The New York Public Library published a very seductive list, Children's Books 2009 - 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing. They look beautiful, and we don't have a single one of them in the collection. We put a few of them in our Amazon shopping, to think about the next time we have a little money to spend...
This is just a wish list. Let us know if there are other items we should add to it.
Cruising around twitter looking for native news...
Then they turned the blocks back on, so that's all you get...
The ice cream social was a big success on Friday, we had some new library users sign up, and a number of people mentioned that they had been curious about the library but never quite knew where we were. Several people filled out the little survey about what kind of downloadable audio books they might be interested in.
And people asked about books they wondered if we had, which is always tells us useful things. They wanted beading books, Sherman Alexie, Salish art, the Twilight books, a SpongeBob movie, and Dave Pelzer's books. We were able to say, 'Yes we have them' to all the things people mentioned, in some cases whole stacks of relevant titles. Yaay.
Re: the downloadable audio books, we will keep you posted as we find out from the State Library how it is going to work, and when it will begin.
Special bonus for blog readers: it's Monday noon (12/14) and there's a little bit of ice cream left; some syrup; some sprinkles. Not enough to offer in an all-staff email, but come on in and ask for a sundae if you read this any time soon. :-)
We have a new memoir written by Alvin Ziontz, the senior attorney for the tribes in U.S. v. Washington, the case that led to the Boldt decision in 1974. Over the course of several decades Ziontz worked on many other important legal issues affecting tribes, and he talks about this work. It makes interesting reading.
We will be having an Open House/Ice Cream Social on December 11, 2009 from 12:00 until 4:30. Please stop by to admire the expanded shelving (thank you Sequim Branch of NOLS!!) and how it has allowed us to rearrange the Library/Education Building. AND have some ice cream!!
The after-school program has a terrific new weekly newsletter, explaining the daily schedule and reporting on activities. When you are in the library ask for a copy. How can you resist news, for example, of a language lesson about the Sleeping Lady of the Mountains, mímxʷtən, and that "After hearing about the Sleeping Lady we all went outside to look at her."
There's an audio file for mímxʷtən on the Klallam Word List: Place Names. It's number 2185. (Can't figure out how to make a direct link...)
The little kids seem to really like looking things up in big dictionaries...
These pictures show a really early point in the process, where Superman goes into the phone booth and changes clothes. Like, where does he hang his suit and hat while he's doing it? Where do we put the books, and the old bookcases, while we're assembling and moving into the new ones?
But it's done, mostly, with the old bookcases moving on to their new homes and spreading the benefit of increased order in offices, at childcare, etc. We're planning to have a party when we're all done. An ice-cream social perhaps... Stay tuned.
Our linguist, Tim Montler, writes that he has "set up a Twitter site called 'Klallam Word of the Day'. I'm going to try to post a new word each day with a sound link. I've put up two so far. I don't know how long I'll keep it up, but you can have a look at it at http://twitter.com/KlallamWOTD."
We are slowly finding tribes who are twittering or getting ready to twitter: Chehalis, Kiowa, Puyallup, Quapaw, Narragansett, Pyramid Lake Paiute. Probably there are more, it's a matter of figuring out how to find them.
There's a wonderful article on Indian Country Today online, ‘It’s going to be just like Tse-whit-zen’. The story includes links to animations of the dam removal process that are really REALLY cool. (1)(2)
(Just in case we get new bookcases and start moving everything...)
The children's corner:
Middle school and high school materials:
The new Fiction (& Biography) section moved in where the GED books used to be.
The front of the main bookcase. We left the image large, click on it to read some of the book spines. Note the DVDs in the upper right corner...
A counter of the usage in social media. How fast people are posting to Facebook, Flickr, Youtube; downloading iPhone apps, texting each other in Second Life; and so on.
No, really. Go look at it.
For now, new stuff has stopped flowing in. So here is where we are:
altogether, 4542 items:
1932 total items for adults (includes DVDs & videotapes)
2610 total youth items, all ages
items for adults are about 70% culture materials
the youth items are about 21% culture materials
Don't forget, you can get a view of our collection through our online catalog at LibraryThing, and coax it to separate out, for example
All Adult Books
Adult Culture Books
All Children's Books
Children's Culture Books,
(or maybe just the DVDs).
We rearranged things, and there is now a fiction section. If you're just looking for something good to read, give the new section a whirl. Soon we may be rearranging bigtime: the public library has offered us a lot of bookcases (that came from the Sequim branch before their remodel...) We'll keep you posted.
Meanwhile, if you have books and DVDs around the house that you are finished with, the library would be happy to receive them.
Here are some of the new DVDs. More are on their way. Come borrow a few from the library.
When you look in the catalog online, clicking on the DVD tag will always get you all the DVDs. We're entering them as fast as we can.
