Pittsylvania County Library Blog

The four public libraries of Pittsylvania County, as well as the bookmobile, have begun to circulate Barnes and Noble Nook e-readers to area library patrons.  The electronic devices are pre-loaded with a variety of books; books will be added to each device on a regular schedule.  In order to borrow a device, library card holders will sign a borrowing agreement and receive simple instructions on how to use the unit. This pilot project is made possible thanks to a grant from the library’s PPL Foundation.  Each library will have two Nooks available for circulation.

Public libraries have been providing reading, audio, visual, and electronic materials for a long time, often educating the public about new media.  E-readers are growing more popular as usability of the devices has improved.

The Nook Simple Touch devices are easy to use and are a good way for people to determine whether or not they like the e-reading experience before they invest in a device of their own.

The circulating collection of devices adds to the library’s adoption of digital technologies.  For over a year, the library has been a member of the Virginia Piedmont Library Consortium which allows patrons to check out e-books and view them on their own computers or devices.  The consortium’s collection has been very popular, which results in long waiting lists for some new releases.  Adding the circulating Nooks to the library’s collection allows for another way to fill patron demand for new items.  It also allows the library to add back titles and classics to its collection immediately to meet patron requests.

“For me, the introduction of ways of reading digitally to the library is important and necessary, but it certainly does not eliminate the traditional book-reading experience,” said Diane Adkins, director of library services for the county.  “I look at it personally as not either/or, but both/and.  I read books on a digital device, and I also read paper books and listen to books on CD.  True book lovers in this transitional time seem to be finding their own comfort level with the array of choices available,” she added.

For more information, or to check out an e-reader, stop by any of the libraries–in Brosville, Chatham, Gretna, or Mt. Hermon.  Locations and services times are available on the library’s website, www.pcplib.org.

Happy Tax Day, everybody.

Library workers, as guardians of the forms, are always happy to see this day arrive.  It means that we can put the forms away for another year.  We regain some of the flat space in our library, always at a premium.  We can stop telling people that we are not allowed to determine which form they need, that it’s a question they have to resolve themselves [we hate not to answer questions!]

How we ever became the repository for tax forms is a question best left to library historians.  I suspect it’s a case of not knowing how to say no.  We are very good at saying yes, not so great at saying no.

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Justice

According to the Library of Congress, the origin of the individual income tax is usually traced back to the passage of the 16^th Amendment in 1909.  However, its history goes back at least to the Civil War when Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1861.  That act included a tax on income to help pay for war expenses.   It was later repealed.  Then in 1894 Congress enacted a flat rate income tax, which was ruled unconsititional the following year by the Supreme Court “because it was a direct tax not apportioned according to the population of each state.  The 16th amendment, ratified in 1913, removed this objection by allowing the Federal government to tax the income of individuals without regard to the population of each State.” [1]

“People who complain about taxes can be divided into two classes: men and women.” — Unknown

When you are tempted to complain about taxes, think about this for a minute:

In 1918, during World War I, the top rate of the income tax rose to 77 percent to help finance the war effort. It dropped sharply in the post-war years, down to 24 percent in 1929, and rose again during the Depression. [2]

We are happy to have the forms put away once again, but libraries are part of the “civilized society” that Justice Holmes rightly noted taxes support.  Libraries are paid for by tax dollars, and studies have shown that for every dollar, libraries deliver over $5 of value to the community.[3]

“The power of taxing people and their property is essential to the very existence of government.” — James Madison, U.S. President

So as you run to the post office to file your form, or click that last button on your computer, remember that, as things are currently structured, taxes make libraries possible.  I hope that will make the medicine go down a bit better.

[1] http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/hottopic/irs_history.html

[2] http://www.irs.gov/irs/article/0,,id=149200,00.html

[3]http://www.lrs.org/documents/closer_look/roi.pdf; http://www.ala.org/research/librarystats/roi

The 1940 census data was released this week.  In one of their stories, NPR noted that this is as exciting to genealogists and historians as the Super Bowl is to football fans.   You might discover, as I did, that it’s exciting to you, too.

First, a bit of background.  Why did it take so long to release this data?  Contrary to some sources, there’s no law stating that personally identifiable census data has to be kept under wraps for seventy-two years.  However, there is a rule, first posed by Census Director Roy V. Peel in 1952.   The idea was that in seventy-two years, people whose data was in the census would be dead.  They wouldn’t care if we knew how much money they made back then; they would be gone.

