May 2002

Charles Davis alerted us to
This One from the land O\’ Jessamyn on Miss Catharine McMurchy has haunted the Snohomish, WA, town library, visiting the second and third floors of its historic Carnegie section.


Employees swear they\’ve seen, felt or heard McMurchy, a librarian here from 1923 to 1939. She especially likes the loft, where children listen to stories.

Future Facing has This One by Simon Jones, who says books are space-hogging, clumsy and a pain to search through, and asks will there be a place for books in our fast, efficient society?

Charles Davis writes \”The strange crime of William Jacques has rocked the
sedate world of letters. But can greed alone explain
why this privileged young man stole, doctored and
sold hundreds of rare books from our great libraries?
Full story at
The Observer \”

Charles Davis sent over
This One that says research reveals that in only
23% do both partners read fiction, making the \’two novel household\’
rarer than the \’two car household\’. Fiction reading among those who read for pleasure is now
just 11 minutes a day, according to research released today by the
Orange Prize for Fiction. The research revealed that on average,
people spend 6 hours a week reading for pleasure which breaks down
to 11 minutes on fiction, 6 minutes a day on non-fiction, 2 minutes on
reference books, 17 minutes a day on newspapers, 5 minutes on
magazines and 7 minutes on online press and the internet. This
contrasts with time spent watching television (3.5 hours a day) and
spent listening to the radio (3 hours a day)

*. This means that nearly
half of the nation (40%)
read no books.

luis acosta writes \”Time Magazine\’s Roger Rosenblatt explains why a simple local branch public library would be the best memorial at ground zero here at Time.com \”

What he has in mind is \”a regular old local branch library, with kids bopping in, and retirees bent over newspapers, and a librarian who looks very much like Laura Bush telling a teenage girl where she can find Emma.\”

Charles Davis points to
This IHT Story on a project converting old tapes to digital recordings, since the tape on which it was originally recorded was starting to disintegrate that is being done at poetry centers around the United States.

\”Some of them already have to be cut and spliced because they are very fragile or even have breaks in them,\” Veskrna said. \”Age isn\’t the only problem. A lot of the tape stock was less than ideal to start with. Companies were experimenting with chemical formulas used to make magnetic tape, and some of those experiments were less than successful in terms of longevity. If these recordings aren\’t transferred to other formats soon, we could lose quite a lot of them forever.\”

Charles Davis writes \”More than 2,000 protesters outside the Harold Washington Library Sunday called
for pornography-filtering software on Chicago library computers. Religious and civic leaders arranged the demonstration after Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey told them such software will not be installed because it won\’t effectively prevent access to all pornography.
see
Chicago Tribune for the Story \”

Sue Ziegler passed along \”This Guest Opinioin that says in an age where seeking accurate and objective information is becoming increasingly difficult as a result of a constantly changing, commercial and impersonal environment, a librarian should be the first person to consult.