Here is a very interesting and cheering article about restoration of streamflow to the San Joaquin River. The gradually increasing release of water will begin on October 1. There's plenty of news coverage: (1)(2)(3)
We are moving shelves of books and shelves of DVDs around, to incorporate all the new-- mostly used but new to us-- items. We'll let you know when the next bundle of DVDs is added, so you can come take a look. Meanwhile, here are some of the new books:
As usual, I mined a couple of hours of Twitter activity to come up with these links. I wonder if any tribes twitter...
Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission: Makah Students Help Survey Culturally Important Purple Olive Shells on Makah Beaches
Indian Country Today: Stimulus money will fund habitat restoration projects
Wall Street Journal: Tribal Casino Rules Revisited
Reznet: 'New Moon' Star Gives Acting Lessons at Tribal School
Looking for an online timesink? Try bomomo.com. It's part of Google's Chrome Experiments.
We've been shopping at the Clallam County Historical Society's annual garage sale. Lots of feature film videos, lots of yummy books. We'll let you know as they get added into the collection. Just for example:
One of the great pleasures of having little kids to read to, is that you get to admire the illustrations. Just now we found out (via Twitter, of course, a posting from one of the editors of School Library Journal), that Eric Carle has a blog. From the blog we discovered that he has established a Museum of Picture Book Art.
Don't for a minute think that book illustrations can't be art. What you see on the printed page is only a shadow of the original paintings or collages or drawings. We once had the opportunity to see some of Ezra Jack Keats' original paintings. They were so vibrant they practically leaped right out of the glass case.
The library has several of Eric Carle's titles, and a couple of Ezra Jack Keats's. We have in fact about 2300 children's books (not counting duplicates), many of them beautifully illustrated picture books. The culture books are in their own section. Stop by and take a look, and just ask for help if you need a little direction...
On September 16th there will be a "tsunami warning communications test along the entire west coast of the lower 48 states." This will include a test of the AHAB (All-Hazard Alert Broadcast) siren. We will NOT actually be evacuating. The National Tsunami Exercise with evacuation drill will be on 3/24/2010. But our AHAB will sound...
As the aerial photo in the previous post makes clear, we are in the tsunami zone. Here's a map. Click for larger image. (Sorry for the blurriness. It's from the Washington State Hazard Mitigation Plan, Hazard Profile - Tsunami, 2004, and we can't find a better version anywhere...)
Here we are, on the Washington Coastal Atlas. This is an amazingly cool tool, covering the entire coastline of the state. It's unfortunately a little bit hard to use. But worth the trouble of picking your way along until you are over the part of the coastline you want to see, and coax it to show you the image. From there you can click on adjacent images, see the same area in other years, and so on.
Endless entertainment: the pilot station on Ediz Hook ; Tongue Point in 2002 ; Lake Aldwell, Elwha Dam, April 2007 and another angle (2) ; Ellen Creek crossing Rialto Beach ; Jamestown in 2006 ; and on and on.
As promised, here's a look at our new DVDs:
Please keep those donations coming. A lot of people will be able to enjoy any DVDs you give to the library.
Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi. We read about this book on The Buffalo Post. It sounds like it's getting good reviews around in the mainstream press, and we don't have too much in the collection about that area. So we put it on the shopping list.
Not, of course, that there's any immediate prospect of having money to spend. But we build the wishlists anyway. Be sure to let us know your suggestions. The books and videos people ask for are the first things we get when we can order.
Last week Indian Country Today had a very positive article about the Elwha hatchery, Major successes in Steelhead Broodstock Program at Lower Elwha.
Someone has given us a dozen or so DVDs of feature films. We are adding them to the library. We'll show you their covers once they are entered in the system and can be checked out.
Most of our movie watchers have already watched everything we have, so it will be nice to be able to offer something new. If you have DVDs sitting around home that you don't watch any more, please consider donating them so they can be offered to the community.
Search-engine-blind-test compares Google, Yahoo and Bing: run a search on this site to compare results and decide which one works best for you.
Most of the new books we ordered have arrived, and a number of donated books have also been added. Look for the "New in the Library" sign.
They are not actually new, they come from used book dealers. It saves a lot of money and we can order more different titles— but sometimes they are just too too used. We got a couple of really ratty ones in this batch, and maybe should stop buying the absolutely cheapest one listed...
The Hubble Telescope's Ultra Deep Field, shown in 3-D animation.
The web is the best thing that ever happened for science geeks...
Work continues on on making digital copies of the audio tapes in the Klallam Language Program's archives. Last week someone turned over a tape labelled only on one side, to make sure there was nothing recorded on the other side of the tape. Checking... checking... A man's voice comes on. "This is August 10, 1959, and Miriam Vincent is speaking in Klallam." She speaks a word, he says the English, she speaks the word several more times. Such a treasure, preserved in silence in a file cabinet for 50 years.
