Library news, book chat, resources, and more
The Santa Fe Book Arts Group has been developing its web page—they now include photographs of several dozen hand-made book projects on the site.
And, the New Mexico online literary journals Lunarosity, Cezanne's Carrot, and Santa Fe Poetry Broadside have all posted new issues.
Books to the ceiling,along with the question, "Isn't he the one who wrote that great book about the pig?"
Books to the sky,
My pile of books
is a mile high
How I love them!
How I need them!
I'll have a long beard
by the time I read them.
- Arnold Lobel
Well yes, apparently so. A quick keyword search in the catalog —lobel pig—pops up exactly what we want. What's the newest title we have by David McCullough? Ask the keyword search by simply entering his name. It neatly gives all his titles in the first relevance group, arranged with the most recent on top and reaching back to his 1977 title, . Isn't there a Jane Goodall book with hope in the title? goodall hope (Actually there are two.) Do we have a recording of Horowitz playing Chopin ballades. chopin ballade horowitz And so on. The machine isn't always right about what is most relevant, but it works beautifully much of the time... Try asking for what you want and see if you get it. :-)
Another reader sent us Booklist's Top 10 Graphic Novels for Youth: 2007. We have only two of them, To dance : a memoir by Siena Cherson Siegel ; and Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese. We'll order the others.
Yet another reader thought you would be interested to read about the surprising number of libraries that lend tools.
This last item didn't come from a reader but right out of the news: the technie news sources are writing that the FCC is going to take up the topic of Net Neutrality.
"Friday, March 23, over 250 people attended the Ribbon Cutting and Grand Opening Celebration. Special guests were Mayor Coss, NM First Lady Barbara Richardson, Representative Jim Trujillo, and former SF First Lady Angie Delgado plus Councilors and School Board members.
"Saturday, March 24: 1700 people attended the festivities (by door count). Southside checked out 1752 items to 451 borrrowers. (as compared to Main’s Main checked out 570 items to 206 borrowers and La Farge’s 575 items to 178 borrowers. 185 new library cards were issued at Southside."
It is a truism in the library profession that when you open a new branch, circulation rises at all branches. It will be interesting to see how the numbers develop.
When they tried to establish a flock here in New Mexico by fostering whoopers in the nests of the sandhill crane who migrate between Bosque del Apache and Grey's Lake, Montana, in the end it failed. Those whooping cranes never bred. It's looking better for the eastern flock...
We got some nice coverage of Southside Library in both the New Mexican and the Albuquerque Journal (not available online, alas) today. The New Mexican story has pictures of the ribbon-cutting, and of Santa Fe's poet laureate, Arthur Sze, reading his poem. Friday's New Mexican had an article about the architecture of the building in the Pasatiempo (also not online).We put together a web page of photos from yesterday's opening ceremony. It begins with some you saw on the blog yesterday, and moves on through the event. There were many speeches. People were very moved by our beautiful library, and each speaker thanked lots of other people for their role in helping it happen. 
Today, Saturday, there were lots of events for children: storytellers and crafts and performances and stiltwalkers and lots more. It was very Very very busy, lots of people. (As you can see, the ceilings are plenty high enough for stiltwakers.)
The full run of construction photos chronicling the construction of the library will remain available from the Southside Library page for a while, but not forever. It's already old news.
Another sound story turned up this week, this one from NASA, about the sound of Saturn rotating...
It's raining at the moment (7AM). "It's supposed to be lucky," says the Director. Hmmmm, we think that's about weddings (the Italian proverb is "Sposa bagnata, sposa fortunata" - a wet bride is a lucky bride), but we'll go ahead and assume it applies to new libraries, too. Come see us at our lucky new library, corner of Jaguar Drive and Country Club Road.
The same email also led us to a charming piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education, in praise of interlibrary loan (and physical books); an update on the challenge to graphic novels in Marshall, Missouri--the library wrote a clear policy and then returned the books to the shelves ; a followup cartoon from Carol Lay at Salon about the media-inflated controversy over this year's Newbery winner, Susan Patron's The higher power of Lucky; and, most fun (if I say 'fun' about library stuff does that make me a dweeb?), a link to OCLC's list of the Top 1000 titles, those titles which the most libraries own, which was exported over to del.icio.us, thereby becoming searchable by genre, language and time period...
As usual there is a particular glamour to the titles that were Just Added To The Database. There's more new Scandinavian fiction (The cruel stars of the night by Kjell Eriksson and The blood spilt by Åsa Larsson); new fiction by Khaled Hosseini, Susanna Moore, and Elizabeth Berg; non-fiction with beautiful covers (like Pollen : the hidden sexuality of flowers by Rob Kesseler & Madeline Harley); or long explicit titles (like Blood of the earth : the battle for the world's vanishing oil resources by Dilip Hiro or Implosion at Los Alamos : How Corruption and Cover-ups Jeopardize America's Secrets by Glenn A. Walp) ). And three hundred or so more.
