Reference@TBML

National Library Week is April 10 thru April 16, 2011

 

Come to Thomas Branigan Memorial Library and help us Celebrate "National Library Week"....  Visit us @ the library for some great displays, and much, much more!

•  “Creating Your Story in Scrapbooking”. Participants will need to bring pictures to create their own scrapbook page. Monday, April 11th @ 2-4 PM in the Roadrunner Room.

•  Come listen to “Diary of a Worm” and make a bookworm. Tuesday, April 12 @ 3:30 pm/ Ages 4 and up.

• Come listen to “Bats at the Library” and make your own bat. Wednesday, April 13 @ 3:30 pm/ Ages 4 and up.

•  “Creating Your Story of Generations”  Our Genealogy Librarian will be teaching how to use genealogy databases. Thursday, April 14th @ 3-5 PM in the Roadrunner Room.

•  Since April is National Poetry Month, we will also be hosting a Twitter Poetry Contest “Creating your Poetry Story: Tweet about your Story Connection with the Library”.  Follow us on Twitter and we will follow you so that we can read your poetry tweets.  Tweets will be judged and the best Twenty Tweets will be added to our Library Blog. 

Money Smart Week® @ Your Library

 
Branigan Library will be celebrating Money Smart Week @ Your Library on April 2-9, 2011.  Money Smart Week is a public awareness campaign designed to help consumers learn to better manage their personal finances.  Money Smart Week began as a organized effort of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Money Smart Advisory Council – which is a diverse group of more than 40 Chicago-area organizations working together to promote personal financial literacy.  The library will have a display of information and resources.  Money Smart Week also has Programs & Resources that you can review for more ideas for your financial planning needs.

"Money Smart Week partnered with the American Library Association (ALA) in 2010 to launch Money Smart Week @ your library nationally. Throughout the ten year history of Money Smart Week libraries have been instrumental in facilitating and hosting quality Money Smart Week events." 

 

 

BONDS FOR LIBRARIES: 2010 Library Go Bond New Mexico

Google the news for “library budget cuts” and you at once see that libraries have been hit hard in the last eighteen months.  Libraries everywhere are grappling with budget shortfalls, lay-offs and closings. Enter “2010 Libraries GO Bond New Mexico” which will authorize a $20,250,000 bond package to fund the purchase of books and other resources. 

 

On Thursday, January 28, 2010, New Mexico Library Association will hold its annual Library Legislative Day in Santa Fe at the Round House.  Supporters will convene at the main library at 8:30 AM for a general orientation.  They will then visit with their individual legislators to advocate for collection and services.  You can view a copy of the preliminary draft of the Library Bond Bill here and more information about the General Obligation Bond. 

 

You can also show your support by asking your local representative to co-sponsor this bill with Representative Ed Sandoval, Chairman of the House Taxation and Revenue Committee.  Find your representative here.

 

mln/mn

TAX PREPARATION

 

It’s tax time again and your library is here to provide access to forms and instructions.  If you need assistance preparing your tax return, the Southwest Tax Coalition is available.  They will be preparing taxes from February 1 thru April 14^th. Southwest Tax Coalition is located at 120 Wyatt Dr, a short distance from Wienerschnitzel on Wyatt and El Paseo.  Hours are as follows:

 

Monday-Thursday    8:30-2:30pm

Friday 8:30-12:00pm

 

Forms available at the library include 1040, 1040A, 1040EZ, some supplemental forms and the New Mexico PIT form packet. If you would like to print forms online, federal forms are available at http://www.irs.gov/ and New Mexico State Tax Forms are available at  http://www.tax.state.nm.us . 

 

In These Trying Times: Resources for Homeowners

 

Lately the news has been full of stories about homeowners being scammed by companies promising to fix their mortgage woes. Scared homeowners go to these people looking for relief and end up in worse financial condition than before. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have teamed up to prevent foreclosure rescue scams from ruining lives.

Being informed can help consumers avoid being ripped off. The FTC and HUD have a wealth of resources available for worried homeowners. For more information on foreclosures and scams, check out the websites below:

The Federal Trade Commission Consumer Information, Mortgages and Real Estate

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Avoiding Foreclosure

MN

Get the facts about H1N1 Flu-redux

H1N1, courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control

Back in April, this blog featured an entry on the H1N1 flu. Check it out here. The featured links are still excellent sources for information and should help dispel fears regarding the flu, immunization and local response.

The Centers for Disease Control have embraced web 2.0 to provide up-to-the-minute information on the flu outbreak, including adding widget applications to their website. To help spread the word, this blog will now feature a CDC widget with information, tips and news all about H1N1. Stay informed and stay healthy!

MMN

Fun Little Tools to While Away the Hours

Sometimes you just want to spend a few hours whiling away the hours with fun little online tools.  Well, here are a few sites to keep your hours occupied. 

Personas is a project of the MIT Media Lab.  Set up to visualize the data mining process, Personas presents you with an online portrait of yourself, or rather, your name.  Read their background information to get full understanding of the project.  Fun, funny, and a little bit scary.

Are you a fan of contemporary poetry?  Try Swindle, a tool which collects poetry from sites onlines and posts the poems on the site.  A great way to get your daily dose of poetry.

