Review Thursday: Children's Books

Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai by Claire A. Nivola, 2008

When Wangari Maathai returned to Kenya after attending college in the United States, she encountered a much-changed country. Once covered with luxurious forest, the Kenya she found was a nearly treeless wasteland. Farmers had removed so many trees to make way for crops that Kenya was in danger of becoming a desert. Maathai spearheaded a grassroots effort to bring Kenya back from ecological disaster. This inspirational story about how one person really can make a difference would be useful for teaching children about both social activism and environmental conservation. Reading Planting the Trees of Kenya in conjunction with Jeanette Winter’s Wangari’s Trees of Peace would provide an interesting comparison between different authorial treatments of the same subject matter.


What the World Eats by Peter Menzel, 2008

What does a family of five eat in a week? In Greenland, that might include 9 pounds of walrus meat, in Mongolia a pound of dried-milk candy. Twenty-five families around the world are interviewed and photographed over the course of a week of typical food consumption. Each entry includes a photo of the family posed in their home with a week’s rations on a table. In addition to the vivid photographs, What the World Eats includes numerous recipes, charts, and graphs. This title is perfect for young foodies or as an introduction to cross-cultural perspectives on a universal human activity. What the world Eats would be a fun read as a companion to It’s Disgusting and We Ate It: Fun Food Facts from Around the World – and Throughout History by James Solheim.


Money Madness by David A. Adler, 2009

Everyone wants money, but what is it exactly? Money Madness is an introduction to how money works as a medium of exchange and a store of value. By way of explaining the function of money, Adler also introduces younger readers to ideas such as the market, credit, and supply and demand. This is an excellent presentation in simple terms of many basic concepts in economics. Younger readers who are interested in understanding the current financial mess will find it particularly useful.

Sailor Database Review: Books and Authors

Gale’s Books and Authors electronic database replaced Ebsco’s Novelist for Maryland public libraries July 1st. This database is modeled on Gale’s long-standing readers’ advisory print product What Do I Read Next. Books and Authors has several unique features that should be of interest and benefit to customers as well as to library staff. Its “Read-a-Like” wizard enables the user to supply a title that the user has enjoyed, and based on subject, author, or genre criteria that the user specifies, the database will suggest books to read. Its “Who, What, Where, When” feature enables the user to browse books by character, subject, location, and time period. The “My Reading Room” feature lets the user save and modify reading lists, reviews that the user has written, and booklists that the user has created.

Users can search by author, title, keyword, series, or genre, and they can filter by age group (adult, young adult, or children). Non-fiction as well as fiction titles are included. Extensive lists or award winners are included, as well as expert picks, librarian picks, and community picks. There is also an advanced search feature as well as an extensive help feature.

Review Thursday: Search Engines

Search engines have been in the news a lot recently, due to the search engine merger between Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing, so there may be changes coming, but for now let’s look at some Google features that you may want to add to your search strategy.

An underused and very useful feature is the minus sign. It is a helpful addition to enhance your search. Take a look at the effect. If you type ‘dolphins’ in the search box, you will have many hits. Now add ‘-football’ and you will see the total hits reduce in number. The minus sign needs to be immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. So your search is ‘dolphins –football.’ It is useful to look at the first group of results and then consider another term to exclude. You can use the minus sign multiple times, but remember that each term you exclude will no longer be searched. This can be a useful feature for narrowing your search as you view results and see recurring terms that you know are not what you’re seeking.

Another useful filter is narrowing the domain. Rather than searching the entire content of the internet, you may want to consider searching only a government or educational site. In some cases this gives you authoritative sites, although with the edu domain, you must be alert to the source. A PhD student’s site about dolphins might be excellent, while a 6th grader’s school presentation, well-done though it might be, would not carry authority as a source for you to use with your patrons. For the domain, you can type the word site followed immediately by a colon (site:) and then add the domain. Another useful domain is org, although always remember that it eliminates other domains, such as com or info. You can also narrow by country domains if you’d like to focus your search. If you’re interested, domains are listed at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

In the case of these limiters, as well as some others that will be discussed later, you can use the Google Advanced Search link, immediately to the right of ‘Search’ on the Google search page. Instead of typing ‘site’ or the minus sign, you can fill in the blank.

