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Written on: September 4th, 2009 in Blog Posts
I had just finished reading Charles Todd’s extremely good new mystery, A Duty to the Dead, another book that I received in galley form while at the American Library Association Conference in Chicago, when I coincidentally discovered this story in publishers weekly which revealed that “Charles Todd” is actually a mother and son writing team, one of whom is a Delaware resident.
In fact, next Thursday the duo will be signing copies of the new book at the Stanton Borders bookstore, according to our very own Division of Arts’ excellent cultural events calendar, DelawareScene.
The Todd’s website includes this video introduction to the new book and its new protagonist Bess Crawford, an army nurse who bears a message from a dead patient to his family and uncovers a sinister conspiracy.
Or you can read my review, along with other library patrons opinions, which is available through the library catalog’s LibraryThing book review feature. All patron review submissions are welcome- you can find instructions at this link.
Written on: September 4th, 2009 in News
On September 4th, 1969, North Vietnamese radio announced the death of Ho Chi Minh. Almost 25 years had passed since Ho, taking advantage of the retreat of the defeated Japanese army and the weakness of the postwar French government, had announced the formation of an independent Vietnamese Republic. After the division of the country under the Geneva Accords which followed the defeat of the French army at Dien Bien Phu, Ho declared war on the U.S.-supported South Vietnamese government. Despite Ho’s death, and despite the promise of the Paris peace talks, the North Vietnamese continued their attempt to conquer the South, and eventually prevailed in the protracted and bloody conflict.
You can read a biographical summary of Ho Chi Minh at our online Nonfiction Book Collection, with your Delaware Library Catalog library card and PIN. Ho has been a popular subject for biographers since the beginning of the conflict with America- it might be interesting to look at the differences in how Ho was perceived in different books between 1968 and 2006, as revolutionary romanticism has been supplanted by a deeper understanding and documentation of the impact of communism in South-East Asia over that time.
Written on: September 3rd, 2009 in Reviews
Here’s the New York Times bestseller list from Dec. 27, 1998- what’s so special about that date? Well, it’s the date that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone debuted on the list (at number 16):
Vampires were apparently less popular back then, but as for many of the rest, plus ca change….
Written on: September 3rd, 2009 in Q & A's
A: The book you are looking for is called Jake, Reinvented by Gordon Korman. According to Booklist “high society meets high school in this retelling of The Great Gatsby, set at the class-conscious F. Scott Fitzgerald High.”
Both the Delaware Library Catalog and New Castle County Library Catalog have copies of the book.
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Written on: September 2nd, 2009 in News
In an attempt to get away (statistically, at least) from Patterson/Grisham/Evanovich/Roberts- the velvet mafia of library circulation- it’s always nice to look at the weekly records of books checked out from individual libraries in the Delaware Library Catalog. It’s a refreshing reminder that Delaware’s libraries are as different as the communities they serve, and while national trends and preferences are reflected in the library media that we make available, our libraries respond to their customers and always try to ensure that everyone has a home at the library.
It’s partly because of this structure that we can see lists like this one, last week’s most popular authors at the Greenwood Library. Not a “top-ten” name among them, and you might not find them on the front table at a big-box bookstore, but local libraries make sure that every book has its reader:
There’s no chain-bookstore mentality in the Delaware Library Catalog- each library manages its own purchases through its own processes, and with its own funds- with some policy guidance from a collaborative collection development team comprised of library directors and Division of Libraries staff- and retains ownership of the books it purchases while those books are made available through any of the Kent, Sussex, or Del Tech and other libraries that make up the catalog consortium. A small collection of “floating” items is purchased by the team through funds managed by the Division, and circulates between all of the libraries and their customers- mostly books that have been selected to fill gaps in the non-fiction collection of the library catalog as a whole, or update the books and other media available in critical fields such as health and medical reference.
Written on: September 2nd, 2009 in Blog Posts, News
1969: On Sept. 2, two computers at University of California, Los Angeles, exchange meaningless data in first test of Arpanet, an experimental military network. The first connection between two sites – UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif. – takes place on Oct. 29, though the network crashes after the first two letters of the word "logon." UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah later join.
And that’s how the internet was born! Of course, for the next twenty years of so after its birth, the internet was only used by a small and specialized group. The phenomenon of today, entwined in every work and leisure aspect of our lives, was not in the original specifications. The Delaware Library Catalog includes a number of books about Tim Berners-Lee and other architects of the web.
Written on: September 1st, 2009 in Blog Posts
Click on the links below to get lists of new items available from the Delaware Library Catalog in various formats:
Written on: September 1st, 2009 in Blog Posts
This image of California’s Station Fire as seen from space, courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory, is an incredible example of nature’s raw power.
News of the fire has ranged from the tragic to the miraculous. The Delaware Library Catalog includes a number of books written about the conflict between human settlement and the ecological dynamics of wilderness fire, including Doug Gantenbein’s Season of Fire, Michael Thoele’s Fireline, and the still-vital Young Men and Fire, by Norman Maclean and our online databases, especially Environment Complete, include scientific, archeological, and popular magazine and journal articles about the environmental, political and economic impacts of wildfires.
You can see the view from Mount Wilson here at the observatory webcam, or see the L.A. Fire Department’s continuously updated map of the fire below
Written on: August 29th, 2009 in News
Hurricane Katrina landed along the Gulf Coast 4 years ago today, with devastating consequences for New Orleans and other coastal communities in Louisiana and Mississippi. According to the NOAA, Katrina was the single most devastating storm ever to strike the US and the damage to the city of New Orleans seemed so incredible that many experts at the time spoke of abandoning the city entirely to the water and resettling its population elsewhere.
During the storm and the recovery, the Times-Picayune, although having lost its printing presses entirely to the storm along with most of its offices, continued to publish new in an exclusively online format, and made sure that the desperate situation in the city stayed in the public eye. Their retrospective and archive on the storm and its aftermath is still required (online) reading for anyone interested in the impact of the storm and the redevelopment and resurrection of the city and its various communities.
There’s a tremendous number of books and other media available from the Delaware Library Catalog about the hurricane and its aftermath. Breach of Faith by Jed Horne is considered to be one of the better books, and Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke is a superlative documentary about the disaster and the apparent abandonment of the people of the city. James Lee Burke’s Tin Roof Blowdown is one of many fictional works which take the hurricane devastated city as a location or theme.
Written on: August 27th, 2009 in
For over a year now, staff at the Delaware Division of Libraries have used the Delicious.com social bookmarking website to share and promote internet resources. The website provides a number of tools for easily harvesting, recording and sharing websites, as well as very useful options for quickly adding links to recorded websites to library homepages, blogs, and RSS feeds. The links that are added to our account are almost immediately visible on this site (the library links panel on the lower right of the page), the Librarian’s Links of the Day section of the Delaware Library Catalog homepage, and are ‘tweeted’, emailed, and otherwise made available to the world.
The Division of Libraries links can be seen at http://delicious.com/delibraries and they include categories for genealogy and homeschooling, as well as resources that are of general public interest or worth sharing with library reference staff across the state. The links are identified from a variety of reliable sources such as Choice Reviews, Resource Shelf, and many many others. We’re always looking for library staff or other information professionals interested in adding bookmarks to this resource.
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