National Library Week 2014: Lives Change at the Library

Lives Change at the Library
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This week is the 2014 National Library Week sponsored by the ALA  The theme this year is Lives Change at the Library.

The event began in the fifties (the spring after I was born) and is intended to raise awareness of all that the libraries and their workers do for individuals and communities and encourage the funding for those services.  

Now, during these economic hard times, this is more urgent than ever as libraries have been loosing funding and closing down.  In those that survive services, hours and materials have been cut.  Which translates to fewer librarians and their aides, fewer books and magazines, fewer multimedia items, fewer days open, fewer events held at local libraries.

It is the most astonishing shortsightedness on the part of library levy voters who can't see that the value they get from the libraries compounds the value of the money levied many times over even if they don't use the services themselves.  

And what can I say about the alarming arrogance on the part of community leaders, politicians and local business owners who are often spouting off about how they got where they are without setting foot in a library?

How can they all not see that even if they don't use the library themselves they are benefiting as much as anyone who keeps their card tapped out at all times?  Or that there are library services they could be using that could save them time and money if they didn't see it as a status step down or a violation of their libertarian doctrines?  Or that the services provided contributes to community health in ways that save hundreds of dollars for every dollar spent on the library?

Consider these few:

• Help with tax forms.  Besides those on fixed income like the elderly and disabled there are the employees of local businesses whose peace of mind translates into more efficiency at work.  But not if the library is never open when they are off the job site.
• A source of information on the people and issues on the next ballot.
• Fact check via phone or email.
• Activities for juveniles that keep them safe and the community safe from their boredom fed shenanigans while inspiring their imaginations toward their future contribution to the community and expanding their aspirations.
• Resources for study and homework help for the students who will be the next generation of employees and entrepreneurs.
• Resources for teen and adult hope-to-be entrepreneurs in learning all the requirements to setting up and running a business.
• Resources for homeschooling families who are also heavy consumers of specialty products provided by local business.
• Help for non-native speakers of English in becoming proficient at communicating in English enhancing their value to employers and the community at large.  Not to mention relieving one of the stressors contributing to dysfunctional behaviors that break down family and neighborhood cohesion and clog the justice system.  How do those costs compare to the few dollars per month asked of local property owners for a healthy vibrant library?

I blogged several times about the Southern Oregon Library System's closure in April of 2007 and how it reopened that fall with most of the 15 branches cut to less than twenty hours over two or three days.  It has yet to bring those days and hours back.  Several of the branches opted out of the system and closed altogether.  It still saddens and angers me.

But I'm currently living in Longview, WA and using the library of my childhood and it seems to be as vibrant and bustling as ever.

I've talked often here about how much I owe to the library systems I've patronized.  

• I've called them my universities.  
• This autodidact has depended on libraries to satisfy her every craving for story or knowledge.  
• I've checked out several thousand library books over my life-time and without libraries I'd never have had access to most of the several hundred novels I've read.  
• 95% of everything I've learned about the craft of writing and storytelling I owe to library books and media.
• The research for my stories depended entirely on libraries before the Internet and it is my belief that the Internet will never completely replace libraries for serious researchers*.  

*Research librarians with advanced degrees in media storage and information technologies still outshine and outsmart the search engines--especially now that most of the common free ones are now sponsor driven or the top tier in search results achieve their positions not because of their relevance or usefulness or even truthfulness but rather because someone with something to sell has paid for the slot.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Role of the Library

Jackson County Library Services

There seems to be a movement afoot in the Rogue Valley to bring back our library services to the pre 2007 levels--before the loss of funding and the six month closure followed my limited hours and staffing among other cutbacks.  This would mean extending the hours of all 15 branches again.  For example my Phoenix branch was once open six days a week for a minimum of six hours.  When they opened back up in October 2007 the 'little' branches were given less than 20 hours per week spread among no more than three days and Phoenix was given three six hour days to enjoy the brand new building that was still under construction at the time of the closure.  Even the two large branches in Ashland and Medford were given only five days and very truncated days at that.

And so it remains.

This situation contributes to my not having used our library services in nearly a year.  Because of my failing eyesight I no longer feel safe making the walk by myself and because we no longer have a car my husband has not been able to just drop by on his way home from work to pick up my requests on the one day a week Phoenix branch is open past 5pm.  We keep making tentative plans to make the nearly mile walk together on a Monday evening when Phoenix branch is open until 7pm but have never followed through and now it is the season he works ten hour days so he will not get off in time for that again until after Christmas.

Other factors include the fact that I've spent nearly half of this year up in Longview, WA helping my sister who is our mother's caregiver.  On most of those several week visits she has checked out for me at one or more of the library systems she has access to: the Longview Library which is our childhood library, the Lower Columbia College Library and the Vancouver Library system which has a branch in Woodland just a twenty minute drive from Mom's.

This past November visit was only four weeks and I was busy with NaNo and those time-crunched crochet projects so I didn't go to the library nor order any books from them while I was there which means the last time I had books checked out was last June.  The last time I had items out of our JCLS system was last January and they had all been checked out before Christmas last year.  My sister helped me return an apple box full of books to the library on our way out of town for my January to March stay at Mom's. They were over fifty percent related to my NaNo novel for last year--writing craft and books about role-playing electronic gaming which I've never done myself so needed to research it for my POV character whose passion it was. I had serious intentions of getting every one of them back again in the weeks and months after I got back home.  I would have been shocked and depressed if told that day that I still would not have done so eleven months later.

