Thursday, August 06, 2009

The Eastern Regional Libraries Show - 22nd July & 29th July

Library staff members Lesley Conway and Pia Butcher run a radio show each Wednesday 12:05pm-12:45pm on Eastern FM 98.1 called The Eastern Regional Library Show. Tune in next Wednesday for a great show. We've got updates for the last couple of radio shows.

22nd July

Pia reviewed a range of novels today, the first four falling into the adult and young adult category.

A lion called Christian by Bourke and Rendall grew from a 2008 Youtube.com film clip about the emotional reunion of two young men and their pet lion, Christian. They had left him in Africa with Born Free's George Adamson, who would introduce the lion into his rightful place in the wild. This is their story written by those young men. (View the amazing story of Christian, Bourke & Rendall, with links to the video....webgurl)

Dewey: the small town cat who touched the world by Myron is the tale of a kitten who was found in a library overnight chute and grew up to being a loyal companion in the Spencer, Iowa library. Dewey helps Vicki Myron, the author, and the people of the town of Spencer to face life.

Crank is a very sad tale of a young girl with a bright future damaged by drugs. A verse novel skillfully written by Ellen Hopkins from her own experiences of her young daughter's addiction. And Glass also by Hopkins, the continuing story of Kristina and her spiral into the depths of drug addiction.

The last two books reviewed are Picture books. Me, Oliver Bright by De Kantzow and Rippen, in which Oliver Bright explores how much life has changed since his Grandpa's times through his school project. A warm hearted look at families and how the adventure of growing up. And Jasper McFlea will not eat his tea by Fox and Vane which deals with Jasper McFlea who will not eat his tea, only pasta. But what will it take to get Jasper to eat everything from avocado to zucchini? A delicious rollicking feast.


29th July

For some time there has been a debate about whether electronic information would wipe out the appeal and usefulness of the book. Evidence would suggest that both the computer and the book have their unique qualities, and will co-exist happily. Today, I featured some of the interesting electronic resources which are making both information and fiction easily available to us all. You may already have looked up magazines like Choice on our ERL Onefile database, but have you discovered that you can access an enormous range of e-magazines via the catalogue? When you do a simple subject search for 'australia history e-magazine' you will get a list of 25 titles; a search of 'diabetes e-magazine' gives you 15 titles. From the icon in the bottom right hand corner, you are taken to the magazine records where the issues are listed by year, and once into the records you can put in a subject search.

Another wonderful resource is e-books, material which is out of copyright or which authors have decided to put in the public domain and forgo copyright. Try putting e-books into a Google search to see something of the huge range available. Another interesting search is to go go to www.gutenberg.org, the site of the first project to put books out in the public domain. You may have heard too that Google are working with libraries around the world to put material which is out of copyright onto the web. What this means boggles my mind, but is also very exciting. A useful example of this accessible material is when a student asked recently if our libraries held a copy of a letter Oscar Wilde wrote called De Profundis. She needed it for study, her university library has all copies on loan, and to buy a copy would cost $35. A quick check on the Internet, and we found that it is freely available.

Music today was from The Royal Australian Navy Band's CD A flagship recital

----Lesley

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