What's Forthcoming

Authors on the Web has a list of books being released in March and April. It's way too long a list to give you a link into the catalog for each one we own. But look up the titles that catch your fancy, place a hold if you find it, and ask us to order anything you want that hasn't already shown up in the catalog.
      Thanks to mw at h2oboro lib blog for this link.

Cell Phone Drivers

Another great bit of flotsam from Resource Shelf: According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the proportion of drivers holding cell phones observed was 3% in 2000, 4% in 2002, and 5% in 2004.
      As of 2004 two states--New York and New Jersey-- plus the District of Columbia have laws banning hand-held cell phone use while driving. The NHTSA paper did not talk about local laws, and gives no indication of how many places may have made it illegal by local ordinance, as Santa Fe has done.

A Small Formal Milestone for Southside

The Bid Opening for the Southside Library project is scheduled for March 22, 2005, at 2 PM. We're still looking at a Grand Opening on July 5, 2006.

Whole Lot of Questions Going On

Part of an afternoon, some of what people were looking for:

• books about Socrates;
• the poetry of John Keats;
• books about meditation, and about yoga;
  a biography of George Washington Carver;
• an explanation of why Europe and Asia count as two continents but Oceania doesn't count at all;
• books about anger management;
• a weather forecast, to decide whether to take Interstate 70 or Interstate 80 across the plains;
• information about the blood pressure drug, Micardis;
• books for Spanish speakers on learning English;
• articles from academic journals about genetics;
• two print references to use in developing their science project;
• books on American Sign Language;
• Barbara Hambly's The Emancipator's Wife, a novel about Mary Todd Lincoln; Anam cara : a book of Celtic wisdom by John O'Donohue; Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, Toni Morrison's Jazz,
• and to cancel a hold on Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty.

      They also needed to know how to find the State Attorney General's office, how to attach their Word files to an email, how to ask the printer to print only the part they wanted, and tax forms.

It's All About Images

New York Public Library has just launched its Digital Galley, "275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library". This enormous institution has a lot of treasures, and they've decided to share. The work is still in progress, their goal is half a million digital images.
      Resource Shelf is featuring the NYPL Digital Gallery this week, and walks you through an exploration of the site. Editor Shirl Kennedy invites us to remember "the first digital images you ever saw online." Oh yes. It was July of 1994 and Comet Shoemaker-Levy was crashing into Jupiter. We had to download those pictures one-by-one ever-so-slowly by ftp through our 2400 baud modem but oh what a knockout on the screen... Memory lane: Shoemaker-Levy on its way in, already fragmented in May of 1994; and, "a necklace of impact sites", July 25, 1994.
      Belated thanks to the guys who invented Mosaic...

The Half-Blood Prince Has a Cover

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will be published on July 16th. It's been slowly on its way for a long time. You can now see its cover at the bookstore sites. It's not in the catalog yet, but will appear there in plenty of time for you to place a hold on it.

Mount Saint Helens Has a 'Small Explosive Event'

Tuesday afternoon March 8th, Mount Saint Helens had a small event at 5:25 p.m. PST. "Airplane pilot reports indicate that the resulting steam-and-ash plume reached an altitude of about 36,000 feet above sea level within a few minutes and drifted downwind to the northeast." (from the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory, with terrific photographs). The Volcano Cam page has many links leading to updates and information, including the latest Mount Saint Helens Information Statement.

The Newest New Audio Books

We have just ordered, among other goodies, the following unabridged audio books on CD:

• Lilian Jackson Braun, The Cat Who Went Bananas
• Michael Crichton, State of Fear
• Larry McMurtry, Loop Group
• Karen Quinn, The Ivy Chronicles
• Rita Mae Brown, Cat's Eyewitness
• Ed McBain, The Frumious Bandersnatch
• Laura Lippman, By a Spider's Thread
• Martin Cruz Smith, Wolves Eat Dogs

These are all 2004 and 2005 titles. I can't speak to the quality of the recordings, but as print books these are all very popular titles; and Wolves Eat Dogs was the best mystery I read last year.
      Having just been ordered, they aren't here yet. But you can place holds on them.

Deepak Chopra and Michael Moore

As mentioned below, several authors had more than one title on the list of most popular non-fiction titles last year. So we thought it might be instructive to lump all the non-fiction circulation by author, and see who the most popular authors were.

