Remote viewing

On a busy afternoon, a young man asked, sotto voce, for material on Remote viewing. I found this book that includes the topic.

Mayer, Elizabeth Lloyd.  (2007). Extraordinary knowing: science, skepticism, and the inexplicable powers of the human mind. New York : Bantam Books. 133.8 M

Morris Louis

A patron was seeking books about this artist. Morris Louis (born Morris Louis Bernstein, 28 November 1912 – 7 September 1962) was an American abstract expressionist painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. Living in Washington, DC. Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.

Morris Louis, Where, 252 x 362 cm. magna on canvas, 1960, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Schomburg gets Maya Angelou archive

Olive: Voters approve library funding

Published: Tuesday, November 02, 2010

OLIVE — Town voters on Tuesday approved, 1,280-419, a plan to support the Olive Free Library with $129,000 in annual town funding. The approval of the ballot proposition allows the library to receive $129,000 annually until the amount is changed through a future ballot proposition.

The library currently receives $43,000 from the town and another $54,000 from the library’s Bishop Trust.

Library board President Mary Ann Shepard has said funding cuts over the past several years had hurt basic services in a rural community where the library serves as a cultural center, educational resource, and job search facility.

Halloween at the Library

Starting today at the Children's Room.

A man came in asking for Dear Mr. Henshaw / Beverly Cleary ; illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky.

A mother with her two daughters were looking for a PG-rated DVD; they looked at Home Alone 4, but Mum nixed it. The violence was okay, but the plot includes a relationship that clearly she did not approve of.

A father with his son, Joseph, who is in the third grade, asked for a book; recommended Cam Jansen.

It has gotten busy, and I can't keep up, but I've recommended, and as wasked about, Patricia Giff, Barbara Cohen, Robert Munsch. Books on Thanksgiving (on Halloween Day), Magic school bus.

At 3, I repaired upstairs to Reference. Decidedly different in Reference than in Children's. A few people studyuing, 6 Internet PCs in use. A patron I know came over and asked for three books:

 Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society, by Glenn Dynner. An associate professor of religion at Sarah Lawrence College. Growth and development of Hasidic movement in Eastern and East Central Europe. Glenn Dynner draws upon newly discovered Polish archival material and neglected Hebrew testimonies to illuminate Hasidism's dramatic ascendancy in the region of Central Poland during the early nineteenth century. (from Oxford Press)




Blind jump: the story of Shaike Dan, by Amos Ettinger. Found it in Suffolk.

Blind Jump is the story of the amazing exploits of Shaike Dan. During World War II, Shaike Dan volunteered to parachute behind enemy lines in Romania on behalf of British Intelligence. His jump had two objectives: to locate the prison camp where 1,400 Allied Air Force crewman, downed when bombing the Ploesti oil fields in Romania, were being held, and also to find ways to get them out of Romania so that they could go back into action and resume their contribution to the war effort. The second objective was to try to rescue Jews from Eastern Europe and get them to Palestine.

Rome and Jerusalem: the clash of ancient civilizations. Martin Goodman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2007.
933.05 G

Clearly there is a theme running through his requests. He is one of the more interesting patrons I encounter here.

I learned something today

A young woman came over to the Readers Advisory desk, looking for "a Romeo and Juliet film," but all she could tell me was that the actress had "blond hair" and the actor had "black hair." I tried to guess, and offered the film Leo DiCaprio made, but that wasn't it.
    She suggested I use Google Images, and when I did she recognized the cover of the DVD: Shakespeare in Love, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes

I learned something: image searching is indeed now possible to use as a librarian's tool to find requested material.

Virginia?

A student asked for Who's afraid of Virginia Wolff, and saw this pun. Cute?

Making Ignorance Chic

Maureen Dowd takes note of librarians in her column.



The false choice between intellectualism and sexuality in women has persisted through the ages. There was no more poignant victim of it than Marilyn Monroe. She was smart enough to become the most famous Dumb Blonde in history. Photographers loved to get her to pose in tight shorts, a silk robe or a swimsuit with a come-hither look and a weighty book — a history of Goya or James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Heinrich Heine’s poems. A high-brow bunny picture, a variation on the sexy librarian trope.

Running the Books

Running the books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian.
Avi Steinberg.  399 pages. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $26.

[One library has it as Running the Books, another as a Biography.]

Fascinating review, or rather, review of a fascinating book written by a man who was a prison librarian for a couple of years.

Clinging to textbooks

They text their friends all day long. At night, they do research for their term papers on laptops and commune with their parents on Skype. But as they walk the paths of Hamilton College, a poster-perfect liberal arts school in this upstate village, students are still hauling around bulky, old-fashioned textbooks — and loving it.

Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times - Victoria Adesoba, a New York University student, said her decision to buy or rent textbooks depended on the course. She said e-texts tempted her to visit Facebook. 

Smart of her; would that other youngsters, including young librarians, heed that. It is amazing just how addicted people become to electronic gadgets, something I well understand. But at work, one has to act professionally, and Facebooking all the time ain't that.


