The Library Community Needs Assessment is Going on Now!

 

The LEKT Library will be running a community needs assessment this month through October to determine what your needs and expectations for the Library are and how we can better serve you. You are welcome to take the survey whether or not you use the Library. You can find the survey at this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SWRCNY2. By taking the survey, you can also enter to win one of three prizes. One first place winner will receive an Apple iPad. One second place winner will receive a $50 gift certificate to Anime Kat in Port Angeles, and one third prize winner will receive a $25 gift certificate to Odyssey Bookshop. The survey will be up from now through the end of October and the prize drawing will be November 1st. Winners will be contacted via email or phone call. 

Banned Books Week Is Coming Up!

Banned Books Week is September 18th-24th, so come join the Library all month long to celebrate the freedom to read without censorship! The Library has the following books which are among the top 10 challenged books in 2021 and 2020:

• All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson
• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
• George by Alex Gino
• Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds

Books unite us; censorship divides us. Read banned books!

Summer Is Here!

Summer here (finally!) and that means it's time for the Library's summer programming! Kids up to 18 can participate in our Summer Reading Program, which is the bingo program below. The rules are very simple. Participants choose a book which matches the themes in each box they choose to complete. Once they have completed 20 minutes of reading, that box is complete and they can move on to the next one. For each completed box, participants will get a ticket in our weekly prize drawing, to be held on Fridays. Finishing the book will earn two tickets. Parents, please confirm that your child actually did the reading. For each complete bingo (five boxes in a row, column, or diagonal), participants will be entered into the grand prize drawing, which will be held Aug. 19. Download and print a copy of the bingo sheet here, or stop by the Library to pick one up. While you're here, you can also get book recommendations for each category and pick up books to read! If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out!

Through July 8, we will also be hosting NASA @ My Library, a program of interactive activities centered around understanding our place in the universe. Participants can simulate solar and lunar eclipses and learn how they work, get a feel for the size of our solar system (it's huge!), feel what the Moon feels like, and so much more! Demonstrations will be held on demand, as well as more in-depth programs on Friday, July 1st at 1pm, and Wed, Thur, and Fri, July 6-8th, also at 1pm. Come check it out! 

Exciting Things Are Happening at the Library this Month!

Thanks to a grant from the Washington State Library and funded through the American Rescue Plan Act, we’ve been able to go on quite the shopping spree over the last few weeks. The Library has received nearly 200 books so far (with more on the way) and over 20 new DVDs including some popular movies. We’ve also been able to upgrade our library software so that you can now search our catalog from anywhere any time! This is called an Online Patron Access Catalog, also called an OPAC, and serves as a searchable database of the Library’s collection which you can access online.

Using our new Web OPAC, you can not only search our collection, but also places holds on materials you wish to check out, renew materials you already have checked out, and review materials you have checked out and what their due dates are. This is the first time in a long time our collection will be searchable from outside the Library, and we are very excited to be able to get the opportunity to provide this new service to you! To access our new website, navigate to www.15339.rmwebopac.com or to www.elwha.org/departments/elwha-library where you can find a link to the site. Please note that in order to manage your account through the Web OPAC, you will need to come in or contact us to set up an online account. As always, email Jason.morris@elwha.org or call 360-452-8471 ex. 7431 to contact us.

In addition to the new Web OPAC, we’ve also received numerous new books in the last couple of weeks. All of them are exciting new additions to the collection, but among the more exciting of them include:

·         The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nicole Hannah-Jones, a reframing of US history through the lens of the slave trade and its repercussions down through history          

·         Five Little Indians by Michelle Good (Cree), which recently won the CBC’s Canada Reads book competition

·         Life in the City of Dirty Water by Clayton Thomas-Müller (Cree), which was also shortlisted for Canada Reads

·         The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman (Oglala Lakota Sioux), “a rich education and delectable introduction to modern indigenous cuisine of the Dakota and Minnesota territories, with a vision and approach to food that travels well beyond those borders”

And so many others, too many to list here. You can find our new books and DVDs on our new website listed under New Items, and as always, you are welcome to come by for a visit to check out the new materials for yourself!