"House Votes to Overturn Bush Order on Release of Presidential Papers
"After five years of bitter complaints from archivists, librarians, historians, and public advocates, the House of Representatives on Wednesday voted 333-93, to repeal Bush's controversial executive order 13233, which gave ex-presidents and their heirs authority to effectively block release of their papers indefinitely. Bush's 2001 order overturned a post-Watergate law that requires the release of presidential documents within 12 years barring those where legitimate "executive privilege" can be claimed. In testimony submitted this month to a House committee, Society of American Archivists' Steve Hensen argued that the order "seriously compromised the basic principles" of government accountability. "In the case of the records of the office of the President of the United States, it is a right that took a long time for the nation to claim fully, but just a quick stroke of the pen to destroy," he said, noting that the discussions about placement of the George W. Bush Presidential Library have brought the issue into focus....
Source: Library Journal, March 16, 2007
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6425078.html"
Other topics included news of a library in Virginia that has decided to block access to MySpace; the curious story of an Alaska police department that confiscated a laptop from someone who was using a free wireless connection in a parking lot after hours, accusing the user of 'theft of services'; and a story about the Department of Justice's use of National Secury Letters for access to library records.
Forget your allergies and come officially welcome Spring with storytime and a craft project, at Main Children's, Wednesday, March 21, 10:30 to 11:00. All ages and their adults welcome.
This week there were a lot of the latter. Since 
"The Santa Fe River is flowing today! Because of the unprecedented amount of precipitation last fall and winter, the City of Santa Fe is managing reservoir releases to the Santa Fe River at a rate of approximately 1 million gallons per day (MGD).
"Currently, the City’s Reservoirs are at 83 percent capacity and the snow melt runoff will fill the reservoirs faster than the city can treat water for the community's potable water supply. If additional rain or snow events occur, the reservoir releases may extend into the month of May and increase up to 5 MGD for a potential fishing opportunity.
"The City of Santa Fe continues to treat and utilize as much of our surface water supply for the potable water supply as is feasible.
"Water Division Director, Gary Martinez, said, 'The planned management release benefits the health of the watershed by recharging the aquifer in the vicinity of the Santa Fe River, providing for the health of the riparian zone habitat, decreasing the fire danger within the Santa Fe River corridor and maintaining flood control for the City of Santa Fe.'
"Martinez emphasized that Santa Fe is still between a drought year and an average year of precipitation [emphasis added] and the city's release of water is only because of managed storage of reservoir supplies and the accumulated rain of fall 2006. According to the U.S.D.A., Natural Resources Conservation Service, the March 1 streamflow forecast for the Santa Fe River is 76 percent of the yearly average. Conservation of water is always in season and something Santa Fe must continuously practice in preparation for any consecutive drought years."
So far, all our copiers are fossils of the old sort...
It would be good to get in the habit of checking 'print preview' (click on 'file', click on 'print preview') to see what you are getting before you send a print job either from the web and from Microsoft Word. Otherwise you may find yourself paying for pages you didn't intend, the footers on web pages or a couple of blank lines at the end of a word document.
Coincidentally, the question of New Mexico Mysteries also arose this week. If there is very much new activity, other than additional titles from established authors, we haven't learned about them. Let us know if there are things we should buy. (For example it appears that Texas author L. C. Hayden's Why Casey Had To Die is set in New Mexico. We'll order it. What else have we missed??)
The ten most frequently challenged titles were:
On Friday, March 9th, from 11 AM to 12 noon, join FAM JAM at the Main Library for a free class of music and movement. Space is limited so call 955-6783 to reserve a space for your preschooler.
The Friends of the Library's Spring Book Sale will be on April 14-15 at the Main Library. What goes in the book sale are the donated books which we don't need for the collection. As we mentioned the other day, 22% of our entire holdings--more than 70,000 items--came out of the gifts. But we don't take all the good stuff for our shelves, and there ought to be plenty of seductive items on the tables at the book sale.
NASA is bragging on some recent images captured by the Cassini spacecraft from high in its orbit around Saturn. They've also go a spectacular movie-sequence of Cassini crossing Saturn's ring plane.Meanwhile, the New Horizons spacecraft, the one which is on its way past Pluto into the outer solar system, just made its close pass by Jupiter for a gravity assist. There's a very sweet picture of the happy team of scientists celebrating the successful maneuver. New Horizons was launched on January 19, 2006, but from the scientists' point of view, the launch was not complete until this week when the Jupiter boost gave it the speed and trajectory change which puts it on track for its encounter with Pluto in 2015.
