Southside Library News

Ground-breaking for the Southside Library is scheduled for Wednesday, September 14th at 9:30 AM.
       The Southside Library web page has been updated with lots of information about the contractor, the groundbreaking, funding, etc. But here is what you really want to know:
The new branch is slated to open in September of 2006!!

Gift Book Meditations

How is it possible that we no longer have any copies of Larry Niven's Lucifer's Hammer? Luckily, here is a donated copy. It's a paperback and a little worn, but we need it. What about C. Wright Mills' 1956 classic, The Power Elite? Boy, the chapter titles sure still seem pertinent. But if we put it in the collection, would anyone check it out?
       Here is Social Contract, a paperback containing writings by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau. Are all these pieces in other books we own, or should this go in the collection? Here is a reproduction edition of Randolph B. Marcy's 1859 The Prairie Traveller : A Hand-Book for Overland Expeditions. We have the original in the reference cases in the Southwest Room. Would anyone want to actually check this one out?
       Patrick J. Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong; David Biro, One Hundred Days : My Unexpected Journey from Doctor to Patient; Paul Bowles, A Distant Episode : The Selected Stories; Henry Petroski, Small Things Considered : Why There Is No Perfect Design (what? a Petroski title we don't own?); Lillian Too, Essential Feng Shui. ? ? ? ? ? Yes yes yes yes yes. We can't give you links to these in the catalog yet, because we've only just sent them down to be processed. But they will be in the catalog soon.
       So far this month we have added 785 donated items to our collection. The ones we get very excited about are the added copies of the books with the most holds on them, since it speeds up the waiting list and makes more people happier sooner. Donate one of those and it will get into the collection so fast the keyboard will practically be smoking. But in addition, and all the time, people are donating books that we don't have at all, and which broaden the collection. So far this month, 263 titles have been added to the catalog through the donated books. Absent the gift, we wouldn't own it. Thank you very much.

'Compelling Storytellers'

On the mystery-reader's email list, DorothyL, the members are discussing genre, compelling storytellers, and literary fiction. Once again, author and critic Lev Raphael has weighed in with lists of fine authors and titles:
       "The Historian? Literary Fiction! And Ann Patchett's thrilling and beautifully written Bel Canto. Ditto John Banville's dark, brooding Shroud. And Alan Furst's WW II books. Yes, Furst. And Francine Prose's The Blue Angel. Philip Roth's The Human Stain. P.S. by Helen Schulman. And Liz Benedict's The Practice of Deceit and on and on. These are all gripping books..."
        And later in the discussion, when someone asked what contemporary authors are compelling storytellers, he offered Ken Follett, Laurie Colwin, Alice Adams, Michael Cunningham, Michael Chabon, Andres Dubus III, Laurie King, Manil Suri, Barbara Kingsolver, Bret Ellis, Sue Miller, Toni Morrison, and again Alan Furst, Philip Roth, and Francine Prose.
       We'll have to order P. S. by Helen Schulman, but we have the rest of the titles mentioned, and at least some works by each of the authors.

For Science Freaks

The staff science groupie reports that in this week's news were stories about the rate of spin of the Earth's core, triggered by an article in the August 27th issue of Science Magazine. They haven't put the article in the free content on their website, but we do have a paper subscription, and the full text will eventually turn up in the Gale/Infotrac magazine databases. Call the library at 955-6781 for the password.
       In another piece of science news, NASA celebrated the 2nd anniversary of the infra-red Spitzer Space Telescope with the release of an image of galaxy NGC 4725. The press release contains an informative caption; but mainly, the image is really pretty.
       Lastly, it can be rewarding to keep your eye on the page which tracks Antarctic icebergs. The most recent image (August 26) is very clear. (Not always the case. It's winter there, and often there's heavy cloud cover.)