I have customers who are interested in learning more about specific state regulations...

...such as those that regulate the establishment of day care centers. Where can I find this information? And is it available online?

There are times when customers want legal information, but what they are seeking is not a law. As confusing as that sounds, state regulations are significant department policies that have the force of law but are not actually statues (laws). Black’s Law Dictionary defines a regulation as “a rule or order, having legal force, usually issued by an administrative agency.” For example, in the Family Law volume of the Maryland Code, Title 5, Subtitle 5 (FL 5-550-557.1) states that the Department of Education shall have authority to register family day care homes and adopt regulations that relate to the registration of family day care. But this law does not lay out the regulations one must follow to obtain that license. Those rules can be found in the Code of Maryland Regulations, more commonly referred to as COMAR. The details for the licensing procedure are found in COMAR under the title for the State Board of Education (Title 13A of COMAR). There is a hierarchical code number system, which makes it easy to identify where to find regulations. Here’s the explanation from the Division of State Documents (DSD) in the Secretary of State’s office.

DSD manages the system, which is identical to the federal practice of issuing regulations. First proposed regulations are published in the Maryland Register and later codified into COMAR.

The Maryland Code and COMAR are both online and very much up-to-date. You can also find them and many other legal links on the Maryland Law subject guide at SLRC. There are multiple ways in which COMAR can be searched. You can search by the agency name, through a table of contents structure or by using a keyword. It’s tricky. If you don’t use the keyword as it appears in the regulation, you won’t find it. It can be challenging. There’s another thing you need to know about COMAR online. When you retrieve the citations for a topic, you will get a list of regulation links to view. Regulations can only be opened one at a time because they are listed individually. There is no way to open all the regulations for a subject at once. So if you want, for example, to retrieve all the regulations pertaining to child and family day care you will have to click on each regulation one-by-one to open them. When you have a lot of regulations in one subtitle it can be very labor intensive! So try to be as specific as possible to limit your results.

You can get help from the Maryland Department librarians at SLRC. The Department has a few different indexes to COMAR and a complete set in hard copy. If you want to get a section without opening all the individual regulations they can fax or e-mail pages to you. If you still want more help on understanding COMAR, take a look at the Maryland law section of Legal Reference for Public Libraries e-Learning Module at the LATI site on slrc.info.

Review Thursday: Nonfiction

The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America by James Sullivan, 2008

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Twenty-four hours later, James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul,” took the stage in Boston for a now-legendary concert, simulcast throughout Boston on PBS, that has been considered as the beginning of America’s healing process. The story of the behind-the-scenes machinations that led to this broadcast, as well as Brown’s tumultuous relationship with the civil rights movement, is the focus of this fascinating story of music, politics, and American culture. Recommended not only to James Brown fans, but to anybody interested in the political and cultural clashes of the 1960s.

I'd like to start a book club at the library, but I'm not sure how to about doing this. How can I get started?

Book discussion groups provide companionship and socialization coupled with intellectual stimulation, and they’re an excellent programming activity for public libraries. The Fiction and Young Adult Department at the State Library Resource Center has prepared a guide on organizing and running a book discussion group. The guide directs the user to Web sites that provide information about the organizational details that the leader of a new group needs to consider in getting a group off the ground, to Web sites that are useful for getting book group reading ideas, as well as to Web sites that are valuable sources of book discussion group guides for individual titles that as group has chosen.