• Deepak Chopra
• Joanna Cole (she writes nonfiction series for small children)
• Michael Moore
• David Sedaris
• William Shakespeare
• Noam Chomsky
• His Holiness the Dalai Lama
• Joseph Campbell
• Seymour Simon (non-fiction books for older children)
• Wayne Dyer
• C. G. Jung
• Paul Theroux
• Stephen Ambrose
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Bill Bryson
• Al Franken

      There are several questions raised by this list. Non-Fiction is a very peculiar umbrella term. As used in our library, it means not-a-novel not-a-short-story. Novels and short stories on one side of the building, all the rest of human experience -- art, washing machine repair, humor, history, new age spirituality, horse training, everything -- on the other. Why should Shakespeare appear in the list above, instead of with all those authors of works of imagination in the fiction list? Should I have left Mozart out because he wrote music and not words? What about those children's non-fiction authors? What is this a list of, really?
      It seems likely that the most popular fiction authors here in Santa Fe differ only in detail from those elsewhere in the country. Probably Nora Roberts and Stan Berenstain rule everywhere. But does our taste in non-fiction have a Santa Fe flavor?

March 1st Drought Monitor

The graphic above, snipped from the March 1st Drought Monitor, shows the area remaining in Arizona/New Mexico which is still suffering level 3 intensity of hydrologic drought. If you watch the 12-week animation at the Drought Monitor, you can see it shrinking shrinking shrinking until in fact it covers just us. That bright red spot seems likely to disappear by the March 8 report or the March 15 report. Indications are everywhere that we have had a very wet (and usefully effective) winter. Is the drought over? Not an answerable question long-term. (Perhaps not likely.) But certainly things are better for now.
      The Weekly Snotel Snowpack and Precipitation Report, as of Monday, February 28, 2005, shows the Snow Water Equivalent for the Sangre de Cristos at 148% of average. The New Mexico Reservoir Storage Graph shows that the State reservoirs have vastly more water than last year (that's not hard!) and are filling back up (albeit slowly in the case of Heron and El Vado; Abiquiu is at 106% of average). The municipal reservoirs in Santa Fe Canyon are at 76.2% of capacity, with a daily inflow of 5.77 million gallons--and the snowpack hasn't really begun melting yet. (We are still under a Stage 2 Water Alert, three-times-a-week watering, not that you're probably having to water very often right now.)
      The March 4 Hydrologic Outlook from the National Weather Service in Albuquerque says "The first 2 months of 2005 have been the wettest start to any year on record in Albuqueruqe...Santa Fe...Farmington..." (etc.) and "Flow from streams originating in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico and feeding in to the Rio Grande should range from 110 percent to as much as 140 percent of normal." (Zowie.)

Free Wireless Points in Santa Fe?

No-o-o-o, alas, not at the library. But we have a little list. Likely there are others we don't know about, and that conditions change now and then in these various venues.

• CD Café (on Guadalupe)
• Jane's Cafe (on E. de Vargas)
• Java Joe's (on Rodeo)
• Santa Fe Baking Co. (on Cordova)
• Steepings (W. San Francisco)
• Sun Mountain Bike & Coffee (in El Centro)
• Travel Bug (on Paseo)
• Tribes Coffee House (W. San Francisco, in the breezeway)
• Zia Diner (Guadalupe Street)

      Let us know if you run across other free wireless sites, so we can add them to the list.

Potsherds Under Griffin Street

One of those speaks-a-1000-words pictures is in today's New Mexican: two potsherds resting on someone's palm. The whole story is interesting (for one thing, it tells us what they found during the excavations last fall across the parking lot that Main Library employees use behind Sweeney Convention Center), but just those two decorated bits of pot whisper, whisper about those who lived here before us, their traces lingering under our feet.

I'm Sure It's Here Somewhere

Minneapolis Public Library put together a good set of resources on memory and memory improvement. We have some of the
titles they mention--The memory prescription : Dr. Gary Small's 14-day plan to keep your brain and body young; Jean Carper's Your Miracle Brain; Richard M. Restack's Older and wiser: how to maintain peak mental ability for as long as you live--and a good many others, including the 2005 title Age-proof Your Mind, but we'll be using their page as a shopping list. Provided we can remember to check with the distributor to see which are still available. :-)
      Thanks to MPL's What's New blog for pointing to this list.

