Reference@TBML

Things do come back

This week the Media Department received an official envelope from our local police department.  At first glance we thought it was a speeding ticket, which is impossible because Media doesn’t drive.

The letter turns out to be an invitation to come to the Police Station and pick up evidence that belongs to the Library.

While having DVDs stolen is not an odd occurrence, police involvement is.  In 2006 a history loving citizen decided to break in to the library in the wee hours of the morning to fulfill his need to view a documentary.  He broke into the Technical Services section of the library thru a Sky light dropped down to the area where those DVDs that need to be processed are stored and stole one title, only one, PBS’s Catherine the Great.   This raises a few questions, why only one DVD? Why Catherine the Great? If it was for resale wouldn’t a more commercial title be a better choice?

We never excepted to see the DVD again, but 7 years later is has been returned unopened in its original packaging and for some odd reason this has given us a little giggle.  EV

 

 

 

 

Watch for the "We the People" Display and Win Your Reading Metal

 
 
  

We the People

A More Perfect Union 

Thomas Branigan Memorial Library is one of 4,000 libraries across the country selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the American Library Association (ALA) to receive free hardcover editions of 17 classic books as part of the We the People Bookshelf grant program. The theme of this year’s Bookshelf is “A More Perfect Union.” 

The award is part of the NEH’s We the People initiative, which supports projects that strengthen the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture. Selected public and school libraries in all fifty states each will receive a set of the seventeen books, bonus materials, including a DVD edition of “The Civil War,” the award-winning documentary by Ken Burns, posters, bookmarks, bookplates, and finally, access to online planning and promotional materials.  Since 2003, NEH and ALA have distributed 17,000 We the People Bookshelf grants to school and public libraries across the country.

The books are on display in the Children’s and Young Adult sections of the library. This summer, children grades K-12 who read all the books in their age category will receive a reading medal.

 

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Happy 98th Birthday New Mexico!!

On January 6, New Mexico will celebrate its 98 birthday. In 1912, New Mexico became the 47^th state admitted to the United States. In celebration, Branigan Public Library has created two displays highlighting New Mexico. The first display is located in the Non-Fiction section near the Reference Desk features New Mexico History and will be available until January 19^th. The main display is located along the back wall next to the adult Fiction and will be featured all month. Items on display include books about or set in New Mexico along with books written by local New Mexico authors. Please feel free to take any of the books on display to the circulation desk to be checked out.

 

Zia Summer

By Rudolfo Anaya

 

 Hunting Badger

By Tony Hillerman

  

 Death Song

By Michael McGarrity

  

 The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid

By Pat Garrett

  

Lincoln Penny Design Contest @ Branigan Library

Come and join us in celebrating the bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln’s Birth!  Thomas Branigan Memorial Library is hosting a Lincoln penny redesign contest for students in Grades 6-12.  So harness those creative juices and redesign the penny with symbols and facts that represent our 16th President of the United States.

In order to compete, all contestants must pick up a template and entry form at the Young Adult Department.

Additionally, there will also be a “Guess How Many Pennies in the Bowl ” guessing game during the design contest.   The Guessing Game is also only for students in Grades 6-12.

The deadline for penny designs entries and the guessing game entries is Tuesday, December 1 at 6 pm.

There will be both a First Place and Runner Up prize in both the middle school and high school categories.  First Place is a $75 Savings Bond and Runner Up is a $50 Savings Bond. The winner of the “Guess How Many Pennies in the Bowl” will receive 2 movie passes.
 
Winners for the Design Contest and the Guess How Many Pennies will be announced Tuesday, December 15.

This contest is sponsored by The Friends of Thomas Branigan Memorial Library.

Questions?  Call the Young Adult Department at 528-4102

Download the flyer here.  Download Penny112009

Keeping the Dream Alive

Forty-six years ago today, the morning dawned as a cloudy Wednesday in Washington D.C.  And forty-six years ago today, in front of a quarter of a million people gathered between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial,  a man from Alabama delivered a thunderbolt of a speech that largely defined the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

In late 1962, various civil rights leaders began planning for what would become the largest civil rights march in the history of the United States. Their goal was to call atten-tion to the poverty, and degradation to which African Americans were subjected and to mobilize support for, as the name they gave their event said, jobs and freedom.

By June 1963, the organizers’ plans for a massive march on the nation’s capital were in place. They had successfully recruited a wide range of civil rights, religious and labor leader and activists, Martin Luther King, Jr., among them, to lead and speak at the rally.

In the days leading up to August 28th, people poured into Washington. On the day itself, more than 2,000 buses, 21 special trains, 10 chartered airliners and a vast multitude of automobiles converged on the city. In addition, all of the regularly scheduled airline flights, trains, and buses going into the nation’s capital were filled to capacity. 