Books on the Move

One of our readers sent us an item from Yahoo news about book vending machines in Paris. He thinks we need one of them on the Plaza... Just love that picture of a commuter running past the machine! A few months ago there was a story about the same kind of thing on the London underground, selling single short stories for one pound each. It's not clear whether the plan ever came to fruition.
       But there are already libraries out there with kiosks in transit stations. The Miami-Dade Public Library system has (or perhaps had; its website won't come up) a small full-service kiosk in the Metrorail Civic Center Station. Lake Forest Public Library gives books away at four transit locations. The stickers on the books read "Take this, read it, pass it on. Compliments of the Friends of the Lake Forest Library." Isn't that terrific?

This and That

Julia Goldberg's blog-- Julia is editor of the Santa Fe Reporter--points out a terrific piece (ignore the awful illustration) by Richard Rodriquez about his continuing expectation of the melting of ethnic lines, what he calls Hawaiianization. We have several of his books in the collection, addressing the same themes.
       Some while ago Yahoo! announced a beta test of a feature called Yahoo! Mindset, which allows you to set a slider on your search results according to whether you're interested in research or shopping. It doesn't seem to clarify the results wonderfully for the kinds of things we've searched for, but it's certainly a useful direction for the search engine developers to move in... Yahoo! is also developing a service that incorporates subscription content into search results. Searchenginewatch explains something about it and how it works.

Pencils, We Need Pencils

If you're cleaning out your desks, we could use your stray bits of pens and pencils... Just bring them to the reference desk at the Main Library, and we will shower you with gratitude.

When It Changed

Recently we have received a new book by Charles C. Mann, 1491 : new revelations of the Americas before Columbus. This is only one of a number of books approaching North American history from the point of view of what was here--and who was here--as the Europeans arrived and spread across the continent. Mann seems to have little to say about the Plains Indians, but another book set further west and later in time certainly remedies that omission: One vast winter count : the Native American West before Lewis and Clark, by Colin G. Calloway. We haven't nibbled on 1491 yet, but can testify that One Vast Winter Count is readable and fascinating.
       An entertaining and curious glimpse of first contact on the east coast is Creatures of Empire : how domestic animals transformed early America by Virginia DeJohn Anderson. Or a different sort of first contact story, Lewis and Clark among the grizzlies : legend and legacy in the American West by Paul Schullery.
       Another thread is books about Native Americans and the National Park lands. A couple of examples are Restoring a presence : American Indians and Yellowstone National Park by Peter Nabokov and Lawrence Loendorf; Indian country, God's country : Native Americans and the national parks by Philip Burnham; and the rather stuffy-looking Inhabited wilderness : Indians, Eskimos, and national parks in Alaska by Theodore Catton.
       We could go on indefinitely, wandering from one of these books to lists of others by clicking on their subject headings. But this might be enough to get you started.

Prescribed Burns in the Watershed

Dolores Maese of the Santa Fe National Forest wants to get the word out that they will be conducting "burns in the SF watershed from August 29th through December, as weather allows and resources are available. We would like to give the community a 'heads-up' in advance of the burn, followed by subsequent reminders. This gives smoke-sensitive people an opportunity to plan accordingly."
       The press release reads in part: "Approximately 2,000 acres will be treated ... between August 29th and the end of October. From October through December fire managers will treat an additional 700 acres of piles... Smoke from these burn projects will be visible from the city of Santa Fe and surrounding areas.
       "The Santa Fe Watershed Project was designed to reduce dense small-diameter tree stands within a 7,270 acre area in the watershed that pose a wildfire threat to both the watershed and the city of Santa Fe. The watershed is one of the main sources of water for the city Santa Fe, providing 40 percent of the City's water. Since 2002 when the project began, 4,648 acres have been thinned, and 1,848 acres of piles have been burned successfully. Approximately 1,000 acres will be thinned in 2006, to be followed with additional prescribed burning."
       There's a description of the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed Project at Community Responses to Wildland Fire Threats in New Mexico, a case study performed by North Carolina State University at the request of the Santa Fe National Forest.
       The photos below are a reminder of why this kind of work needs to be done. They are of the Trampas Fire in the Pecos Wilderness in 2002, taken from a hotshot team's website that summer. The photo above is from the same site, showing the amount of fuel available in the overgrown forest.

Holiday Closings

'Tis the season.