For all the talk that her generation is the most technologically adept in history, paper-and-ink textbooks do not seem destined for oblivion anytime soon According to the National Association of College Stores, digital books make up just under 3 percent of textbook sales, although the association expects that share to grow to 10 percent to 15 percent by 2012 as more titles are made available as e-books.

He comes next

A man came over to the Information Desk and asked for the book. 3 libraries own it. After he left, I looked at the record a little more closely, noticing the cover and the subject headings more carefully.

Note the fruits; nothing lost or confusing there. The complete title is He comes next : the thinking woman's guide to pleasuring a man.

Subject headings:

	Sex instruction for women.
	Oral sex.
	Male orgasm.

Israeli books

A patron came in today with hold requests for these books:

To the end of the land, David Grossman
The trials of Zion , Alan M. Dershowitz.
The rise of David Levinsky, Abraham Cahan
Bearing the body. Ehud Havazelet.
The Jewish Messiah. Arnon Grunberg.
Fire in the blood.  Irène Némirovsky.
A pigeon and a boy / Meir Shalev.
When the grey beetles took over Baghdad / Mona Yahia.

Go GaGa

This video was passed on to me; it's cute: Librarians Do Gaga.

Students and faculty from the University of Washington's Information School get their groove on.

Directed, edited, and produced by Sarah Wachter.
Lyrics by Sarah Wachter.
Lyrics available here: http://www.athenasbanquet.net/2010/05...
More info available here: http://www.athenasbanquet.net/2010/05...

One hit wonders of the '50s & '60s.

Farmingdale Library called asking for two songs: Let me go lover! and I'll Always Love You. The second song is in sheet music; the first in this book.

Q 784.5 O

Songs:

Alley cat song -- Angel of the morning -- Apache -- Theme from Baby, the rain must fall -- The birds and the bees -- Bobby's girl -- Book of love -- Chantilly lace -- The deck of cards -- Dominique -- Eve of destruction -- Grazing in the grass -- Guitar boogie shuffle -- Happy, happy birthday baby -- Harper Valley P.T.A. -- I like it like that -- Israelites -- Leader of the laundromat -- Let me go lover! -- Love (can make you happy) -- May the bird of paradise fly up your nose -- More -- More today than yesterday -- Na na hey hey kiss him goodbye -- On top of spaghetti -- Pipeline -- Pretty little angel eyes -- Sea of love -- Silhouettes -- Stay -- Stranger on the shore -- Sukiyaki -- Tie me kangaroo down sport -- Who put the bomp (in the bomp ba bomp ba bomp) -- The worst that could happen.

$200 textbook vs. free. You do the math.

Infuriating Scott G. McNealy has never been easier. Just bring up math textbooks. Mr. McNealy, the fiery co-founder and former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, shuns basic math textbooks as bloated monstrosities: their price keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same. “Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,” Mr. McNealy says.

Textbooks get more and more expensive every year.

Early this year, Oracle, the database software maker, acquired Sun for $7.4 billion, leaving Mr. McNealy without a job. He has since decided to aim his energy and some money at Curriki, an online hub for free textbooks and other course material that he spearheaded six years ago.

Thank goodness someone with sufficient resources, money, is doing something about it.

The nonprofit Curriki fits into an ever-expanding list of organizations that seek to bring the blunt force of Internet economics to bear on the education market. Even the traditional textbook publishers agree that the days of tweaking a few pages in a book just to sell a new edition are coming to an end.

They got away with it for a very long time.

“Today, we are engaged in a very different dialogue with our customers,” says Wendy Colby, a senior vice president of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “Our customers are asking us to look at different ways to experiment and to look at different value-based pricing models.”

Huh?

Over the last few years, groups nationwide have adopted the open-source mantra of the software world and started financing open-source books. Experts — often retired teachers or groups of teachers — write these books and allow anyone to distribute them in digital, printed or audio formats. Schools can rearrange the contents of the books to suit their needs and requirements. But progress with these open-source texts has been slow.

Always is.

Aneesh Chopra, the federal chief technology officer, promoted an open physics textbook from CK-12 in his previous role as the secretary of technology for Virginia, which included more up-to-date materials than the state’s printed textbooks. “We still had quotes that said the main component of a television was a cathode ray tube,” Mr. Chopra says. “We had to address the contemporary nature of physics topics.”

And that computer time-sharing was the latest rage?

£ 1 for a library

Item in most current issue of ALA e-newsletter, from England. Library in a phonebox

Der Hirt auf dem Felsen

Interesting question: recorded and printed music for this Schubert song. Found former, not latter.

Slow

It is so slow I almost wish Mrs. Ochman would call again. Almost.

New bridge arrives

An adventure in multidimensional space

Amidst requests for newspapers and for directions to the bathroom, a good, solid question appears every so often, and today I got a good one: books on topology manifold. HW owns one that fits the patron's needs perfectly:

An adventure in multidimensional space : the art and geometry of polygons, polyhedra, and polytopes / Koji Miyazaki ; translated by the author ; edited and revised by Henry Crapo.