Dr. Atkins Falls Out of Fashion

At least here in Santa Fe, the vogue for the Atkins diet may be waning. All the copies of his books used to be out all the time, with people waiting in line for them. But right now you could probably walk in and find a copy to check out of any of the fifteen Atkins titles in the catalog.

Morris the Elephant (Story Time)

Among the books they read in Story Time this week were a bear story (Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin, Jr., with the wonderful Eric Carle illustrations), and three elephant stories: David McKee's Hide-and-seek Elmer, Patricia's Thomas' "Stand back," said the elephant, "I'm going to sneeze!" (hmmm, a story whose whole plot may be in the title), and David McPhail's Where Can an Elephant Hide? (the summary in the catalog says, "The jungle animals help Morris the elephant conceal himself from approaching hunters.")
      Pre-School Story Time at La Farge happens on Tuesday mornings, and runs two groups simultaneously: 2- and 3-year olds meet from 10:15 to 10:45 AM; and 4-5-and-6-year-olds from 10:15 to 11:00 AM. It runs in six week cycles. Call the children's department at La Farge to register, at 955-4863.

Searching the Government

There's an interesting article at llrx.com (itself an interesting site: "Legal and Technology Articles and Resources for Librarians...") about searching for government documents. The article, "Why Google Uncle Sam?" by Peggy Garvin, discusses various search strategies and concludes that FirstGov.gov is a better place to start than the other search engines that offer government document access, but not by a lot; and that, as always, "When searching the federal government niche, follow the same recommended practice as in general searching: use more than one search engine."
      The site analogous to FirstGov.gov for New Mexico government information is FindIt New Mexico. We have collected some other useful government links on our Government Information page.

Pictures of Ravens

Another reference question: someone was looking for a particular photograph of ravens she had seen in a National Geographic article about five years ago. According to Geographic's index there was an article about ravens in the right time frame; but when the magazine was fetched up from the basement, none of the pictures looked right. No other articles mentioning ravens (in the index) were listed as published in the right time frame.
      So we tried Google Images and Yahoo Images (as of just lately Yahoo's images database is a lot bigger than Google's). Still nothing that worked.
      Next we tried the area of the stacks where the bird books are. In the end she checked out Bernd Heinrich's Mind of the Raven: investigations and adventures with wolf-birds--not a glossy picture book, but with photos selected to clearly show raven behaviors.
      Readers know Heinrich mainly for his books about his work with ravens, but my personal favorite is his last year's book, Winter World : the Ingenuity of Animal Survival, a riveting description of how a working scientist goes about solving a deep mystery: that teeny tiny creatures--kinglets, bees, the smallest ground squirrels--can survive sub-zero Maine winters.

SF Reporter Does Blogs

The cover story on this week's Santa Fe Reporter, just out this morning, is "Trolling the Blogosphere". The whole story is online (which is not always the case), including links to local bloggers. (Still no other local libraries or librarians in sight.)

Reference Librarian's Lament

Finally found the answer, and can't find the person who asked! The question: "When will Cormac McCarthy have a new book coming out? It's been a really long time." The answer: No Country for Old Men comes out in July. No, it's not in the database yet, so you can't put a hold on it. We'll let you all know here when it gets ordered, so that you can start lining up for it.

Stately, Plump Buck Mulligan

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan" is the opening phrase of James Joyce's Ulysses. Project Gutenberg, which has been offering copyright-free full-text books online for free since 1971, reports that this week their etext of Ulysses was downloaded 1011 times, and was their fourth most popular book. See Project Gutenberg's Top 100 page for this week's list.
      It's not all that easy to read an entire (very long) novel on a PC screen, but it's out there, it's free, and Project Gutenberg's one-long-text-file format makes a wonderful way to hunt for a quote you remember and can't pin down! They have a total of 13,000 titles available at the moment, all prepared for online accessibility by volunteers over the past more than 30 years. Try the Project Gutenberg catalog to see what they have.
      Thanks to Waterboro Public Library's blog for pointing out the Top 100 list.