Monday, September 5th

The Libraries will be closed for Labor Day

September 8-9-10-11

Fiesta Hours

• Thursday, September 8th, Main Library will close an hour early, at 8 PM.
  
• Friday, September 9th, Main and La Farge will close at 1 PM, the Bookstop will not be open.
  
• Saturday, September 10th, Main Library closed; La Farge open 10 AM - 6 PM, Bookstop open noon-6PM
  
• Sunday, September 11th, Main Library closed; Bookstop open noon-6PM
  

The library's full schedule of holiday closings is available from the About the Library page.

Material Culture

A surprising proportion (maybe even half) of the people who come to the desk don't wear watches. When they want to sign up for internet time and we tell them what the next available time slot is, they whip out their cell phone (or it's already in their hand, more likely) to see what time it is. Or they ask us, or look wildly around for a clock.
       It turns out that wrist watches haven't been around all that long : Patek Phillippe made the first one in 1868. Pocket watches have been around since 1524, but wearing the personal timepiece strapped to one's body was perhaps a custom that lasted only 150 years...

025.431 : The Dewey Blog

Since our library is organized by the Dewey Decimal Classification, we thought you might be entertained by 025.431: The Dewey Blog, maintained by Jonathan Furner, assistant editor of the DDC. Mr. Furner's discursive and cheerful approach to what everyone thinks of as an intractibly dry subject--classification--might give a little window of insight into how the numbers get chosen, and what makes book A shelve next to book B instead of three aisles over... (Although practically speaking what you want to see are the actual numbers laid out: the 10 Classes and the 100 Divisions, and the 1000 sections. Or straight from the source as a PDF file.)
       A number of other scientists and thinkers from OCLC, the bibliographic network we belong to, also are blogging. It's like eavesdropping telepathically on the net gods, as they post about what they are thinking about. Lorcan Dempsey, VP of Research for OCLC, posted to his weblog ("On libraries, services and networks") last week with the news that Flickr is working on an algorithm for ranking by "interestingness"; talked about classics as "complex works with many derivatives" in discussing the Hollywood meets Bollywood film Bride and Prejudice; mentioned that the OCLC database had reached a billion holdings--you weren't wondering why we say that Interlibrary Loan rarely fails, were you?--, about the term "memory institution" as an umbrella term for libraries, archives and museums, about library logistics and resource sharing... his posts most often are not only relevant to libraries but also helpful for thinking in wider ways about this networked world in which we live.
       His colleague Thom Hickey (OCLC Chief Scientist) frequently posts about technical standards and other topics that might seem fairly abstruse, but he also posted about the billionth holding --well, they all did :-)-- and it was he who wrote about all the things delivered to his door and to the houses on his block, and what that might mean for libraries. I'm still thinking about that one five months later.
       Other OCLC bloggers include the three folks who do It's All Good (Alice Sneary, Alane Wilson & George Needham), and Stu Weibel, Senior Reseach Scientist at OCLC. Obviously, you needn't care at all about the network from which we borrow books, and pull down the catalog records which are most of the time what you see when you look in our catalog. But it is somewhere between entertaining and deeply reassuring that as they go about the massive technical task of integrating and making accessible the one billion holdings of 53,548 (or so) libraries, they make time to think about what we are all doing together.

Click on the Cover Image

In the catalog, more and more people are finding the additional information available by clicking on the cover image or the "More about this Title" button.
       Need to know whether Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is going to explain continental drift to you? Look it up in the catalog, hit the cover or the "More" button, then click on Table of Contents. Hmmm, doesn't look like it. Trying to sort out the order of titles in Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series? Get any one of the titles on the screen. Go to More information, then Title Profile. At the bottom of the title profile is a link to the series list. Is Donna Andrews the author who writes mysteries about an artificial intelligence personality? What did reviewers think of... well, you get the picture. Tons of additional information might be right there in the catalog under the cover image or the 'More about this title' button.
       Last month people accessed the Summaries 1424 times, large cover images 345 times, Publishers Weekly reviews 343 times. Sometimes there are also First Chapters, but only 136 people made use of them in July. Explore these resources. They are really useful.
       If you have a popup blocker, you will need to tell the browser to allow windows popped up by syndetics.com

