I recently checked out Michael W. Smith’s latest album, A new hallelujah, or musical compilation as some would say.  For those of you who are not familiar with Michael W. Smith, he is considered one of the most influential artists of contemporary Christian music. I have been following and appreciating his music and writing abilities since the beginning of his career in the early eighties.

I have switched, like so many of us, to downloading my music online and loading it on to either my computer, MP3 or iPod player. The library is a great way to preview many of the albums that you might want to buy. That is what I was doing with Michael W. Smith’s latest. This album however, reminded me of why I believe compact discs still have a place  in today’s market place.

A new hallelujah although not hailed as a live album, is performed before a live audience in Houston, Texas. The flow of the songs because they are performed live, in my opinion, need to be played in order. While listening to the CD, I began appreciating the CD format. I was able to feel like I was right there with Michael W. Smith. Many of the  songs on the album have been performed by other artists such as Chris Tomlin and Hillsong United. They have been rearranged as only Smitty (as he affectionately is called) can do. The album highlights Smitty’s piano talent and ability to elicit audience participation.

The library has a large collection of music available for you to explore a variety of musical genres. If you haven’t explored the Christian music genre, I highly recommend checking out the Michael W. Smith collection that we have.  If you want a quick listen to what I think is one of the best songs on this album, check out this video of the song, Deep in Love withYou.

In brainstorming  this week’s blog post, I began wandering around the Internet and found a fascinating article on NPR.org. The article featured a blurb about a new book called This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson. It seems so insightful that, despite having requested it through the Library, I may just go out and purchase it for my own collection.

Lately, I’ve been really pondering what it means to be a librarian (or semi-librarian in my case, as I don’t have my Masters in Library Science yet). I won’t say that I have a hard time answering this question, especially since I’ve been working at the Library and learning more about librarianship in my day-to-day duties. But there are times when I’m at a loss for words when someone asks me “Why do we need librarians when there’s Google?” (Yes, I’ve been asked that, readers.)

The question of what it means to be a librarian is one that I’m always seeking answers to and the answers I’m finding are always fascinating. Here are a few books that spring to mind when I ponder my current occupation as semi-librarian/book wrangler:

Librarian as Bookmonger/Disseminator of Information: There was a book that I read about a year ago called How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard. I have to confess that I didn’t finish reading the book and here I am attempting to talk about it. Within the first chapter of this book, Bayard discusses a passage in a book called The Man Without Qualities (don’t ask me if I’ve read it) in which an ideal librarian is one who “never reads more of the literature in his charge than the titles and the table of contents”, lest a librarian lose perspective in his role as disseminator of knowledge. I found that quote so astonishing that I stopped reading to make note of it…and hadn’t really started back.

Librarian as Social Worker/Psychologist/um, Mall Cop: Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks and Gangstas in The Public Library is a fascinating and uproarious book about the rigors of public library work. I liked this book because I could relate in certain ways to author Don Borchert, a free-spirited wage laborer whose path into the library field was, well, non-traditional (read: a happy accident, really).

Librarian as Book Aficionado: The Library At Night is an intriguing book by author and bibliophile Alberto Manguel that features fascinating musings on his own expansive book collection and on libraries in general. Though not a librarian by trade and profession, Manguel is a man possessed of a deep appreciation of books themselves. He loves not only the wealth of knowledge and beauty within a book but also the sight, the feel and perhaps even the smell of books.  I can imagine that quite a few librarians are initially attracted to this field by their simple love of books.

I miss lilacs.  Against the advice of every book I read when I first started gardening in the South I defiantly planted a lilac bush and nursed it through three years of misery before it finally gave up on me.   Mother Nature’s compensation for depriving me of that scent, comfortingly sweet in the soft night air, heady and almost too heavy in the midday sun,  is magnolias with their bright lemon scent and those show off camellias that bloom when I still don’t expect to see flowers.  Though I miss the Spring riot of peonies I could never keep a gardenia alive back home and roses and rosemary are so much less finicky here.  It is difficult to feel cheated when planting pansies in the fall, cheerful, bright and hinting at the intoxication of Spring in the South, but I still manage to feel put upon when I find myself cutting the grass in December.

Naturally I have a battered copy of Don Hasting’s Month-by-Month Gardening in the South but here are a few other titles in the collection you may find helpful.

Bulletproof Flowers of the South by Jim Wilson,  Gardening in the Humid South by E.N. O’Rourke,  Questions and Answers by Deep South Gardeners by Nellie Neal, Gardening with Native Plants of the South by Sally Wasowski and Commonsense Vegetable Gardening for the South by William D. Adams

March 7-13 is Teen Tech Week, a national initiative that focuses on promoting libraries’ nonprint resources to teens. This annual event is sponsored by YALSA, the Young Adult Library Services Association and this year they have chosen the theme Learn Create Share @ Your Library. This year’s aim is to remind teens and those that work with teens that the Library is a place to learn how to effectively, efficiently and safely use technology in order to help with school, future careers and more. And of course, knowing how to use technology can be lots of fun!

