The hometown heroes, Vicki Myron and the late Dewey Readmore Books are headed for the spotlight. Kind of like Marley & Me.
Here’s the Spencer Daily Reporter’s story about the upcoming New Line film starring Meryl Streep as Vicki Myron.
November 2008
That Movie You Got From Netflix That You Haven’t Watched? It’s Really Angry.
That Movie You Got From Netflix That You Haven’t Watched? It’s Really Angry.
Video and place for commentary at NPR.
Tip of the Week: Turn Your iPhone Into an e-Book
The #5 most emailed story at the New York Times is “Tip of the Week: Turn Your iPhone Into an e-Book”.
Family Reading Night Coming Up
Illinois Secretary of State and State Librarian Jesse White is urging families in Illinois to spend time together reading on the evening of Thursday, November 20th to celebrate the Secretary of State’s annual Family Reading Night.
“This special event is a night when parents and children are encouraged to turn off the television, computers, video games and other forms of entertainment and spend time reading together,” White said. “Studies have shown that reading together makes families stronger, creates a positive learning environment, and helps children develop a love for reading that can last a lifetime.” QC Online.
“Show Me the Money” Say Mayors
Phoenix’s Mayor Phil Gordon is just one of several big city mayors who want in on the federal government’s $700 billion bailout plan. As a vital part of their city, they want a portion of the money to go to libraries.
Gordon joined the mayors of Philadelphia and Atlanta in writing a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, suggesting the cities get $50 billion for investments in infrastructure and loans, some of which would help pay pension costs.
“Let’s build those roads, those parks, those water treatment plants, those libraries, all of which are needed, all of which are scheduled,” Gordon told News/Talk 92-3 KTAR on Friday.
Library Teaches Students About the First Americans
American Indian Heritage Month was celebrated Thursday at the Coshocton (PA) Public Library with a program open to children in grades kindergarten to sixth grade.
“Around Thanksgiving it’s a good time to remember the first Thanksgiving,” said children’s librarian Diane Jones. “It’s not only an educational opportunity, but a chance for the children to have a good time and be exposed to a variety of cultures.” Children are shown in this article enjoying a Native American game of ‘who’s got the stone’.
All Those ‘No’ Votes Hurting Libraries
Here’s a post-election day scenario that is playing out in a number of cities and towns across the US; library budgets reduced or no money set aside for improvements.
From The Day (CT): “Faced with a disappointing loss at the polls last week, the Board of Trustees of the E.C. Scranton Memorial Library said they will work with town officials to develop a revised proposal for the library expansion that will meet the needs of the town. The trustees had asked town taxpayers to approve a $13 million bond issue, allowing the library to renovate and expand its landmark building at the corner of Wall Street and the Boston Post Road.
In a letter to the editor in this issue of The Source, Board of Trustees Chair Ted Mallory said, “Most of those who were opposed were concerned with taking on a major expense in the tumultuous financial times that burst upon us this fall…The referendum was defeated. The economic fears were too great and we failed to communicate or convince enough people of our reasoning.”
The measure lost by about 500 votes in Madison, CT, a relatively wealthy community.
Were there library voter issues in your community? What were the results?
Google Is Taking Questions (Spoken, via iPhone)
Pushing ahead in the decades-long effort to get computers to understand human speech, Google researchers have added sophisticated voice recognition technology to the company’s search software for the Apple iPhone.
Feleti Barstow Public Library Vandalized
The sole public library in the Territory of American Samoa, Feleti Barstown Public Library, was reportedly broken into. Radio New Zealand International relays from KKHJ’s news department the story of the incident. Few details exist as to specifics that were taken.
The Territory of American Samoa is a possession of the United States of America that is closer geographically to New Zealand than Hawaii. The public library there fulfills the function of public library and state library if it were a state. The only other significant library presence in that part of the Samoan archipelago is the academic library at American Samoa Community College.
Greenstone 2.81 Released
David Bainbridge from the Greenstone team posted a release noting that a new version of the package was released. Greenstone originates from New Zealand at the University of Waikato. Relative to the changes in the new release, Bainbridge wrote:
The main focus has been on multilingual support. Improvements include handling filenames that include non-ASCII characters, accent folding switched on by default for Lucene, and character based segmentation for CJK languages.This release also features our new installer, which is 100% open source. Previously we had relied on a commercial program for this, which incurred a significant cost in keeping up to date; consequently we decided to develop our own installer, based on the excellent open source installer toolkits already available.
There are many other significant additions in this release, such as the Fedora Librarian Interface (analogous to GLI, but working with a Fedora repository). See the release notes for the complete details.
The post gives details on downloading the release as well as daily builds.
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