Nevertheless, at 8:00 am, only fifty people had showed up at the Washington Monument where the march was to start. Two hours late, there was a much larger crowd, but the leaders were still not present, as they were meeting with a congressional delegation. Those assembled started marching to the Lincoln Memorial without them. By the time King wrapped up the activities for the day (his speech was the last on the program,) though, more than 250,000 people had gathered, making this the largest civil rights event in the nation’s history.

King started giving another speech, but in mid stride, changed his mind and delivered, with minor variations, a speech he had given before. It galvanized the nation. ABC and NBC interrupted their regular programming to deliver it live to the nation.

You can listen to this masterpiece of rhetoric and experience the thrill and gooseflesh of that day almost a half a century ago by clicking here.

This speech always moves me. As we look back on that Wednesday more than four and a half decades ago, I hope it moves us again. We’ve come a long ways since then, but there is still a long ways to go before we can, to paraphrase Dr. King:

       “…see the day when all of God’s children, black people and white people,
       Gays and lesbians and transgendered people, Jews and Gentiles, Muslims
       and Hindus, Catholics and Protestants, People of all religious beliefs and
       unbeliefs will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro
       Spiritual:
      
       Free at Last! Free at last!
      
       Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
      
Visit the Stanford University King Institute's King Resources site for a plethora of resources.

Two excellent books on the topic in the library are:

The Dream by Drew D. Hansen  and The Preacher King by Richard Lischer

Additionally, consider this list of materials on the "I Have a Dream" Speech.

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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. 

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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.

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Authors and Their Environment

It is always fascinating to go beyond the writing of an author and begin to investigate their environment.  Through this investigation we start to see how their environment, whether it be an immediate physical environment or the socio/political environment, informs their work.  There are several newer websites out there that provide this interesting window into the writer's process.

The well-designed and informative site Rowan Oak provides a virtual tour of William Faulkner's home in Oxford, Mississippi.  360* views and a timeline meshing Faulkner's writing history with that of Rowan Oak are the main features of this interesting site.

Another recent site outlines the cultural environment of America's favorite son, Mark Twain.  Mark Twain's Mississippi is a site chock-full of fascinating and helpful information for Twain scholars, students, and everyday users alike.  Included on the site are digitized primary documents, census maps from the Mississippi River Valley, sound recordings, and videos of Twain scholars and enthusiasts discussing and bringing his work to life.

And finally, a new book out called On Moving: A Writer's Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again by Louise DeSalvo offers a more contemporary perspective on the more contemporary act of moving from place to place and home to home.

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Lost and Found Book Treasures

With greater frequency we are seeing rare and delicate collections move online.  This means that more of these rare antiquities are available to the everyday user.  While no one would argue that a virtual viewing of any of these objects replaces the real deal, it is refreshing to see access become more deomocratic and available to anyone with an internet connection.

An excellent example of this improved access is the recent (and widely touted) digitizing of the world's oldest bible, the fourth century Codex Sinaiticus.  The translation, digitization, and beautifully rendered presence on the web is an international project bringing together groups and institutions in Europe, Russia, Middle East, and the United States.  Those interested in rare and handmade books will find this fascinating.

As far as digitized books go, Project Gutenberg and Scrib'd are some large and interesting sites (see also this post).  But the heavy hitter of digitized books has to be Google books.  Publishing digitized images of books and magazines, Google books offers a wealth of lost treasures.  Looking for that 1981 issue of the Weekly World News?  How about The American Gentleman's Guide to Politeness and Fashion?  Well, Google Books has 'em. 

And finally, not all of the recent strides in digitization are concerned with books.  Recently, a collaborative project with the intention of providing access to the world's photography collections was born.  Cultural and arts institutions from around the world have contributed digital images to The Commons, an online space hosted by Flickr.  The National Galleries of Scotland, the Bibliotheque de Toulouse, and the Smithsonian Institution have all contributed, creating possibly the world's most unique and diverse digital collection.  Stop by today!

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The Van of Enchantment @ TBML

The State of New Mexico's Van of Enchantment is making it's way to TBML this coming Thursday, June 25.  The van presents a mobile exhibit on the history of travel in New Mexico.  This will cover transportation from ancient times through our near past.  Learn about the Chaco Roads, the Camino Real, and the Old Spanish Trail!  Visit the Van of Enchantment at it's home online and be sure to climb aboard on Thursday.  The exhibit is free and open to the public. 

The Van will be parked directly in front of the Library in the parking lot on Thursday, June 25th.  The Van will be open from 10 AM to 12 Noon and then from 1 PM to 3 PM.  Visit our events calendar for more details.