In celebration of Teen Tech Week, the Dunwoody Library will be having a Teen Internet Scavenger Hunt. Teens are encouraged to stop by the Dunwoody Library to pick up a list of questions to be answered using the Internet and the DeKalb County Public Library website and Reference Databases. Those who answer all questions correctly have a chance to win a cool prize! Please click here for more information.

The Brookhaven Library will be hosting Robots, Go! a fun and interactive program that allows teens to create actual working robots. Click here for more information.

And don’t forget to visit DeKalb County Public Library’s teen events calendar for a listing of teen events through the Spring. There are ongoing programs that are designed to acquaint teens with various technologies at many of the DeKalb County Public Library branches. Stop by the Chamblee Library or Flat Shoals Library for a Wii game night, or sign up to take a PowerPoint class at the Toco Hill-Avis G. Williams Library.

And most importantly, if you are struggling with anything from research to resumes to social networking, remember that your librarian is here to help! So stop by your local Library today to see how you can use technology @ your library.

Also: check out the Library’s new Teen website, available March 5.  It’s a completely re-designed website where you can find advice from the library’s own teen volunteers on what to read, watch, and listen to.  It’s also got many other things too, like polls, reviews, and homework help.

I don’t understand how my shelves at the library can be in perfect Dewey Decimal and Alpha order but my house is an unorganized mess.

I’ve read the best of the best—Peter Walsh’s How to Organize Just About Everything at 501 pages.  It covers just about every organizing situation from planning a wedding to organizing a filing system. I got a workout just carrying it around but due to its extra large size, I never lost it under a pile of clutter.

Walsh also wrote Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Big?. It explores the connection between being overweight and clutter. He recommends ways to clean out your house and your refrigerator.

I skimmed “Organizing solutions for people with attention deficit disorder : tips and tools to help you take charge of your life and get organized.” This would be good with a prescription for Ritalin.

I took the fun test in Organizing for your brain type: finding your own solution to managing time, paper and stuff by Lanna Nakone. Her system was foolproof except in my case.

And I own Organizing from the Inside Out: the foolproof system for organizing your home, your office and your life by Julie Morgenstern.

All in all, I’ve tried and grudgingly accepted that I am one of the few, the not proud, the disorganized. But there is a bright side. I took an informal poll of my co-workers and most of them have great looking shelves but messy homes. It’s a good thing you can only come to the library instead of our homes, right?

This month the Library added a new online tool for our patrons – Optimal Resume (available through our Reference Databases page). As the name suggests, Optimal Resume assists you in creating a resume and cover letter but it has many other features that make it a comprehensive aid to job seekers. Every day, library staff help people using our computers make resumes and search for work. We’ve been looking for something that would make it easier for job seekers and Optimal Resume is the best product we’ve seen. It’s used in many college and university career centers and we’re happy to be able to offer it to DeKalb County residents.

To use Optimal Resume, you will need to first set up your account through the library’s website. If you’re accessing the website at home, you will need your library card number and PIN. You only have to go through the Library’s website the first time. Once you’ve set up your account, you can login directly to our Optimal Resume website.

Once you login, you’re taken to the Document Center. The resume and letter sections have lots of professionally written sample resumes and lots of online help (like a link that suggests appropriate “action verbs”). Optimal Resume takes you section by section through the resume process and formats the document for you. You can work with their examples, start your resume from scratch or upload an existing resume. You can customize your resume for different job openings and store all the versions online in your Optimal Resume account. No more keeping your resume as an email attachment or on your flash drive (we have a lot of flash drives in our lost-and-found drawers.)

Beyond creating resumes and letters, Optimal Resume will help you create your own website. You can post your resume, create an online portfolio and more. Your website can be public or password protected. I used several of the sample documents to create a resume and application letter for the imaginary Jane X. Sample. You can see her personal website at http://dekalblibrary.confidentialresume.com/Jane_X_Sample/.

If you have access to a webcam, you can use Optimal Resume to record yourself during a practice interview. A video “coach” offers advice on good ways to answer some of the usual interview questions. It’s a great way to rehearse for a real world interview.

The Libray is offering classes to help you get started with Optimal Resume and staff will be also be available to assist you with the site during any of our “Open Labs for Job Seekers”. Come in and try it out at any of our libraries or at any time from your home computer.