Turns out, that thinking was a bit flawed.   It is estimated that 21 million Americans who were enumerated in the 1940 census are, in fact, still with us.  People whose names we recognize—for example, Morgan Freeman and Chuck Norris–are in there.  Maybe some of your people, too.

You do need to know this:   the census is not searchable—yet—by an individual’s name.  To find anyone, you need to know what enumeration district they were in.   [Quick: which one are you in?]  Luckily for us, a guy named Steve Morse has created a search tool.  It’s is available here:

http://www.stevemorse.org/census/unified.html

I played around with this for about twenty minutes and was startled that I was able to find my grandparents, my mom and her siblings.  Knowing the census was not searchable by name had convinced me that I would not be able to do that.  However, the search tool and the fact that my grandparents lived in a very small enumeration district kept the job from being onerous.  And I have to tell you, there’s just something magical about seeing your mom’s name and her age—in this case, 16—listed on a very old census document.  I wasn’t prepared for how this affected me.  I wanted to call her sister and brother and tell them all about it.  Maybe I still will.

The 1940 census, as others have noted, gives us a snapshot of our country as it pulled out of the Great Depression and before it entered World War II.  It’s a fascinating era, and people will be teasing out information from this for some time to come.

So, let me suggest that you do some digging.  You can start by going to this site:  http://1940census.archives.gov/ Read up on what the census covers.  Find out the enumerators’  methods.  You’ll discover, for example, that in processing the 1940 Census, operators transferred information appearing on the schedules filled out by enumerators to punch cards. This permitted processing of census returns by sorting machines for the first time.[1]

Take some time with it and look up someone you know.  It’s better than the Super Bowl.

I finished an astonishing book this weekend.

I had not really planned to read The Sense of an Ending.  I knew of its author, Julian Barnes, and knew he had become well-respected in literary circles.  However, I just was browsing our new book section one afternoon and saw the book, noted it was quite slender, and decided to try it.

The Sense of an Ending is beautifully written and hauntingly difficult to put out of your mind.  It highlights for the reader what repercussions can echo through decades of time and relationships from one simple, angry action.  It is a meditation on memory and on how we manipulate our recall of the past to paint ourselves in the best possible light.  Its ending is nothing short of shocking.  I found myself compelled to re-read whole sections of the book after I completed it the first time, in part just to see if I could have foreseen the end. It reminded me of Atonement by Ian McEwan.

This is not easy reading, but it is a book that will bear fruit for you long after you finish it.  I recommend it.

I also want to announce that we are beginning a series of book discussions around the theme Places in the Heart.  These will take place on the second Thursday of each month in the meeting room of the Chatham library.  The books to be discussed are Empire Falls by Richard Russo; A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean; Brothers and Keepers by John Edgar Wideman; Plainsong by Kent Haruf; and Gilead by Marilynn Robinson.  Empire Falls will be discussed on April 12.  All these books are readily available through both online booksellers and bricks-and-mortar stores.  If you want to participate, but need help getting a copy of the book, please let us know at info@pcplib.org.

Until Food Network decided to make nearly every show a competition, until they chose to embarrass people on camera the way other networks do, I liked to tune in.  In fact, I still watch Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, and I love Alton Brown’s shows.  We like to eat at our house, and we really cook.  Not much that is prepackaged shows up on our table.  We gather recipes and cookbooks as others might collect stamps.

So I thought I might share with you two cookbooks that I have enjoyed using in the past couple of months.  The first is The Complete America’s Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook.[1] America’s Test Kitchen [ATK] is a show on PBS starring Christopher Kimball, the most unlikely of TV hosts.  He reminds me of Mr. Rogers in a chef’s apron–he’s calm, he’s knowledgeable, and he is confident that you have great abilities that just need to be affirmed.  ATK tries recipes and tweaks them to make them work extremely well in your home kitchen.  This book captures every recipe of the first eleven seasons of ATK–675 of them.   The paper is high-quality and therefore the book weighs a ton–that’s my only quibble with this wonderful volume.    One of my favorite parts of ATK is the equipment reviews.  This book has a section near the back that compiles those.  I have bought many of their recommended items and they have never led me astray–and I love the fact that some of their recommended buys are vastly less expensive than others touted because of their “big name.”  In short, this is a cookbook that you can live with for many years.  It will help you stock your kitchen and hone your skills.  Oh, and by the way–we have DVDs of many of the ATK shows at the library, too.

