,191,162 downloads. No, I'm not sure I believe it either. Another website with a lot of poetry and a list of poems with the most page views is plagiarist.com. (Authoritative sites like University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online don’t do popularity listings. Too bad. It would be fun to compare.)
       The website that triggered this whole train of thought was an entrancing photo of the Golden Gate Bridge under construction, from the Marin County Free Library's Golden Gate Bridge Photo Album, in their California Room Digital Archive. (We learned about this resource from their Marin County Free Library Blog...)

Early Sunday Morning...

...on the lawn at City Hall, the apricots are nearly ready.

Just pick 'em and eat 'em. If you can reach and the birds don't beat you to it...

LOTS of Programs This Week

Summer Reading is in high gear!! Programs are always free; you do need to register for the craft program, so we can prepare enough materials.

Tuesday, July 12th
     Magic Show with Jamie O'Hara
     10:30 AM - 11:30 AM, La Farge
     2:00 PM - 3:00 PM, Main

Tuesday, July 12th, 2005, 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM
     Learn Magic Tricks with Jamie O'Hara
     La Farge Branch Library

Wednesday, July 13th, 2005, 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
     Storyteller Janice Nelson
     Library Bookstop

Thursday, July 14th, 2005, 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
     Weave your own basket
     School Age Craft Program. Call 955-4863 to register.
     La Farge Library

Thursday, July 14th, 2005, 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM
     Family Night with Clan Tynker
     Main Library

PS Start looking forward to the grand finale, the Summer Reading Parties on July 29th. All participants from the Talking Books Reading Club and Reading Buddies Programs are invited.

Evan Hunter / Ed McBain, 1926-2005

Mystery writer Evan Hunter, who wrote under several names and is best known as Ed McBain, died this week. Marilyn Stasio, New York Times mystery and crime fiction reviewer, wrote a wonderful obituary in Thursday's paper. It's also available in our Proquest newspaper database. (Link takes you to the article, but it will first want a login and password. Call the library if you don't already have it.)
       Stasio credits Hunter/McBain with having invented the modern police procedural novel and, from the description, an entire lineage of TV shows as well. Excerpts:
       "Evan Hunter, the author who as Ed McBain virtually invented the American police procedural with his gritty 87th Precinct series featuring an entire detective squad as its hero, died yesterday at his home in Weston, Conn. He was 78... With the publication of Cop Hater in 1956, the first of the 87th Precinct novels, he took police fiction into a new, more realistic realm... Cop Hater laid down the formula that would define the urban police novel to this day, including the big, bad city as a character in the drama; multiple story lines; swift, cinematic exposition; brutal action scenes and searing images of ghetto violence; methodical teamwork; authentic forensic procedures; and tough, cynical yet sympathetic police officers speaking dialogue so real that it could have been soaked up in a Queens diner between squad shifts."
       We have a number of his books written as Evan Hunter, including The Blackboard Jungle (1954), which first brought him literary fame. And we have most of his many books written as Ed McBain.

Manga

The catalog calls them "graphic novels" and there aren't very many in the collection yet. More will be coming, and meanwhile you can find 100 or so in the catalog. There are also some books about drawing manga, a nonfiction story, and a video.
       Step across the generation gap and take a look at some of these graphic novels, to see what is this new type of book that is getting teens reading. Need to read about them first? Time.com has a regular column, by Andrew Arnold, reviewing graphic novels.

Harry Who?

We have 24 copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on their way. At least some of them should be available to begin filling holds exactly when we open on the the day of its release, July 16th. Place a hold soon, the list of people waiting will only get longer.
       We also have lots of copies of the first five titles. Many of them are checked out at the moment-- some people at least are warming up for #6 by re-reading the other books, especially #5. Almost all the copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix are in use.

Nice Place to Live

We've been following a blog written by a couple of newcomers to Santa Fe, called going to new mexico. They spent the holiday weekend running around the landscape, and offer two lovely posts, Tent Rocks and Off to the Caldera. Good photos.

"Here's Looking At You, Kid"

The American Film Institute has put together a list of the 100 Greatest Movie Quotes of All Time. (Six of the quotes are from Casablanca. They made the interesting choice not to limit it to one per film, but rather put in what they wanted.) Looking for a particular quote? Internet Movie Database has a quote search.
       Thanks to Molly Williams at Waterboro Lib Blog for this one.

'Top Ten Requested Items'

Right now the titles with the most holds on them are:
     The mermaid chair / Sue Monk Kidd
     Harry Potter and the half-blood prince / J. K. Rowling
     Eleven on top / Janet Evanovich
     The closers : a novel / Michael Connelly
     Broken prey / John Sandford
     Rage / Jonathan Kellerman
     The Kite runner / Khaled Hosseini
     Blink : the power of thinking without thinking / Malcolm Gladwell
     The world is flat : a brief history of the twenty-first century / Thomas L. Friedman
     With no one as witness / Elizabeth George
       By happenstance we ran into the analogous information from the Greater Victoria Public Library in British Columbia. Their list has some of the same titles as ours. But some differences, too. Collectively, Santa Feans have been done with The Da Vinci Code for a while now--still enough demand to support 30-odd copies, but no holds. (In fact, seventeen copies are on the shelf at the moment, so it's probably time to get rid of a few of them...) GVLS also has a page of links to bestseller lists that goes to English and Canadian sites as well as the New York Times. Alas, we still haven't found any sites that tell us what Australians are reading.
       A longer list of the books you're willing to wait in line for is always on our About Books and Literature page.

Musical Wind Chimes

That's Barney over there to the right, always waiting to welcome you to the La Farge children's room.
This week the summer reading program is happy to present a craft program for school-age children. Programs are all free, but for crafts you need to register (so we can have enough materials!)

Tuesday, July 5th, 2005, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Musical Wind Chimes

Main Library. Call 955-6783 to register.

Thursday, July 7th, 2005, 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

Musical Wind Chimes

La Farge Library. Call 955-4863 to register.

Smoke in the Air

'Tis the season to be careful. On Tuesday the Santa Fe National Forest announced Stage 1 campfire restrictions. Last Thursday's New Mexican had a long story about what fireworks are (sparklers, smoke bombs, cone fountains) and are not (short version: everything else) allowed this year.
       Earlier in the week, the City's Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) Specialist office sent out an email about "the smoky haze in the city and surrounding areas. The smoke is from (believe it or not) Arizona. There are currently 6 large fires in Arizona for a combined total of 164,108 acres, 13 structures lost, with over 1500 personnel battling the fires..." (the numbers have grown; the Cave Creek Fire is now at 199,368 acres. 37% contained)
       We have a small section of wildfire links on our New Mexico & Southwest pages. For the most up-to-date briefings on current fires in the southwest go to the SWCC Morning Intelligence Briefing, updated daily around 8:30 AM. Overall our drought situation remains improved (the graphic at Drought Monitor doesn't look very severe.) But the weather report in the Morning Briefing says, "...critical fire weather day from the central mountains west due to very low relative humidity... very poor relative humidity recovery overnight and high Haines index values..." That graphic is scary looking.

Holiday Weekend

All three libraries will keep their regular hours Saturday and Sunday. Main 10AM to 6 PM Saturday, 1-5 PM Sunday; La Farge 10AM to 6 PM Saturday only; Bookstop noon-6PM Saturday and Sunday. On Monday all three locations are closed for the holiday. See you on Tuesday!!
       The 2005 schedule of holiday closings is available on our web page.