Celebrated British novelist Salman Rushdie will have a multimedia exhibit of his life and works at the Emory Library’s Schatten Gallery from February 26 to September 26, 2010.  The exhibit is called “A World Mapped by Stories: The Salman Rushdie Archive,” and as part of the opening festivities tomorrow (Friday, February 26) there will be a symposium with Rushdie and other authors.  Read the full press release to find out more details.

The DeKalb County Public Library has copies of many of Rushdie’s novels, including Shame, Midnight’s Children, which won the Man Booker Prize as well as the Best of Booker Prize in 2008, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories and about a kazillion others.

I remember when I was a little boy I was so disappointed to find out that most adult books didn’t have pictures. What fun is a book without pictures? I was outraged. Today, still, I think pictures are a great way to enhance the reading experience. Luckily, I’ve found many others who agree with me. Some of them are visual artists who have been inspired by literature or literary figures. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to highlight two blogs that show off a wide range of literary inspired art.

Picture Book Report

I love this blog. It’s a project where many different visual artists have agreed to re-illustrate the classics. Each artist chooses one book to work from, and each week we get new artwork illustrating key scenes from that book. Some of the books chosen so far have been Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, A Wrinkle in Time, Geek Love, and many others. The visual styles vary greatly from artist to artist. For me, it’s really illuminating to see someone else’s conception of a well loved classic.

Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobberin’ Time!!!

Yes, it’s a silly name for a blog. I’m not sure what the story behind the name is, but it’s a fun website where different artists draw or paint portraits of their favorite literary authors or characters. There must be over a hundred artists participating, and they’ve drawn everyone from H.P. Lovecraft and Kurt Vonnegut to Willy Wonka and Ignatius J. Reilly.

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.” Such was the wisdom of American industrialist Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company and father of the modern assembly line. I agree with the sentiment and attempt to make every day a learning experience (working in a library is a big help in this endeavor). If you feel like I do, then you may be interested in checking out one of the many OpenCourseWare offerings available online.

OpenCourseWare can be defined as the free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. Such courses typically do not offer certification, or access to instructors, but are excellent resources for furthering your own knowledge in a given area. The first OpenCourseWare selections were offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 and since then a large and growing number of institutions (including many highly regarded universities such as Stanford, Yale, and Harvard Medical School, among others) have published their own OpenCourseWare projects. As of 2009, MIT had over 1900 courses available online, with reading lists and discussion topics, homework problems and exams (often with solutions) and lecture notes. Some courses also include interactive web demonstrations in Java or MATLAB, complete textbooks written by MIT professors, and streaming video lectures. Other institutions boast similar offerings.

For a list of institutions offering OpenCourseWare resources, click here. The listings are divided into nine categories, including Academic Behemoths (MIT), Ivy League (Yale), and International (University of Tokyo). Or, if you prefer, you can utilize the OCW Finder, which, as its name suggests, helps people find OpenCourseWare.

Of course, if you are interested in autodidacticism you needn’t venture farther than your neighborhood library. The DCPL catalog contains two excellent educational series (Great Courses and Modern Scholar) available for checkout in both CD and DVD format.

So take advantage of these resources and keep your mind young for life!

As you might remember from my podcasting blog post from a few months ago, I’m a huge fan of podcasts!  Recently I’ve also become a huge fan of short stories.  I don’t know why they are not more popular.  Think about it: people have less time than ever,  they are constantly on the move, and with so much to read and do, who has time to finish a tome like this one or this other one.  What a better format than a 20 page short story that you can read at the bus stop?  Better yet, a 20 minute short story you can listen to while working out?  I think the combination of podcasts and short stories is up there in the list of genius combinations with rice and beans, Romeo and Juliet, and jeans and t-shirts.  So without further ado, here are some of my favorite free short story podcasts:

Miette’s Bedtime Story Podcast

Miette reads both classic and contemporary short stories in her soothing English accent.  This is one of my favorite podcasts, and true to its name, I’ve fallen asleep many times while listening (though sometimes the stories gives me weird dreams).  The best part about this podcast is that all the stories are handpicked by Miette herself, who has unpredictably quirky but excellent taste.

The New Yorker Fiction Podcast

Every month in this podcast they ask one short story writer to pick and read any story from The New Yorker archives that has influenced them or that they just really enjoy.  Afterwards, the writer talks about the story with fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.  It’s interesting to see what stories different writers pick.  For instance, I thought it was surprising that George Saunders chose Isaac Babel’s short story “You Must Know Everything,”  (which was one of my favorite stories in this whole series, and introduced me to a great writer).

PRI: Selected Shorts Podcast

This podcast gets professional actors to read short stories in front of  a studio audience.  Each episode follows a theme for an hour, and usually contains 3 or 4 short stories.  The performances are top-notch and really draw you in.