The other volume that has captured my imagination and which has been a workhorse for me since Christmas is Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.

Yum!

[2] Friends had introduced me to an article by the same authors in Mother Earth News a couple of years ago.[3] The article outlines a way to make bread dough that does not use a starter, that does not have you proof the yeast, and does not use a machine for mixing or baking.  It uses high-moisture dough that can be cut into pieces the size of a grapefruit and baked as a free-form loaf. My go-to recipe involves four ingredients–King Arthur unbleached flour, kosher salt, yeast, and water.  I mix a batch every Sunday afternoon and then bake every day until we run out–usually Friday or Saturday.  Rinse and repeat, as they say.  The book takes the basics and expands those fundamentals into other interesting recipes.  Since this book was released, they have added others to the series–Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day and Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day.  Yes, we’ve got those, too.

In fact, the library has many cookbooks besides these two.  I encourage you to come and browse, but please be aware–we only check cookbooks out to people who eat.

[2] http://catalog.pcplib.org:8080/?config=ysm#section=resource&resourceid=1391012&currentIndex=0

[3] http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/Artisan-Bread-In-Five-Minutes-A-Day.aspx

Linsanity passed me by for about a week.  In case that describes you, too, here’s a quick update.  Jeremy Lin was a very good high school basketball player in California.  He wanted to play for Stanford University, but they did not offer him a scholarship.  He ended up at Harvard, where he was a standout for four years.  However, when big-time NBA scouts look for players, they do not tend to look in the Ivy League, but he did end up playing summer ball and signed with the Golden State Warriors.  Eventually they put him on waivers and he was picked up by the Houston Rockets.  He played seven minutes in two preseason games, after which he was again put on waivers and picked up by the New York Knicks on December 27, 2011.  Because the Knicks were playing so poorly, their coach put him in a game on February 4.  That’s when a streak of seven wins began for the Kicks.  Lin became the first NBA player to score at least 20 points and have seven assists in each of his first five starts.[1]

Here’s the funny thing.  Most people saw nothing exceptional in Jeremy Lin.  Remember, no college wanted him badly enough to offer him a scholarship.  However, there was one guy.  He’s a delivery man for FedEx, and his hobby is numbers analysis.  He wrote an article for Hoops Analyst on the potential he saw in Jeremy Lin–back in 2010.  Ed Weiland noted Lin’s performance in two-point field goal percentage and rebounds, steals and blocks per forty minutes.  Those numbers compared favorably with point guards in the NBA who were stars.  Weiland concluded that Lin could someday be a star, too.[2]

I know you think this is a sports report, not a library blog, but the reason the whole thing has intrigued me so has to do with the fact that I just watched the movie Moneyball[3],

based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis.[4] The plot of Moneyball is not unlike this story of Jeremy Lin and Ed Weiland.  Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, has to field a contender with far less money to spend on players than other teams have.  He listens to an analyst named Paul DePodesta [Peter Brand in the movie] who shows him how to use sabermetrics [an attempt to be objective about baseball]  to decide what undervalued players will actually make big contributions to the success of the team.  Sabermetricians often use different measures to determine true baseball skill, and that is at the heart of the movie.

Moneyball is essentially a business book, not a baseball book.  It makes you think about what qualities are undervalued in other areas of life, not just sports.  I have expressed my admiration for Michael Lewis’s writing about financial matters in earlier posts.  A rational approach to markets may be the best way to manage an investment portfolio; however, it’s hard, as Billy Beane notes, to remove the romance from sport.

That’s what gives the Jeremy Lin story its staying power.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Lin

[2] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204880404577225562995441868.html

[3] There’s a copy at each of our branches; DVD 5620.

[4] There’s a copy at the Chatham library; Dewey number is 796.357L.

“Machines are gonna fail and the system’s gonna fail…then, survival. Who has the ability to survive? That’s the game – survive.”

Do you remember who said that?   That line came back to me over and over again throughout the month of January as our library struggled with a hacked webpage that took hours and hours of staff time and technical help from other libraries to restore.  No online catalog.  No patron accounts.  No blog.  It was not a fun time at the library.

