Rasmuson Library Collection Development

Banned Books!

Starting Sept. 29th, through Oct. 6th, the library is celebrating your freedom to read by observing “Banned Books Week.” We’ll have a display of information on censorship both in the U.S. and other nations, as well as a collection of “great books” that have been banned repeatedly by school districts and even national governments, any of which you can check out and read. I’ll also put a few links to interesting web sites about censorship. There’s nothing like banning a book to make it popular! Enjoy!

Re: Robyn R’s Picks

The Devil You Know by Michael Carey.
Felix Castor sees dead people. And exorcises them. But after one of his exorcisms went horribly, badly wrong, Felix gave the whole thing up. A new case draws him back into the game, however, when he is summoned to exorcise a ghost that’s haunting the Bonnington Archive. Formerly peaceful, the ghost has suddenly started attacking the staff, but the ghost’s odd behavior is not the only thing that’s off about this case as Felix soon finds out.
Very British, very noir. If you like urban fantasy and hard-boiled detective fiction, you will like this book. Available in the Rasmuson Bestseller section.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver.
Author Barbara Kingsolver relates her family’s attempt to eat locally for an entire year with wit and style. Besides being very funny, I thought she made two good points that a number of other slow food manuals gloss over: 1) historically, we yearn for things that we can’t grow locally such as spices and 2) our current ability to colonize marginal climatic areas in large numbers is very much based on shipping food over long distances.
Food for thought. Available in the Rasmuson Bestseller section.

Natalie’s pick

1. Natalie Says:
   September 13th, 2007 at 11:36 am eRobert Gifford’s CHINA ROAD: A JOURNEY INTO THE FUTURE OF A RISING POWER. Available in our Bestseller collection.

Staff Picks!

Library patrons and staff both enjoy having a collection of “staff picks” - books read and recommended by staff. I’d like to get Rasmuson Library staff input on good books in our collection; add yours to the blog and give it the category of “book suggestions.” Perhaps we’ll separate the list into months too. Any other ideas for the “staff picks” section?

Learning 2.0 #30 - Final Thoughts on Web 2 (and Web 1)

The internet is so rich in information and in tools for sharing knowledge, that no one could ever really call him or herself a “webmaster,” a term normally used for a web page designer, but one I don’t see used as much any more. Although one can’t know everything, especially when things are developing so fast, it’s essential to be literate in finding internet information, and using tools appropriately can assist with those searches. Imagine being in a library that doesn’t use a classification system, has no catalog, and hires no staff to assist. You wander up and down the aisles searching for that one book you really need…endlessly. If you don’t know what you’re doing on the internet, you’ll surf and surf, get distracted, and never find the information you want. Web 2 tools are great assists, and may simplify finding good stuff in the vast offerings; just as we now “can’t live without” google, some of the other tools will become standards. Others will fade away. And even better ones will be developed, so in 2-3 years we’ll need another “Learning 2.0″ experience, to keep us fresh. It takes time, but I love it! It’s fun!

Learning 2.0 #29 Rasmuson web resources

Aha! Finally one Learning 2.0 lesson whose resources I have already utilized extensively, including all of the items! Yay! They’re all great too. Try them out. We do good stuff here at Rasmuson, and the more we learn about Web 2 and other new technologies the more we will be able to offer to the world.

Learning 2.0 #28 New web browser

I downloaded Opera. It was amazingly easy to download, and I love that it just nabbed all my Firefox bookmarks and added them to the new browser! The widgets are fun, but I’m not sure how useful they are yet. Maybe I just need to find the right one. I did notice that downloading Opera and having it running simultaneously to Firefox is slowing everything down.

Learning 2.0 #25 Google labs/base

I didn’t really have anything to post on Google base. It would be nice for someone with no html or other web page knowledge to put information on the web. I looked through Google Labs and didn’t see any tools I could really use at this time. I did go to Google Maps though - one of the “labs grads” - and whoa, I think a good half hour went by before I stopped getting information on Kauai. And it’s only July! Great tool - can get info on anything, plan any trip. Good bye AAA.

Learning 2.0 #22 Listen Alaska and Project Gutenberg

These are great resources. Listen Alaska is a pilot project, but one I hope will continue, and ideally with some major changes, such as allowing iPod users access to these files, and removing the “checkout” and “return” model in favor of a better system for measuring use. Once you download the OverDrive software, the audio books are easy to use. I’ve burned most of the titles I checked out to a CD so I can use them at home in future.

Project Gutenberg includes audio books, e-books, music scores and more. What a great resource! The husband of one of our librarians is on the editing team at Gutenberg, and the project is steadily growing.  We’re lucky that people consider Gutenberg to be important enough to volunteer their time.

Learning 2.0 #16 Wikis

I love wikis! They’re not the easiest to edit, but once you know what you’re doing, they are much better than shared network files, or web pages. We have used our Rasmuson wiki extensively - for procedure manuals, workflow process descriptions, and lots more.

I like wikipedia as a place to start searching on a topic I know little about, but usually go elsewhere for more authoritative information afterward. For example I used wikipedia to find out basic information about the accounting field, then used the sources listed there to find information in databases and books in WorldCat.