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Written on: May 26th, 2009 in Reviews
Straying a little here onto Facebook territory, but I liked the result for me: Watership Down was a favorite book of mine as a child, along with the incredibly thrilling and moving Plague Dogs.
You’re Watership Down!
Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you’re
actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their
assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they
build their houses…
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
Written on: May 23rd, 2009 in Reviews
I wasn’t planning to review any titles this week because of the holidays- presumably everyone has already selected their beach/campfire reading for the weekend and blog readership will be scant! However, I felt I should mention this one title since over the course of two days I have seen three separate and glowing reviews for it, from sources as different as Elle magazine and the New York Review of Books.
Clancy Martin’s “How to Sell” is a coming of age novel of a kind, set in the mercenary and amoral world of the high-end jewelry business. The protagonist, an appealing con-man, drops out of school at age 16 to join the family business, seduce his older brother’s girlfriend, and try to enrich himself without losing his soul. It’s quite possible that the diamond industry, with its cruelty, superficiality, and greed may be serving in this novel as some kind of broader metaphor for American society. I’m just saying, maybe.
You can read more about the novel here (you’ll need to enter your library card ID and PIN to access the NoveList database), and see other Delaware Library Catalog fiction and non-fiction books about the diamond trade here.
Written on: May 22nd, 2009 in News
If you have a long memory, you may remember this blog post from March of this year, in which it was proposed that the catalog configuration would be changed so once you log in, you will go directly to your account information, with a list of holds placed and available, books checked out, fines and fees, and other library messages. After almost uniformly positive feedback, this change will take effect in the next couple of days.
Stay tuned for an upcoming exciting announcement concerning checkout times and due dates….
Written on: May 22nd, 2009 in Reviews
Check out this fascinating story from today’s Washington Post. At this week’s Homeland Security Science and Technology Conference, sci-fi writer Greg Bear has been leading workshops and sessions bringing together science fiction writers such as Catherine Asaro with public safety and defense industry contractors to brainstorm technology development strategies. Science fiction writers have lived in the future ever since Jules Verne, and as the article suggests, the space race might have been radically different without the writings of Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein.
Also, for the twitterers amongst you, here is a list of major U.S. publishers’ twitter feeds. If you have a twitter account, you can follow these feeds for new book announcements, events and signing schedules, and juicy publisher gossip.
Written on: May 20th, 2009 in News
The Atlantic journalist Andrew Sullivan has been receiving feedback from his readers about the role of libraries in society, and published some of the most interesting ones here…
There’s a lot of convergence between the comments of Sullivan’s readership and the results of a recent nationwide library staff survey by the Colorado State Library’s Library Research Service.
Written on: May 19th, 2009 in Learning Journeys
Honoré here: In my April 27 post, I wrote about Steve Leveen's blog post on the ubiquitous 3 x 5 index card. Kathy and I are allegedly using the 21st Century version of the 3 x 5 card: Twitter.
Perhaps you've heard of Twitter and tweets – short, 140 character posts that chronicle such mundane things as what you're doing or thinking or, or, or … at any given moment in time. Twitter's hot these days – all sorts of people, including Oprah, Ellen deGeneres, President Obama, tweet. Local radio and tv news stations, newspapers, use Twitter to instantly communicate and update their readers on a certain topic or event. A quick Google search identifies different ways Twitter [and similar other social networking sites such as Yammer, Facebook ] are used. This research study from PewResearch: "Twitterpated: Mobile Americans Increasingly Take to Tweeting" gives a recent [Dec 2008] overview.
It does not surprise me that libraries of all ilk, from the Library of Congress to the smallest of rural libraries, use Twitter. The TwitterLeague lists libraries on Twitter ranked by the Twitter follower counts. Click on any of the libraries – I found that right clicking to open up a new window worked best – to see how libraries currently in the league are using Twitter. The New York Public Library uses Twitter to draw attention to the many services, programs and resources that support any individual's personal learning quest and especially to draw attention to how valuable and viable the public library is, especially in these t o u g h economic times.
To get back to the subject – why are Kathy and I tweeting? Ostensibly for an online scrapbooking class we're taking – the subject is on writing/journaling (apparently many scrapbookers experience writer's block – though that isn't our problem, we're both quite comfortable with writing and words. We're taking the class because we enjoy the facilitator, read her blog and learn a lot from her classes. ..in short, we're headed down another learning path…) I suspect that we'll add tweets to this blog ~ just as soon as we both get a little more comfortable with the medium. In the meantime, stay tuned. Tweet. Tweet.
Cheers~
Written on: May 18th, 2009 in News, Reviews
May 19th:
May 20th:
May 21st:
Dates courtesy of the excessively useful NYT “on this day” website.
Written on: May 18th, 2009 in News
This week’s installment of one of our regular features: Click on the links below to get lists of new items available from the DLC in various formats:
All New Items
New Audio Books
New Books
New DVDs
UPDATE: The new audio book listing now includes items in the very convenient Playaway format. If you aren’t familiar, Playaway books are digitally recorded versions that are packaged onto a sturdy, solid-state playback device. All you need are headphones. Thanks to the blog reader who alerted me to the fact that they weren’t listed with the other audio books!
While you’re here, take a look at some of the other recent posts in the Delaware Library Catalog blog- this week we’ve added stories about books in the news, trials for electronic resources, and how-to’s on downloadable e-audiobooks!
Written on: May 17th, 2009 in News, Reviews
Another reminder about reviews- you can write reviews for books you have checked out from the Delaware Library Catalog by clicking the “see reviews/add a review” link in any full record. It’s a two step process to set up a private account and submit reviews for publication- they’ll appear in the catalog almost immediately, and you can also publish them to your personal blog or facebook account.
Delaware Library Catalog patrons have recently reviewed Water Touching Stone, Muse of Fire , the Monkey’s Raincoat among other titles. You can read the reviews in full in the left-hand column of the page.
Written on: May 17th, 2009 in Reviews
Here are some selections from today’s New York Times book reviews, with links to the Delaware Library Catalog record so you can check availability, place holds, etc.:
Today’s reviews included a really strong review for Horse soldiers, by Doug Stanton. This is for readers who prefer red-blooded military history with a Chesty Puller, “Nuts!” flavor, although while this is a story about heroes, and far from being an analytical work, the book doesn’t avoid talking about higher-level strategy and policy failure in the Afghanistan conflict. You can read the full review here.
Not being a nautical type, I did not know that there even was a difference between flotsam and jetsam! Flotsametrics, by Curtis Ebbesmeyer summarizes four decades of the author’s research into understanding global ocean currents by tracing human garbage on the high seas.
America may have elected its first black President last year, but in 2005 an African glass ceiling was shattered with the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as president of Liberia, and as Africa’s first female president. Her biography, This Child will be Great was recently published to no little acclaim. Liberia is a traditionally very patriarchal society, still recovering from a very recent and monstrously destructive civil and regional war. That Sirleaf survived is itself remarkable- she was a member of the LIberian government during two separate coups led by two different murderous lunatics- but to live through that experience and commit to rebuilding her shattered and still precarious society is awe-inspiring.
The 20th anniversary of the June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre will be observed in a couple of weeks, and while we won’t be seeing “Prisoner of the State”, former Chinese premiere Zhao Ziyang’s account of the democracy protests in American for a while (they’ve not been translated yet), the discussion surrounding this book reminds me of the reason why freedom to read and to access information is vital to society- this book, by itself, may create a whole new understanding of a critical event in modern history and have a dramatic effect in China itself.
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