Machines will fail.

Reading devices fail, too.  [Don’t get me wrong—I still love my Nook!]   But literature and the written word—well, those have done a pretty good job of surviving.

So, while I was “away” in the weeds of hacked webpages, here’s what I’ve been reading.

At the Virginia Library Association Council meeting in January, we introduced ourselves to each other by briefly reviewing what we were reading at the time.  I talked about Spirits of Just Men by Charles Thompson.  Thompson has spoken at our library before, and had just been the guest speaker at a  Pittsylvania Historical Society meeting.  He’s a professor at Duke University and a native of Franklin County, Virginia.  Spirits of Just Men is about moonshining, a pertinent topic now that our county has been made famous, or infamous, by virtue of Discovery Channel’s Moonshiners.  One of the points that Thompson makes so eloquently is that his nice office at Duke would not be possible had it not been for his grandfather’s involvement in moonshine.  Those who portray these people as backwoods hillbillies clearly do not have a full picture about the extraordinary survival skills they developed in order to provide a livelihood for their families.  Thompson is always an intelligent observer of the culture around him, and this book does not disappoint.

Elizabeth George has written seventeen installments in the Inspector Lynley series of mysteries.  Some of the more recent outings have not held my attention, but her newest, Believing the Lie, has a psychological element that I have found intriguing.

George’s books are lengthy—though in fact, I began reading her so long ago that I can remember that the first few were normal size.  This one tops the 600 page mark—20 cds in audio.  A typical George book weaves several plot lines, all related, and all tend to come together at the end. What captures my interest are her dense characterizations.  Those doing the investigating are often more interesting than the murder itself.  If you have a long weekend, this is the type of book that can absorb you for long periods in a satisfying way.

Oh, and the line at the beginning?  That comes out of Burt Reynold’s mouth in the movie Deliverance.  Talk about backwoods—I think I can hear the banjo.

Libraries are, as I have noted before, all about connecting people with the information they need.  In the interests of doing just that, I am posting links here to all three of the uranium mining studies that have been released in the last month.

Democracy rests on the premise that citizens stay informed about issues.  Many who live in this area have awaited these studies with great anticipation.  To be truly informed, however, it is necessary for us not only to read news accounts of what they say, but also to become familiar with the findings ourselves.

I would only suggest that if you are not going to read these studies–and they are lengthy–at least read the nontechnical summary of the National Academy of Sciences report.  That begins on page nine of the report.  It’s a mere ten pages long, and it’s a good starting point.

Here’s where you can find each of the reports:

National Academy of Sciences Report: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13266

The Chmura uranium study, The Socioeconomic Impact of Uranium Mining and Milling in the Chatham Labor Shed, Virginia is here, as is the National Academy of Sciences report: http://dls.virginia.gov/commissions/cec/files/chmura_study.pdf

Finally, the study commissioned by the Danville Regional Foundation, conducted by RTI, can be accessed here:  http://www.drfonline.org/news/2011/20111215-RTI-Uranium-Study.php

I get lots of good book recommendations at my book club meetings.

What a radical idea.

This is my shout-out to the fellow members of my book club.  Intelligent and thoughtful women all, they are also astute reviewers of their latest reading.  Recently, one of them recommended The Snowman by Jo Nesbø.[1] Since I respect the woman who recommended it, I picked it up right before Christmas.

Folks, this is not a light holiday book.  One other thing:  you can’t put it down.

If you have read any of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium series, you will feel at home in the hands of Nesbø, one of several “hot” Scandinavian mystery writers [Henning Mankell is another].

I did not have any difficulty figuring out who the murderer was early on, a point worth making only because I am usually not very good at that part of the mystery reading experience.   I am going to assume it was not Nesbø’s intention to fool the reader.  Though I will say he sprinkled in plenty of false leads and red herrings [There!—that’s my Scandinavian pun for this review].  Beware, too, that the violence in these books is particularly horrifying—again, not unlike the Larsson books.  Though be forewarned that Nesbø himself does not like being compared to Larsson.[2]

What made this a book I could hardly stop myself from reading—despite being surrounded by my children and  grandchildren, who seemed to want to focus on Christmas, of all things—was  the relationships between Harry Hole, the detective and central character, and two women.  One was his colleague, Katrine Bratt, and the other was the love of his life, Rakel.

