Event Next Week: The Arts and Crafts Movement in the PNW

We’re very excited about our upcoming evening event next week!  Author and Program Director for Historic Seattle Lawrence Kreisman will be joining us next Thursday night, February 28, to discuss “The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest.”  You’ll definitely want to join us to find how local artisans contributed to the Arts and Crafts heritage through architecture, furniture making, stained glass, and jewelry.  Doors open at 6 pm on Thursday, so come early and get the best seat!

Speaking of artisans, the staff here has developed a new handout celebrating Brooding Heron and Jawbone Presses, the presses of Washington State Poet Laureate Samuel Green.  This flyer describes the materials available at the Washington State Library associated with both of these important Washington presses, so be sure to check it out.

Weekend Infoload

We’re headed out to enjoy a chilly January weekend, but before we jet for the day we want to share some new and really nifty information with you.

Our Handouts page has been revamped.  All our handouts are now hosted on our main website, so downloading them should be much easier for those of you that have to deal with filters. 

There’s a new category for Handouts that go along with State Library Presentations and Events.  You’ll find several handouts from the upcoming “Conservation Kitchen” program there.  We’re hearing lots of buzz about this exciting brownbag event that’s happening next Wednesday, January 30th.

Four Genealogy handouts are also making their first appearance: WSL Genealogy Periodicals, Newspaper Indexes and Abstracts, Donation Land Claims, and Brief Histories of the Counties of Washington.

There’s also a new category for Northwest History News Notes.  You may remember this feature from last year.  We’ve uploaded Fall of 2006, and more will be coming soon. 

Speaking of Northwest News Notes, we’re going to be entering those featured journal articles into our new CiteULike account.  You’ll now be able to browse Northwest-related journal article citations by subject or author using our tag clouds!  If you see a couple you are interested in, we’ll be happy to email them to you; just follow our article request directions.   Books from News Notes will make their way to LibraryThing (and our online catalog of course), and new links of interest will be entered into Del.icio.us, where you can do similar types of browsing.  You’ll be able to see the feeds for the most recent entries in the margins of this blog (or you can subscribe via RSS if you’re using a feedreader like Bloglines).

Finally, we have a new map available via Platial:  Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Visitor Centers.  If you’re planning on taking that Lewis and Clark-themed road trip this spring or summer, you might want to check it out!  Our other maps are still available on our Platial site too.

Tune in next week for our Event Rewinds of Archaeology in Washington and Conservation Kitchen, as well as more groovy information from the librarians at the Washington State Library!

Fun Things for the Weekend

State Library staff has gotten to work and created a couple new fun resources for you.  First, on the Handouts page are two new flyers publicizing some of the children’s materials we have available:  Children’s Picture Books Set in the Northwest and Children’s Picture Books: Washington Reads.

Second, we’ve recently discovered Platial, a social networking site that allows you to build map mashups and share them with your friends.  Our first map is a map showing the Old Oregon Trail markers that appear across the country thanks to the efforts of Ezra Meeker.  Our inspiration was Dennis Larsen’s “The Missing Chapters: The Untold Story of Ezra Meeker’s Old Oregon Trail Monument Expedition January 1906-July 1908” and the collected works of Ezra Meeker.  You can access our new map on this page (left hand margin) or through our new Platial homepage.  If you like this map, feel free to embed it in your website.  While you’re at it, why not make us your new Platial buddy so you can comment on our map and suggest ideas for additional maps?  As with Flickr, LibraryThing, and Del.icio.us, we love our Friends and Buddies!

2007-2008 LAL Contest; New Washington Reads Poster

Those of you who joined us at The Fair this week will know that we have new brand-new information about two of our popular library programs.  The first news is that the guidelines for the 2007-2008 Letters About Literature program is now up on our website.  Letters About Literature encourages students to write to the author of a book that really impacted their lives.  Entrants must be at least 9 years old and submit their letter by December 14, 2007.  Letters About Literature is sponsored by the Washington State Library, the Library of Congress Center for the Book, and Target.

Click here for Participation Guidelines and more information about this year’s Letters About Literature program.