Spirit and Opportunity

Mars is about as close to earth as it gets this month, and astronomical sources are suggesting that we go outside and look.
       But two spacecraft have been rolling around on Mars taking a much closer look for the past year and a half. The Mars Exploration Rover Mission was launched from earth on two separate vehicles on June 15 and July 7, 2003. Spirit and Opportunity landed on January 3 and January 24, 2004, and were expected to have a working life of about 90 sols, or Martian days (about 39.5 minutes longer than ours). Instead, each heroic little vehicle is continuing to do science on the surface of Mars. Spirit has been working for 561 sols and is climbing day by day--sol by sol--to the summit of a formation called the Columbia Hills, sampling rocks and making observations as it goes. Opportunity is on sol 548 and is rolling across the Plains of Meridiani en route to Erebus Crater.
       We have a very interesting new book, Roving Mars : spirit, opportunity, and the exploration of the red planet, by Steve Squyres. Squyres is the principal scientific investigator behind the Mars Rover mission, and a lively writer. He details the complicated science involved in designing and operating the two Rover machines, and chronicles the first several months of discoveries made and technical problems surmounted--all done from an ever-changing distance of anywhere from 36 million miles to 250 million miles as Mars and Earth go 'round in their orbits.
       Meanwhile, Cassini continues to orbit Saturn. Since it settled into orbit on July 1, 2004, it has been working its way through a series of flybys of many of Saturn's moons, the next being another approach to Titan on August 22.
       NASA has a handy page detailing all its current missions. Have we mentioned lately what a boon the web is for science freaks? Unlike entertainment, science is a realm where the practitioners are happy to give their work away.

Update on Google Print

Last week's news reported that Google has temporarily suspended its project of scanning library materials still in copyright, while sorting out copyright issues with the publishing industry. The best headline is from Confessions of a Mad Librarian. Google Blinks, she says. But in truth, we could find nothing to read on this subject which doesn't have its authors' assumptions and prejudices built in. So we will just give you some links and let you filter them for opinion yourselves...
    News stories:
San Jose Mercury News
Washington Post
Business Week
The Book Standard
    Opinion:
Tim O'Reilly
Red Herring
Librarian.net
A Copyfighter's Musings

Official Invitation!!

We would like to extend an invitation to attend the Groundbreaking Ceremony for the Southside Library which will be held on Wednesday, September 14 at 9:30 a.m. at the corner of Jaguar Drive and Country Club Road.
(Map)
       School children will join with New Mexico First Lady Barbara Richardson and Santa Fe First Lady Angie Delgado, Honorary Chairs, to start the festivities.
       Music and refreshments will be provided!

'Before' Pictures

Ground-breaking for the Southside Library is scheduled for Wednesday, September 14th at 9:30 AM.

!!!

So we went out to the site and took some 'Before' pictures. This tree is the reference desk.


Lots more pictures on the Before Page. More details on the Ground Breaking Festivities will appear here later today, as soon as the dignitaries and schoolkids and boxes of shovels are lined up.

The Books in Sunday's Paper

We already have two of the four titles on the book page of the August 14th New Mexican.
       The two we have are Shockwave : Countdown to Hiroshima, by Stephen Walker, which is still in processing; and Long Time Gone, by J. A. Jance, which already has a lot people waiting for it. You can place holds on both of these.
       The two we don't have (yet) are Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa; and Rider of the Pale Horse: A Memoir of Los Alamos and Beyond, by McAllister H. Hull & Amy Bianco. These are both titles we should have, and we will try to order them.
       (By the way, that title about modern slavery which we mentioned ordering some while ago, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, by Kevin Bales, has come in, and is being processed.)(We get as antsy as our patrons to get the books people are waiting for from the publishers...)
       About placing holds: if you have multiple holds you want to place, first go to "View Your Record" and log in. Then click on "Search the Catalog". Starting this way, you will not keep having to re-enter your information for each book. It's in there until you hit the LOG OUT button. (Do please remember to log out.)
       PS. J. A. Jance will be signing at Garcia Street Books this afternoon at 4 PM.