Quick!  Who sang the song with the lyrics, "...If you turn me down once more, I'll join the French foreign legion..?"  LyricRat has the answer!  Just type in your lyric and LyricRat will supply you not only with the song title, and artist name as well as an audio sample.  And, if you are a Tweeter, you can use LyricRat on the go! 

And finally, Boggle fiends take note, WordSplay is your answer to the doldrums.  Using only your email address to register, you can play this Boggle-like word-building game to your hearts content (or as long as your eyes can take it).   

Have fun!--BES

The Hollywood Blacklist

With the death of Bud Schulberg earlier this month and his illuminating obituary in the New York Times, we've been revisiting the darker years in Hollywood and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). 

The Hollywood Blacklist had its roots in the perceived threat of real and imagined links between the U.S. entertainment industry and Communism.  In 1938, HUAC chairman Martin Dies released a report on the pervasiveness of Communism in Hollywood.  The panic gradually began to escalate until 1947 when the first group of identified Hollywood Communist sympathizers were called to give testimony in front of HUAC.  Of the 43 called, 19 refused to give testimony as they felt it a violation of their First Amendment rights.  Ten of the nineteen, now known as the Hollywood 10, were found in contempt of Congress and given citations by the House of Representatives.  Immediately following, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) voted to make all members swear to a non-communist pledge and the MPAA chairman declared that theten would be suspended without pay until cleared of all charges.  More actors were called before congress; some named names (like Bud Schulberg and Elia Kazan) and others refused to testify and were blacklisted.  The Hollywood reached its height from 1952-1956 and finally began to break around 1960.

Those interested in reading more online might consider visiting the PBS page on Elia Kazan (in conjunction with their "Miller, Kazan, and the Blacklist: None Without Sin") which features: essays, timelines, and video commentary.  The Mesa County Library District (in Grand Junction, CO) has a very nice website dedicated to blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Blacklist.  The Media Resource Library at UC-Berkley has a comprehensive website dedicated to the Hollywood Ten and provides mini-biographies of the ten members.  And of course, Wikipedia provides a good background (but by no means 100% authoritative) on the topic as well as a comprehensive list of all blacklisted industry members.

Here at our own library, we have a few memoirs regarding the Hollywood blacklisting.  Consider checking out:

The Red and the Blacklistby Norma Barzman

Hollywood Exile, or, How I Learned to Love The Blacklist by Bernard Gordon

Touch and Go by Studs Terkel

Anything Your LIttle Heart Desires by Patricia Bosworth

Also, Stuart Woods gives the Hollywood Blacklist the fiction treatment in Beverly Hills Dead.

And, since this is Hollywood we are talking about, there are bound to be films made on the subject:

Sydney Pollack's The Way We Were uses the HUAC hunt for communists as a backdrop for this love story.

Blacklisted screenwriter Walter Bernstein wrote the Woody Allen vehicle The Front which explores the atmosphere during the blacklist.

Scandalize My Name, a documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman takes a unique perspective on the blacklist and how it affected African American members of the entertainment industry as well as the Civil Rights Movement.

And of course, George Clooney's more recent Good Night, and Good Luck chronicles newsman Edward R. Murrow's conflicts with HUAC. 

BES

The Jewish Experience in New Mexico

As many of us know, New Mexico is made up of a fascinating, complex, and historically rich ethnic fabric.  One of the more recent groups to be researched and documented are New Mexico's Jewish pioneers.  Among these Jewish pioneers there are a number of different groups including Conversos and Crypto-Jews who came with the early Spanish pioneers and Eastern European Immigrants who came later in the 19th century.  So take a few moments and begin to explore this little-known facet of New Mexico history with some of the resources listed below.

Begin to explore this fascinating subject by visiting the Southwest Jewish Archive at the University of Arizona's site.  The City of Albuquerque also has an interesting and informative little write-upon the history of Conversos and Crypto-Jews in New Mexico and well worth the time.

In the library, we have a number of books about the various groups of Jewish immigrants that are a part of the ethnic fabric of New Mexico.  Check out one of the books listed below:

Jewish Pioneers of New Mexico gives an illustrated history of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants to New Mexico.

To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico by Stanley Hordes and published by Columbia University Press is a newer and encyclopedic entry into the research field.

The Marrano Legacy: A Contemporary Crypto-Jewish Priest Reveals Secrets of His Double Lifeby Trudi Alexy and published by University of New Mexico Press offers a personal narrative of the Crypto-Jewish experience.

And click here to find a more complete list (including genealogical materials) of books on Jewish Immigrants in New Mexico.

BES

Trying to find the next book in your favorite series?  That task is now easier thanks to the library's NoveList Plus Database.  Using NoveList Plus is easy.  Simply select NoveList Plus from the list of databases on the library's Databases Page.  Once in the database, type in the series name or author's name in the Find box.  After a list of titles appears, simply click the series title from the right side of the page.  This will display a complete list of titles within the series. 

Another helpful feature of NoveList Plus is the lists of award winners.  NoveList Plus lists several popular awards such as the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Awards, Agatha Awards and the Caldecott Honor Books.  To find award winners, click on the Award Winners link under the appropriate age group on the menu on the left side of the page.  A list of award topics will be displayed from which to select.  Once an award topic is selected simply select the award name and year to find the list of titles.

For more assistance on how to use NoveList Plus, please feel free to speak to a Reference Librarian in the library, call us at 529-4026, or email us at braniganreference@gmail.com.

VM