Elder Book Delivery

We are considering starting a new program at the Library which would deliver books to Tribal Elders weekly or as often as necessary. Participants in the program would select books (either through the Library’s web catalog or by contacting us directly) to be delivered to their home and books will be picked up as well when finished. We are currently assessing the feasibility of such a program and would like to hear your feedback to understand how much demand exists for the program. If this sounds like a program you would be interested in participating in, please contact Jason with any feedback you might have. You can visit us during our business hours, Mon-Fri 8am-4pm, call at 360-452-8471 extension 7431, or email jason.morris@elwha.org or jessica.egnew@elwha.org. We look forward to hearing from you!

We've Got New Books!

Thanks to a generous grant from the National Science Foundation and administered by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Library, we’ve been able to purchase a number of new books on climate change, social justice, and deep time. There are some really interesting and exciting new books, including Generation Brave: The Gen Z Kids Who Are Changing the World by Kate Alexander, The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth by Rachel Ignotofsky, The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change by Grady Klein and Yoram Bauman, The Whale Child by Keith and Chenoa Egawa (Lummi and S’Klallam), and many more. Special thanks also to Bonnie Roos, the Librarian at the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal Library, who notified me of this opportunity. I hope to see you soon to check out some of these amazing books!

Also very exciting, the Tribal Council moved us into Phase 4 of re-opening this week, which means we are one step closer to returning to normal! What this means for the Library is that we are now welcoming up to 15 patrons in the building at a time and that all of our computers are once again available for use by the public. Computers are available from 8:00am to 2:30pm.

Join the Library in Celebrating Women's History Month!

March brings Spring, St. Patrick's Day, and, of course, Women's History Month. With the Tribe's recent move into Phase 2 of reopening, we are welcoming visitors back into the Library, so come join us in celebrating Women's History! We have many books for all ages about Women's History, including books about Native women as well as women from the Olympic Peninsula and the wider Pacific Northwest. We have too many books to list here, so come in and browse our collection (a small selection of Women's History books are displayed in the Library), or contact us to learn more. 

We are also starting a new Grab Bag program where you will receive a random selection of books from our collection which can be picked up contactlessly or in the Library.  Simply contact us, indicate what type of material you would like to receive (e.g. children's, teen's, adult's) and staff will grab a selection of books from the shelves and will notify you when they are available for pickup. You can also indicate if you would like specific types of books, such as Women's History, non-fiction, fantasy, etc. 

The Library is Back Open to the Public!

The Tribe has moved into Phase 2 of reopening, and that means that the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Library is finally back open to the public for the first time in 2022! We are excited to welcome members of the commnunity back into the Library. As a reminder, we are open to the general public regardless of your affiliation with the Tribe. Thanks to the small size of our building and the requirment to maintain social distance, we are only allowing up to two patrons into the Library at a time. As a result, we recommend that if you need to come in to use the computers or browse the collection/check out materials, you should give us a call or send an email to request an appointment. Additionally, because the Library hosts the after-school program in the afternoons, we are only available for the general public from 8AM to 2PM. In other exciting news, we will be setting up self-circulation in the Library soon, which means that you will be able to check out books contactlessly. This update will also come with access to our collection via the web, meaning you will be able to search our collection place holds, and manage your library account from home. Keep an eye hear, because I will be updating this blog when the changes happen. We can't wait to see visitors back in the Library, and I hope you will come pay us a visit soon!

Hello! It's been a while since the last post here, so I figured I'd change that! My name is Jason Morris and I just started as the new Librarian here at the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Library. I recently graduated from Emporia State University with my Master of Library Science and this is my first job out of college, so I am very excited to get going and learn all about this wonderful community! My first project here at the library is to refresh and expand the collection (it hasn't been done since before covid!), so we will be seeing a wide varity of new books, DVDs, and other materials entering the collection over the next few months. Although the Library remains closed due to the Tribe's current reopening phase, the computer lab is available by appointment to those who need it. Please give me a call or send my an email if you would like to set up an appointment. Also, I will be updating this blog frequently with updates about the Library, including our reopening date when I know it, so be sure to keep and eye here for the latest updates! I look forward to meeting you when we do reopen!