Book Sales and Other Events

Put these events on your calendar!!!

• The next Friends of the Library Book Sale will be at the Main Library September 17th and 18th.
• 5th Annual Book Arts Group book exhibit, presented by Santa Fe Book Arts Group & Santa Fe Public Library. The show will exhibit hand-crafted artist's books created by artists from Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico. Main Library on Oct. 21st and 22nd.
• The Friends' Bargain book sale will be at La Farge November 19th & 20th.
• The Holiday Book Sale will be December 3rd at Main.

Check the library news page for event news. And stay tuned: we're about to be able to announce the date of the groundbreaking ceremony for the South Side library.

Under The Sea (Homage to Orca-Live...)

On an island in Johnstone Strait off northern Vancouver Island (map) there is a research station called OrcaLab, dedicated to non-intrusive, shore-based observation of killer whales (orcas) and other marine mammals. In the summer and fall they 'present a continuous webcast of streaming audio from OrcaLab's hydrophone network, and video from numerous underwater and surface cameras.'
       In season, I think of little else but the hope of listening to orcas at ORCA-LIVE: hanging around by the hour on the community page, watching the live feed (usually the kelp forest, sometimes a sunset, and surface views of the orcas if they happen to be there), posting messages and reading the postings from the other viewer/listeners, and waiting waiting waiting for the hydrophones to pick up the orcas singing. All screeenshots below are Copyright © Orcalab http://www.orca-live.net/ for non commercial, educational use only.

       The actual size of the webcast window is about 4"x3". The Orca-Live live stream is online from July to November, 24x7, while the Northern Resident orcas are in and around Johnstone Strait. The kelp forest waves in a sunny blue sea, the scientists post updates, the orca watchers hang out together; there's the sounds of those whales far away, and sunrises, sunsets. And, yes, occasionally seeing an orca (or a humpback whale).

The people who hang out online at Orca-Live come from around the globe--Australia, Japan, England, Scotland, Netherlands, France, Germany, Belguim. Many are veteran watchers, know a lot about orcas, and care deeply about them; they send each other screen shots, help newbies figure out how to do things, identify pods by their calls and individual orcas by their dorsal fins. Like all electronic communities, they also have their own culture, worry about each other, share links, wander off topic. We keep each other company while we wait, wait, wait for the orcas to come, then bubble over with joy when they do.
       You'll need RealPlayer to view or listen to the live stream. You can do it on the public machines at the library. And no, City staff machines aren't set up for streaming media, so we are not spending our work days with our heads under the sea. I would if I could :-)

The Reporter Upgrades

The Santa Fe Reporter has upgraded its web site. More content, better search capacity. It's very handy to have their movie listings, say, or the Visual Art/Gallery Openings--as well as current feature stories and an archive--right there under your fingertips. And it's all free.
       They have the library listed under their Local Non-Profits Links, but alas they didn't list this blog among the Local Blogs.
       Going link to link from their blog list, we fetched up at The New Mexican's recent list of local blogs. We're not in that one either.
       This is really quite depressing. I guess we need to go on a PR attack to let people know librarians are bloggers too. The old image of librarians dies hard...

60th Anniversary

In the sculpture garden at Ghost Ranch in Santa Fe, the Children's Peace Statue is virtually buried in paper cranes. Strings of cranes hang from the trees, and from all the sculptures; thousands and thousands of paper cranes.
       August 6, 1945, at 9:15 AM, the bombing of Hiroshima. August 9, at 11:02 AM, the bombing of Nagasaki. 140,000 killed in Hiroshima, 100,000 killed in Nagasaki.