If you like books that emphasize relationships between people in a cold winter setting, and if you don’t mind some pretty violent action, this book should be worth your time.  Just don’t plan to eat or sleep until you are done.

On another note, let me encourage you to resolve, for 2012, to track the books you read.  You can do this the way my mom did.  She had a recipe file box and 3×5 cards.  She had everything alphabetized by authors, and she noted on the author’s card which works she had read and when, along with a brief review.  Or, if you want to be twenty-first century about it, try an online service such as Goodreads [www.goodreads.com]   or Library Thing [www.librarything.com].  If you do this, I think you’ll find it to be a beneficial way to give structure to your reading as well as helpful when you try to remember specific characteristics of a book.

One more thing before I sign off for 2011.  Here’s a link to a list of books Nancy Pearl, librarian extraordinaire, reviewed during a webinar I took recently:  http://www.ala.org/pla/sites/ala.org.pla/files/content/onlinelearning/webinars/archive/nancy_pearl_handout_1211.pdf

My husband asked me if I had read them all.  I told him, “Read them all?  I haven’t even heard of them all!”  Nancy will expand your reading horizons if you let her.  Don’t be afraid to stretch!

See you next year.

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/jo-nesbo-the-next-stieg-larsson-the-norwegian-author-is-no-fan-of-the-thought/2011/05/03/ AFdj3GhF_story.html

In October, the New York Times ran an article on the post office as the heart of a community.[1] As most of us know, post offices are under tremendous economic pressure.  The use of the Internet, e-mail, electronic bill pay, and alternative shipping providers has meant the volume of mail and the demand for postal services has decreased.  I heard someone recently call the post office simply a delivery system for junk mail. [2]

All the economic questions aside, though, what struck me was the similarity in the way people in smaller communities view their libraries and their post offices.  I have lived in large cities and in small towns; there is a different pace in smaller places.  I think part of the reason is that people become interdependent.  They invest energy in increasing their “social capital.”  They watch out for each other.  As for post offices and libraries, these institutions are natural gathering places for people; they are where rural folks catch up with their neighbors.  They are public buildings open to all.  Everyone is a “member” of the post office and the library, just by virtue of walking in the door.

The Times article talked about people exchanging garden produce in the post office; that’s not an activity that is foreign at all to the staff at our library.   People even bring us baked goods when they come in to make copies.  And as for the post office,  I know that I saw the magic of small town life in action when I arrived there to mail an important document, lacking a few coins from having enough to pay the postage.  I was waved on by the desk clerk who took me at my word when I said I’d be back in a bit with the rest–he tossed the envelope into the waiting basket and it headed out to the truck to make my deadline.

There are small institutions in every part of rural America that are struggling right now.  Small churches, small libraries, small post offices, small businesses.  Somewhere we got infected with the idea that “big” and “consolidated” and “growth” are all supreme goods.  Those that live in small towns, though, know that when things get big and grow, something of the personal is lost.  As the Times quoted one person, “I just wish that they would leave our post office alone,” Ms. Bowling said. “If I couldn’t come here to get my mail every morning, I’d feel a big part of me has died.”  Another interviewee said, ““You’re throwing the little people, the rural people, under the bus.”

Will the local post office survive this assault?   It appears certain that changes are coming, but then changes are coming to many of our institutions.  I like what my friend, Rev. Chuck Warnock of Chatham Baptist Church wrote about “the church as abbey” when he was thinking about the small town congregation: “The old Celtic Christian abbey [was] a center for worship, refuge, hospitality, learning, art, and community. The ancient abbey embraced its neighbors in adjoining towns and countryside as its parish, and served the needs of the community. The Celtic abbeys were not closed monastic compounds that excluded the outside world; rather, they were open to travelers, neighbors, inquirers, and those seeking help. Every person they encountered did not show up for worship on Sundays, but the witness of the abbey impacted the community it served every day of the week. “[3]

Impacting the community we serve every day of the week–not a bad mission for any of us in small town institutions.

[2] http://www.npr.org/2011/12/06/143215137/snail-mail-may-arrive-more-slowly-will-it-matter

[3] http://chuckwarnockblog.wordpress.com/the-abbey-church/