Return of the First Salmon Ceremony

Yesterday was the "Return of the First Salmon" ceremony. A great many people— lots of them youth— made their way to the end of Lower Elwha Road, happily picking blackberries along the way. There was sunshine, there was blue sky, there was chanting, there were blessings. There was weaving a raft of cedar boughs, placing salmon on it, and setting it afloat towards the river mouth. There were three eagles hanging around towards the river mouth in case the singing people wanted to release another delicious floating cedar platform of food. (Sorry, eagles, wait until next year.)

We Have Cookbooks

In the library, we have cookbooks,

 

and cookbooks

 

 

Come by and check some out.

New Books!!

We have a batch of new books (and some videos). These are native-related titles which we were able to buy with a small part of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) basic grant which helps support the library every year. Although there are many donations to the library, these are the first things we have been able to buy since October of last year, and we are very excited.

Except for a new first aid book, everything we ordered this summer is native related, whether books or DVDs, children's materials or adult's. You can display all our culture titles in the online catalog, at LibraryThing.

Thank you to all the community members who have donated materials over the past year, and to IMLS for continuing to support us every year.

Drop by any time and ask to see the new items. For now they are on a separate shelf, instead of being put away among the more than 1600 other culture titles in the library. Come browse, come check some things out.

Meanwhile, Down By the Strait

The nearshore areas along the Strait and being remade as silt, sand and gravel move downstream from the former lakebeds once locked up behind the dams. Tom Roorda has given us permission to share this photo he took from the air on January 16th. A story in the Peninsula Daily News explains what we see.

National Book Award Winner

Louise Erdrich won the 2012 National Book Award for her novel, The Round House. It's really really good reading, and (beware) really really depressing. Set in Chippewa country, in 1988, it references events and characters in her earlier novel, The Plague of Doves. Likewise really really good, and really really depressing. We have both titles, and a good many of her other books, including her The Birchbark House series for middle-school readers (which some of us thought were boring, nothing like her dynamite work for adults; love to hear some other opinions on this...)

We have it in the library now.

Every Computer Occupied

On a day to day basis, what the community is interested in is the computers—right now every machine is occupied—, the DVDs, and the newspapers. We have a lot of new DVDs on their way into the collection. Once they are processed, we will have more than 700 DVDs altogether. We'll let you know when the new ones are in the catalog and ready to go.

The Peninsula Daily News gets a lot of action, and some of the papers and newsletters from other tribes.

But we also try to keep up with the books we should have on native history and Klallam cultural topics, and are absolutely thrilled to let you know that Dr. Montler's Klallam Dictionary has been published. It's beautiful, it's huge (987 pages), and it embodies decades of careful work with our elders. The book hasn't been processed for the library yet, but you are welcome to stop by any time to take a look at it.

Meanwhile, winter has come. The gulls on the roof of the tribal center don't seem very excited about it.

P.S. Louise Erdrich, Ojibwe author, has won the National Book Award for her novel, The Round House. We are working on getting a copy. Meanwhile we have a good many of her other books.

Many Many New Books Coming In

Here are a few of the new books which have come... There's another big pile on Jim's desk, so there will soon be more to show you.

Movies, Movies, Movies

We've added more than a hundred DVDs in the past couple of months. Many of them have been donated. About a dozen just came in that are native-related, with more to come.

Watch the Dam Come Down FAST

The Glines Canyon Dam progress since September 5th in 90 seconds. This very cool time lapse is built from the Dam Webcam archive. Whee.

6889 Items (!!!)

Here are some of the new books we have received recently. Some were purchased, but most donated. Thanks to everyone, community members, other libraries, and our budget, we keep growing. The collection will soon reach 7000 items. It's always worth dropping by to see what we have.

(...click for larger image)

Reminder: The online catalog, which comes through LibraryThing, is always available. You can sort materials out into 'collections' to zero in on what you are most interested in. You can now look separately at
    All Adult Books
    Adult Culture Books
    All Children's Books
    Children's Culture Books
    DVD/VHS/Audio

Anytime you go to the catalog, you can pull out one of these five separate views by clicking on the pulldown that says "All Collections" or "Your Library"

and choosing the one you want.