Cruisin' the Library Blogs

The Alexandrian Public Library (Mount Vernon, IN) posted a note a couple of weeks ago about Nora Roberts. They pointed to a USA Today story that said that Origin in Death, in the series of mysteries which she publishes as J. D. Robb, is her 159th title. It includes the yummy fact that an average of 21 of her books are sold every minute. Certainly she is now at the top of Santa Fe Public Library's most popular authors list--last year she circulated better than the Berenstain Bears.
       Hennepin County Public Library (MN) posted a list of what their staff is reading, with mini-reviews. (Terrific idea. We'll see if we can extract a similar list from our own staff.) They have a really nice "Find a Good Book" page.
       Recent postings at h20boro lib blog (Waterboro, ME) include links to a profile of poet Stanley Kunitz, who just turned 100; and to the Invisible Library, a website about books that only appear in other books (including The Book of Counted Sorrows, from which Dean Koontz pretends to take his epigraphs.) Most of the postings on this blog tend to be literary, but there is the occasional gem like a link to the BLM's Historic Glass Bottle Identification & Information Website (worth visiting just for the lucious photo at the top of the web page.)
       St Joseph County (IN) Public Library's Lifeline gives us an early glimpse of some contenders for the 2006 Newbery award, and a list of current non-fiction bestsellers to use as beach reading.
       Sites & Soundbytes at Caestecker Public Library (WI) has a link to the Official M. C. Escher Website, to the Map Collections 1500-2004 page at Library of Congress, and to a lot of other really interesting websites.
       Some of the other library blogs we sometimes follow include Redwood City (CA), Thomas Ford Memorial Library (IL), Buena Park Library District (CA), Lincoln County (OR), Marin County Free Library (CA), and La Grange Park (IL). It's interesting to see what other libraries, and other library bloggers, are doing.

What People Want To Read

The titles with the most holds at the moment are:

• The mermaid chair / Sue Monk Kidd
• Eleven on top / Janet Evanovich
• Rage / Jonathan Kellerman
• Harry Potter and the half-blood prince / J. K. Rowling
• The historian / Elizabeth Kostova
• The world is flat : a brief history of the twenty-first century / Thomas L. Friedman
• Fire sale / Sara Paretsky
  
• Cross bones / Kathy Reichs
• No country for old men / Cormac McCarthy
• Blink : the power of thinking without thinking / Malcolm Gladwell
• One shot : a Jack Reacher novel / Lee Child
• With no one as witness / Elizabeth George
  
• The tipping point : how little things make a big difference / Malcolm Gladwell
• Dance of death / Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
• The Kite runner / Khaled Hosseini
• Crusader's cross / James Lee Burke

       We have a lot of copies of these titles; it's just that an awful lot of people want to read them! The full list is available on our web page.

Book Bargains at the Santa Fe Public Library

This Saturday, August 6, from 10:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m. The Friends of the Library will hold a Book Sale on the Portal at the Main Library, 145 Washington St.
       Bargains galore will greet you—-prices have been slashed! Hundreds of donated books for sale!
       Join us!

Story Time for Pre-Schoolers

Pre-School Story Time at La Farge happens on Tuesday mornings, and runs in 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. The next cycle begins on September 13, and continues to December 6. To register, call the children's department at La Farge, at 955-4863.

What's Newest?

A whole lot of new titles turned up in the database this week, mostly new and mostly on order, but including a few older titles and donations as well. Take a look at the list, and place holds on the ones you're anxious to get hold of.

Time Depth of 800 Years

Archaeology as spectator sport. Behind the soon-to-be-gone Sweeney Convention Center, the excavation has reached only to the Territorial Period and the Fort Marcy era. They've found mostly metal and glass, and the present pits are in a military parade ground dating to 1887. But they know from the exploratory trenches dug last winter that some parts of the site will take them back about 800 years. All this we overheard as one of the archaeologists stopped his digging in the hot sun to explain what's going on to two little boys. He had some dates for occupation, but we missed that part as we scrambled for a pencil to write down the entrancing phrase, 'time-depth of about 800 years.'
       There is information about the project, and Tesuque Pueblo's interest in it, in the City Council minutes from July 19. Scroll down just below halfway. You're looking for the section that begins, "Status Report on Archaeology..."

Y'All Don't Be Strangers Now

Summer Reading is over, but we hope you'll keep coming back to the library as often as you did over the summer...