A $6,500 hobbit

The Hobbit that is, the book, as in a signed second edition recently sold on abebooks.com. You can see the list of the top 10 sales in AbeBooks for October here. Of course, there are copies of that book, and many others too in that site for far less; have a look sometime, it's an excellent umbrella site for used book dealers across the U.S. The library sometimes searches for out of print titles there.

Feral Detroit?

There was a set of articles in Newsweek, the Sept. 21st issue, about Detroit (you can read them in Academic Search.) There have been some articles online too, for example in CityJournal, and a blog has some quite startling pictures (one is shown here,) of how parts of Detroit are becoming "feral," or returning to wilderness.

AquaBrowser & Films on Demand

AquaBrowser is back up! Well, it was, lol, but now is back down again. It will be back, just use the classic catalog for now.

On another topic, let your blogger alert you to a fairly new resource of ours you may not be familiar with, FMG Films on Demand. This is the same group that we have bought many of our documentary videos from over the years, but now we have access to it online. For example, someone was just looking for video about Rosa Parks, the civil rights era heroine, to use in a class - we showed her how to access Films on Demand, which has a video about Parks, something the student could easily access in her classroom's PC.

AquaBrowswer catalog down

Our new AquaBrowser catalog is temporarily down, but you can still access the "classic" online catalog here. Yes, one thing you can say about the old time card catalogs is that they never were "down." Of course, you couldn't do all the nifty random searches, limit by type etc. like you can in modern online catalogs!

Elvis spotted in library cafe!

Hah hah, well, OK, it was really two of the cafe staff in Halloween costume. Elvis Presley sure was something in his time though. We have some great books about Elvis and those amazing early days of rock 'n roll, like, Last train to Memphis: the rise of Elvis Presley, by Peter Guralnick.

Read All Day

Read All Day is a project and a blog by a woman who challenged herself to read a book a day for 356 days, and to write a brief review of each. For anyone who loves books and reading it's a fascinating story! (She is pictured here, busy reading!)

We have books here in the library on reading of course, for example Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why. As a matter of fact, with the sizable book collection we have, covering so many areas, from philosophy to literature to science, history and more, there's no reason why you couldn't embark on your own personal "read all day" project :-)

Nor'easters!

For you meteorology students, or the weather buffs among us, there's a nice article in the NOAA website about nor'easters. We do have the Weather Almanac online, and many books in our collection relating to weather. ScienceDirect and AcademicSearch would be great for articles. I found this photo of a nor'easter in the AP Multimedia site. The photo is of a March 2001 storm, in Kennebunk Maine.

Dictionaries, encyclopedias and more!

Need the definition for a word? Like to read a good background article from an encyclopedia or other reference source, so you have all the facts, names etc. straight in your research? Try our Online Reference Sources page - there's a link right off our main web page too.

We have lots for you to take advantage of, from the definitive "OED," Oxford English Dictionary, to current controversy resources like CQ Researcher, specialized sites like Mental Measurements Yearbook (great to research those psych and educational tests,) general encylopedias like Britannica, and collections of resources, like Gale Virtual Reference.