Purely for the pleasure of admiring them en masse, any time you have one of these lists of titles, try clicking on the "Covers" button. You end up with something wonderful, like this:

The Strong People

Here is a trailer for a video project, The Strong People: The Return of a River, The Rebirth of a People, by Matt Lowe and Heather Hoglund. They are raising money for the film through Kickstarter. Hope they are successful: it looks like it is going to be good. :-)

Wow-Beautiful New Library at Jamestown

New Library in the Oldest Community Building on the Tribal Campus

Admiring the New Space, and the Beautiful New Cabinets

New Librarian

Their hours are Monday to Friday 9AM to 5PM, and Saturdays 10-3. Their catalog is online, and their webpage serves as the gateway to their digital tribal museum project, House of Seven Generations.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

Film-maker John Gussman has posted another video clip, this one about the now-nearly-empty Lake Aldwell behind Elwha Dam; and sent a link to some photos of the Lake Mills delta behind Glines Canyon Dam.

Barnard Construction continues to lower the dam at Glines Canyon, and draw down the lake. For ongoing entertainment, keep your eye on the Dam Cams.

Donation by Missouri Libraries

We have recently received some books from the University of Central Missouri and the Missouri State Library. These books are ones that have been taken off the shelves at these libraries. When this is done the Libraries offer these books to other libraries, and this time we recieved 5 books which are all about Native Americans.

We would like to thank John Baken for his generous donation of books,and thank you to the American Indian Library Association for including us on their mailing list so we can receive information about book donations, as well as other information.

A Friend of Our Library

In the year we had the IMLS grant, we added a lot of books. But not all of them were purchased with grant funds. Very early in that process, a couple of retired librarians in Santa Fe who knew about our library shopped for children's picture books and sent them to us. In the spring of 2008, along came a box of about 50 beautiful books, almost all culture- and native-related titles. And they kept us in mind for the next couple of years. Now and again, another box would come in the mail. Everywhere they traveled they kept their eye out for books for us. Altogether they gave us 107 shiny new children's books.

At the time, they wanted the donation to be anonymous. But one of them has recently passed away. She never met us or saw our library, but she was our good friend, and we are grateful to her memory. Thank you, Mary Grathwol.

Here are the covers of the 107 books Mary and her sister donated to Lower Elwha. Click for larger image, and ask Jim if there are any of these books you would like to see. Or just come take a look at the children's culture books shelves:

Prize-Winning Children's Books

A small donation check has arrived, marked "for children's books." We try to get some of the American Indian Library Association's awards titles every year, so we ordered two from AILA's 2012 list, the picture book winner :

and the young adult winner:

 Indian Country Today has an article about these and other titles which have received awards from AILA.

Finding the River

There's a new book about the Elwha River: Finding the River
An Environmental History of the Elwha, by Jeff Crane. We'll order a copy. Except there's not exactly money for materials right now. We'll work on it, this is a book we want to have available.

[Later: yaay. The publisher sent us a copy. Jim is processing it. You can check it out in a day or two.]

Don't forget to keep your eye on the dam removal cameras at Elwha Dam and Glines Canyon Dam. Great (slow) online entertainment.

The Hits Keep on Coming

As the DVD watchers who haunt the library know very well, the collection continues to grow. Keep those donations coming, your fellow community members are grateful.

New culture titles:

New Videos:

Elwha Science Education

There's a really nice article about how the dam removals have inspired the Geoscience Education Program at Elwha.

Traditional Foods and Other Topics

We have received a number of cookbooks using traditional foods from different parts of Indian Country.

There are also a number of interesting new culture books.

You can make the catalog show you all our traditional foods books by searching the catalog for them specifically. Or take a look at all the adult culture books. Try these special searches:
    traditional foods
    adult culture books

Some examples of the new ones (click for larger image):

Land of Painted Caves

When we put in our book orders, we ordered the things people had asked us for, everything we mention along the way as going "on the wish list". The new Jean Auel book, the new Brad Meltzer. Nine titles in that fantasy series about warrior cats in the forest. Cookbooks, a whole lot of delicious cookbooks, including Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

We're now pretty well settled into the new shelves. A lot of the books moved around. Won't have new signs and new labels yet, but we can help you find things. Please come and borrow some of these new titles!!!

P.S., the new DVDs are coming ever closer, but mostly not here yet. Maybe this week, maybe.

   

Still Braggin' On the New Books

Here are the covers of the new kids' books. There are so many of them we had to capture the display in three pieces. Click for larger images.