Consider these points when you begin a new book group in your library:

• Use established library publicity channels to promote the group and recruit members
• At the first meeting use ice breakers to introduce the group members to one another and to learn about their reading interests
• Food encourages informality and conversation
• A group can use a variety of methods to choose books
• Chose only titles with an adequate number of copies
• Don’t choose brand new, popular titles
• A good book for discussion elicits disparate opinions or reactions
• Prepare discussion questions in advance
• A book discussion group leader is a facilitator, not a teacher or an expert
• Center the discussion on the book itself and avoid irrelevant digressions
• Use open-ended questions, and encourage group members to come with their own discussion questions
• Encourage brevity, open-mindedness, sharing and listening
• After you’ve worked with a group, you’ll come to know what to expect from the group’s members

Thursday Review: Fiction

Anathem by Neal Stephenson, 2008

In Anathem, Stephenson sets his story in the world of Arbre, a place with a long history that mirrors our own in some ways. The story begins in a monastery, but one difference from our world immediately stands out -the monastery is not religious, but dedicated to the study of science and philosophy. Those practicing here have been segregated from the outside world, an arrangement with a twofold purpose: while those within are protected and allowed to concentrate on their study without distraction, their power is simultaneously limited and the rate of change that new technologies can bring is controlled. The past history of Arbre was punctuated by cataclysms brought on by new technology, and fear of repeating past mistakes has lead to this unusual arrangement. Monasteries are divided into sections that open to the outside world once every year, every ten years, every hundred years, and every thousand years.

Erasmas is a young monk who belongs to the “tenners”. At the beginning of the book the time of the next ten-year opening is about to arrive, the first time he has seen the outside world since he entered the monastery. However, he receives hints that something unprecedented is going on. Visitors from the inquisition have locked up the monastery’s observatory - the sky contains information that is currently forbidden the monks. Shortly after this, many monks are called out of the monastery by world leaders to help face the threat from the sky. Erasmas and his friends will have a key part to play in what follows. Stephenson has written a very ambitious science fiction novel full of a love of ideas and their implications - the story does not always make for fast reading, but it is always fascinating.

Recommended for those who like philosophical novels like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and lovers of dense science fiction epics.

Thursday Bonus Review: Nonfiction

What's Your Poo Telling You? by Josh Richman and Anish Sheth, M.D., 2007.

This is a serious book that can’t take itself too seriously. Any medical book that wants to discuss the different type of poo that comes out of us and what it tells us about our health shouldn’t take itself too seriously because we would all be giggling to ourselves anyway.

And there is no better way to describe the different forms and consistencies this matter can take than to use the lingo we’ve been using since we were five. When you read chapter headings like, “Soft Serve,” “Log Jam,” and “Hanging Chad,” you know exactly what they’re talking about. Clinical descriptions would take sentences of lengthy words that no one would understand anyway, and make the subject more confusing than it needs to be.

Along with each description is an actual explanation from Dr. Sheth (known as Dr. Stool in the book), of what causes that kind of poo to happen and whether it’s something to worry about. This is the real meat of the book, and this is why it is necessary to have. What does this mean? Should I be concerned? What should I do to help fix it? Do I need to see a doctor? These questions are answered.

The book is also full of fun facts about poo and many illustrations that make the book enjoyable reading. You can giggle at the jokes, and you can use the information to help figure out if you’re okay.

I have a customer who has asked me for information on the value of a painting. Are there sources out there that can help me find the value of a paint

Ideally the customer will have the name of the artist that did the painting. Sometimes customers cannot find a name on the painting and this makes the research process difficult. You may want to try checking various signature and monogram books. It is also important to differentiate between a painting, print, etching etc. In all instances we provide a discretionary caution that we cannot give appraisals, but we have resources for research.

Searching for work by the artist that has recently sold at auction will help determine a relative value for the work. Some suggested books and Web sites include:

Davenport’s Art Reference and Price Guide - Price listings of works of art that have sold at auction houses in America and Europe.

Gordon’s Print Price Annual - Fine art prints.

Artnet Auctions

AskArt - American Artists

You may also want to recommend that the customer contact an appraiser. In all cases, it assumed that these professionals will impose a service fee.

How to Find an Appraiser Fine Arts and Music Show-me guide, requires flash

American Society of Appraisers