The second batch of good news is that our new Washington Reads poster featuring former astronaut and current President and CEO of the Museum of Flight Bonnie Dunbar is now available.  Washington residents can click here to order a copy of the newest poster in our series that has also featured NASCAR driver Kasey Kahne and our previous Letters About Literature winners!

Enjoy your weekend.  We’re still trying to work off all those scones, curly fries, and carmel apples…

Return of Library Handouts and Save the Date!

The format of today’s update might look a little familiar, but the content is hopefully new and exciting!  We have some more new handouts available, including:

• A Revised Edition of Romp with Pomp: Books for Kids about the Lewis and Clark Expedition.  This version updates the original which was released in July of 2005.
• Two new Washington Reads compilations, one that gathers together all of the selections from the Fall of 2003 to the Summer of 2007, and one contains all the selections for this our fourth year.

And like last week, we have an important Save the Date Announcement:  On Thursday, November 8, 2007 the Washington State Library will host 81-year-old author Mary Gruenewald, who will speak about her book, “Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps.”  We’ve heard great things about Mary’s book talks, so you’ll want to make sure you mark this exciting event on your fall calendar!

New Library Handouts and Save the Date!

It’s summertime and our staff has been hard at work creating some new handy resources and booking another event!  Now appearing on the Handouts page are:

• A new Supplement to the Go West Young Reader Bibliography, which updates the Children and Young Adult titles set in Washington and the Pacific Northwest from the original list that appeared in November 2006.
• A sampling of Westerns set in the Pacific Northwest.
• This Summer’s Washington Reads selections, this time focusing on Spokane and the Inland Empire.  Click here to read the State Librarian’s comments on this quarter’s honorees.

In addition, mark your calendars for October 3, 2007: Award winning poet Lucia Perillo will be joining us for an evening poetry reading!  Lucia was the recipient of a 2000 MacArthur Fellowship (nicknamed the genius award).  Her 2005 book “Luck is Luck” won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She won the PEN/Revson Foundation Poetry Fellowship for “The Body Mutinies.” Her most recent book which came out in May is “I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing.”  You’ll definitely want to join us in October for this exciting event!

Washington State Library on Your Favorite Websites

Even librarians suffer from “information overload” sometimes.  It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of text and photos flying at you when you’re online, even when it’s coming from your own humble blog.  So we thought we’d take a minute to just point out some of the nifty tools that appear in our blog’s sidebar, that area off to the right of the screen, and probably just out of sight in your browser window.

We’ve highlighted our LibraryThing account before, but because we’ve added so many new materials (over 320 items!), we thought a refresher might be nice.  Of course, LibraryThing doesn’t include everything from our collection (that would be our online catalog), but we do highlight special books from our collections to give you an easier way to virtually browse our shelves.  Our Tag Cloud is a good place to start.  Folks who want to be informed when we add new materials to LibraryThing (which is frequently!) can sign up for our RSS feed.  [What is RSS?  Click here to find out.]

If you ever wished that Yahoo! still indexed the web and created subject guides for your topics of interest, why don’t you check out our list of Research Links through Del.icio.us?  Our librarians have collected hundreds of informative websites, and now they’re eager to share this information with you.  Again, the Tags on the right hand side of our profile page are the best way to explore what’s available.  New subjects areas are being added all the time, so if you want to stay on top of the best of the Washington State web, subscribe to our RSS feed for Research Links.  If you’re already a user of Del.icio.us, you can add us to your network (user name “wastatelib“).

We also maintain a list of just Genealogy Research Links using Del.icio.us.  The username for that list is “WSL_Genealogy“, and you can subscribe to that RSS feed by clicking here. 

Finally, everyone likes having Friends.  If you use Flickr for your photos, we want to be your Friend!  Add user “wastatelib” to your contact list, and you’ll always be the first to receive our newest pictures.

If you have questions or concerns using these web tools, please contact us.  If you’d like to make suggestions for improvements to these services, or have ideas about new ways we can share our library with you, we’d also love to hear them.  We hope these new tools are helpful to you.  If they are, why not share them with a friend?