December 2014

Welcome to the Ferguson Municipal Public Library, NOW with SUPER SHAKY CAM (TM). This tour will show you around the public areas of the library. A simple video introduction, and a big welcome to every single human being in the city of Ferguson, Missouri!

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture has given a thumbs down to a Duluth seed-sharing program that allows members to borrow vegetable seeds from the library in the spring and later return seeds they collect from their gardens.

State agriculture regulators say the exchange — one of about 300 in the United States — violates the state’s seed law because it does not test seeds.

That could jeopardize the popular program, which attracted 200 members who borrowed 800 packets of seeds in its first year, manager Carla Powers said.

In September, the library got a surprise visit from a Minnesota Department of Agriculture seed inspector. He informed the library it was likely violating Minnesota’s seed law, which regulates the selling of seeds.

Full article:
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/11/30/duluth-librarys-seed-sharing-program-hits-a-hurdle

Cites & Insights 15:1 (January 2015) available
https://lisnews.org/cites_insights_151_january_2015_available

When one of the bookmobiles at the Fort Vancouver Regional Library (FVRL), WA, wore out, spending a quarter of a million dollars to buy a new one was not an option. Yet patrons in remote, rural locations in Clark County still needed library service. The innovative solution was the Yacolt Library Express (YLE): a building that is open to the public nearly 70 hours a week, yet staff only spend about ten hours there during the same period.

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2014/11/opinion/one-cool-thing/the-off-site-librarian-one-cool-thing/#_

It’s a robot unlike any other: inspired by the world’s fastest land animal, controlled by video game technology and packing nifty sensors — including one used to maneuver drones, satellites and ballistic missiles.

The robot, called the cheetah, can run on batteries at speeds of more than 10 mph, jump about 16 inches high, land safely and continue galloping for at least 15 minutes — all while using less power than a microwave oven.

Full article:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/mit-engineers-have-high-hopes-for-cheetah-robot/ar-BBgbftO?ocid=ansnewsap11

Annoyed Librarian comments on the news story that the library in Ferguson was open during the protests and that it has been receiving donations.

Although it has “boring” in the title the post is a good read:
http://lj.libraryjournal.com/blogs/annoyedlibrarian/2014/12/01/a-little-boring-is-sometimes-a-good-thing/

Novelist Kent Haruf chased writing in his youth, but it wasn’t until he was 40 that he’d developed his skills enough to be published. He’s best known for National Book Award finalist “Plainsong.”

Two minute audio story at NPR:
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/02/367938648/kent-haruf-author-of-moving-colorado-set-novels-dies-at-71

As if the work of Japanese fiction master Haruki Murakami weren’t strangely beautiful by itself, his American publisher has just put out a stand-alone edition of his 2008 novella The Strange Library, in a new trade paperback designed by the legendary Chip Kidd.

“The library was even more hushed than usual,” we read in the opening sentence (the entire book is set in a typeface called, appropriately, Typewriter), calling attention to the fact that we’re in for a special event. Murakami sets his story — newly translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen — in a realm of words, an unnamed city library. An inquiring schoolboy stops by on the way home from class returns some library books (How to Build a Submarine and Memoirs of a Shepherd) and asks for reading on a subject he says has just popped into his head: Tax Collection in the Ottoman Empire.

An unfamiliar female librarian sends him down to room 107, “a creepy room” where yet another strange librarian (a bald man this time) hands him the requested volumes — then conducts him to a secret space, behind a locked door and down a hall to a labyrinth of corridors where a small man dressed in a sheepskin puts him in a cell under lock and key.

A very strange library indeed!

Full piece here:
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/02/363836249/watch-your-head-when-checking-out-murakamis-strange-library

In 1991, there were 176 certified librarians in Philadelphia public schools. This year there are 11 and only five are known to be actually doing what they were trained to do. Five librarians for the nation’s eighth-largest school district.

Leaving Philadelphia’s public school libraries without professional staffing is a grave mistake. It will have consequences for the students for the rest of their lives. Study after study shows a clear link between school libraries staffed by certified librarians and student achievement.

Read more in the Philadelphia Inquirer.