July 2010

New Walnut Creek (CA) Library Houses Art & Books

“Shhh…A Portrait in 12 Volumes of Gray,” by Christian Moeller, is the centerpiece of the public art on display in Walnut Creek’s new public library, which opens on July 17.

At one entrance, shown above, visitors to the library will be greeted by internationally recognized artist Christian Moeller’s 26-foot-tall portrait of a cheeky librarian holding a finger to her lips. At another, they’ll walk under a stream of colorful glass bottles riding a metal tidal wave. And in the children’s area they won’t be able to help but notice the playful sculptures of bees, dragonflies and flowers flitting across the walls. Twelve photo images and more on the new library from Contra Costa Times.

New Jersey Library Loans a Little-Seen Painting to the Metropolitan Museum

From Arts Journal: A few days ago, the Dover Free Public Library in Morris County NJ, took ‘Emigrant Train Attacked by Indians’ by Emanuel Leutze (painter of the more famous Washington Crossing the Delaware) down from its walls, packed it, and put it in a truck destined for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It will be on loan there for five years. After that, no one is talking.

Why? Dover library director Robert Tambini told the Morris Country Daily Record that he was bothered that such an important painting, which hung in the library’s reading room, was unrecognized, unseen by enough people. It was lent to the library in 1934, and given to it in 1943 by a local family, the Derrys, in memory of Olivia Smith Derry.

Recently appraised for insurance, it was valued at $2.5 million, up from $300,000 in 1988, according to the DR. Here’s a link to the article in the Daily Record.

July 13, 2010 by birdie Legal Issues Librarians Libraries Museums

Now showing: A sense of community

Star Tribune (Minneapolis-Saint Paul): On a proverbial dark and stormy night, Sage Holben’s porch is relatively dry for her Friday moviegoers. Riley Soeffker, 13, munches on pretzels, and Ben Grim, “almost 5,” wolfs down some popcorn. Neither is distracted by the bunny-rabbit shadows that Pedro Garcia’s hands are casting on the screen or the passing cars with loud exhaust systems.

As the rain picks up, one of three young adults walking down Bates Avenue bellows, “What is it this week?”

“‘The Fantastic Mr. Fox,'” Holben responds. “One week you should stop in.”

“I might have to,” the hooded pedestrian says. “It looks kind of slick.”

Even on the driest of evenings, the creaky but sturdy L-shaped porch provides shelter from the urban storm, a refuge that Holben, a librarian at nearby Metro State University, has created in St. Paul’s rough-and-tumble Dayton’s Bluff.

Full story

[This librarian creates a place for neighborhood kids to come together and watch movies. It’s a pretty inspiring story. -AndyW]

July 12, 2010 by AndyW Libraries

Check It Out or Click It Out

It’s a brave new world where “Brave New World” is available in both digital and old-fashioned book form.

“E-books aren’t changing the library’s mission but rather influencing the ways we can deliver our mission,” said Anne Thornton, director of reference and research services at the New York Public Library, which covers the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island.

“You have to respond to what your patrons want,” noted Michael Santangelo, who oversees almost 13,000 titles available online as curator of the electronic book collection at the Brooklyn Public Library.

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” was the most popular e-book last month at the New York Public Library, while Harlequin titles like “In Bed with the Duke” and “The Innocents Surrender” were among the favorites at the Brooklyn Public Library. Most e-books are checked out in the evenings, when most brick-and-mortar libraries are closed.

The New York Public Library offers 33,000 e-books, compared with roughly 4.8 million paper books. But the nation’s largest public library and the BPL are helping write the book on the future of reading in the age of the iPad and Kindle. “I would not have thought, 10 years ago, that I would be comfortable with reading digital books,” said Thornton.

She said e-book reader technology has advanced enough to pass her test of “the three B’s” – beach, bath and bed.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/bronx/2010/07/11/2010-07-11_check_it_out_or_click_it_out_from_library.html#ixzz0tTdudYl0

July 12, 2010 by birdie EBooks Internet Libraries

Reference Librarian Enjoys His Patrons, His Books and Getting Feedback

As modern-day reference desks go, the one at the DeLand library is still more focused on books than some, and that’s OK by Sean Hurley.

He loves books and the people who read them.

Most reference librarians in the Volusia (FL) County library system spend a fair amount of time assisting people on the patron computers that sit near the reference desk, but in DeLand the two departments are on separate floors.

That doesn’t mean Hurley, 50, and the other reference librarians don’t stay busy at their upstairs desk. On any given day, the desk is a hive of activity with a steady stream of patrons looking for assistance as they navigate the tall shelves of the library’s nonfiction and reference sections.

“I love it,” Hurley says. “It’s the best job I ever had.”

Patrons who don’t ask for help are likely to get an offer of assistance from Hurley.

“I enjoy helping people,” he says. Yes, even the ones who show up at 6 p.m. researching a report due the next morning.

Sony Library Finder

Link on the Sony Reader Store. The store is where you can buy books for the Sony Reader. Interesting to see this promotion of libraries at the site.

Link: Sony Reader Store

Here is a direct link to the Library Finder.

July 10, 2010 by Bibliofuture EBooks Librarians Libraries

Turning the Page on the Page Turn

Microsoft hopes to patent the digital equivalent of a page turn, but it might not be the most efficient way to read on a digital screen.

Full article

July 10, 2010 by Bibliofuture Uncategorized

The Medium Is the Medium

Opinion piece by David Brooks

Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.

Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.

Full piece

July 9, 2010 by Bibliofuture School Libraries

Lindsay Lohan needs to spend more time in law library

Cato senior fellow Walter Olsen says about Lohan: “She needs to be more careful in her legal research — too much time in bars and not enough in law libraries”

This was in response to Lohan’s Twitter assertions that her 90 days in jail were a violation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and she also made mention of the unfair nature of federal sentencing guidelines. Both legal concepts she mentioned had no relevance to her case.

Full article in the Washington Post

Note to librarians: What is worse than information illiteracy mixed with poor online research?

Answer: Information illiteracy mixed with poor online research by Lindsay Lohan.

July 9, 2010 by Bibliofuture Internet Legal Issues Librarians Libraries

But Did He Steal It?

Remember how librarian Richard Kuhta was handed a damaged copy of one of the Bard’s First Folios for examination?

Yesterday, the man in possession of the priceless piece, Raymond Scott, 53, was found guilty of handling stolen goods and removing stolen property from the UK in relation to the book, which has been described as part of England’s ”cultural legacy”. However he was cleared of stealing the work.

The charges relate to one of the surviving copies of the 1623 compendium of Shakespeare’s plays which went missing from Durham University in 1998. It was handed in by Scott to the world-renowned Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC a decade later.

Scott was remanded in custody by Judge Richard Lowden, who told him: “There will, in due time, be an inevitable substantial custodial sentence.”

The judge adjourned the case to a date to be fixed to allow a psychiatric report to be prepared.

The jury of seven women and five men heard that Scott was arrested after presenting the badly damaged folio to staff at the US library and asking for it to be verified as genuine.