I must confess that one of the factors has been the embarrassment of having lost my library card during our move last December--for the second time in less than three months.  I had found the first lost one during the packing for the move so I told myself that I would not replace the new one until I'd finished unpacking and sorting all of the books and papers, bags, purses, boxes and pockets that it might have ended up in.  Eleven months later and that project, interrupted as it has been by the packing and unpacking for three extended stays at Mom's, is not completed tho I must say it is close to 90% done in terms of having unpacked and gone through everything if not completely sorted and organized all of the papers.

Then there has been my addiction to ebooks begun when I downloaded Kindle for PC last November in order to accept an ARC (Advanced Review Copy) and then discovered the plethora of free ebooks on amazon and then a few weeks later downloaded Adobe Digital Editions for another ARC and soon after downloaded Calibre which can read most of the other formats and keep my ebook library organized.  Because of my visual impairment ebooks are a Godsend but they are not a complete substitute for everything I need a library for.

Free is the only cost for books our budget can withstand and tho there are many thousands of free ebooks available and the flow of ARCs both ebook and tree book has stepped up dramatically for me over the last year, none of that is a complete substitute for all that I depend on the public library for.

What has all of this to do with the theme of my Friday Forays in Fiction posts?

A lot.

Beginning with the ability to keep up with the latest from my long list of favorite novelists and short story writers and to catch the debuts of new ones I would find on the new books shelf and to acquire those titles I discover on the book blogs and other reviewing resources online.

Then there is the role the library played in shaping my love for books, reading and story.  Then the role it played in helping me study and write term papers through high-school and college, developing my love of story and writing and research.  Then the role it played in my autodidact lifestyle in which I would choose subjects to immerse myself in for weeks or months which if not already chosen as research for a fiction WIP would often provide inspiration for one or more old or new ones.  And of course there is the role of the librarians trained in reference sources and fact finding who along the way have helped me fine tune my searches or chase down an allusive fact or resource or introduce me to a resource I hadn't known was available.

Most import, my fiction WIP including this year's NaNo novel have suffered due to lack of regular public library access this past year.  The Internet can lead me to titles of books and articles I need for research on topics and for fact checking needed for the WIP and research on craft and publishing but I'm rarely able to read them for free online.  And when, as has been my practice, one wants to access upwards of one or two hundred titles per year, few budgets can accommodate that.

There are those who believe the Internet is a viable replacement for everything a library represents to an individual and their community and thus libraries are becoming obsolete and not worth funding.  Aside from the fact that many of those who need free library services are only accessing the Internet at the library this is a woefully ignorant viewpoint, as besot by tunnel vision as are my own RP diseased eyes.

What role has your public library played in your life?  In developing or sustaining your love for reading and/or writing fiction?  In your own blogging habits?  In the raising of your children to love story?  How much of that can the Internet as you now know it replace?

This may be the first of a series of posts in which I explore these and other questions and topics related to the role of a free public library system in communities as our own community begins a new dialog on what ours means to us and the level of funding we are willing to sustain.

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Big Kindle Boogie - One Day Left

http://bigkindleboogie.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/BigKindleBoogie

There are 10 Kindle Fires up for grabs.  And to top it off the winner of the first drawing also gets $500 donated to their local public library.  As bad as I want a Kindle Fire (any Kindle actually) I would be more thrilled to see that money go to our Jackson County Library System which continues to struggle like a transplant patient on life-support ever since the six month closure in 2007.  So I love that these guys are adding that grace note to their boogie.

I have downloaded all of my copies of the 75 books.  Those I didn't already have from the Kindle Fire Giveaway Scott Nicholson participated in with two other inde authors a couple of weeks ago.  The books among them that I'm the most excited about aren't the novels and short story collections but rather the non-fic books on writing, self-publishing, being an indie author and all that entails including promotion.  So even if you think the genre of story these guys write is not your cup of tea but you are an aspiring writer yourself you might find those books helpful.

I am participating in these events and the virtual author blog tours of the previous two days posts as part of my investigation into the inde option for publishing my own stories.  I believe it takes more than reading books about it.  Watching someone who made it work in action is worth a thousand how-to manuals.  And as I've discussed here before, self promotion is a very alien concept to me because of the way I was raised to believe that it was the equivalent to bragging which in turn was evidence of prIde which was a sIn.  Note the big fat capital 'I' in the middle of those dirty words.  Evidence, see, that when you put your big, fat, selfish self into the middle of something you are standing on a slippery slope on the edge of the abyss and nothing good can come of it.

I learned that before grade school and fifty years later still can't shake it.  Even after eight years of blogging.

Funny thing is tho, whatever in me generates that anxiety and self-disgust surrounding efforts at calling attention to myself does not translate to feeling disgust with others I'm observing in action doing the very thing I can't seem to allow myself to do.  I even have vicarious joy in watching them succeed as I cheer them on.  That seems to indicate to me that this is not a core value of mine but rather something more like a Pavlov response.

So I wonder if I were to create a pen name and instill an alter ego in it and publish and promote under it would my 'I' feel free to cheer on it's alter 'I' and allow it to succeed?  

OMG my brain hurts.

Actually if I had my druthers I'd rather give my alter 'I' all the baggage of the  'self=sin' paradigm and write under my own name.  Which BTW means 'joy reborn'.

OK so this post went places I never intended.  Only the pic and the first paragraph was planned when I opened the draft and I almost clicked on publish but then thought to say something about the free books.  This is what happens when I start typing after being awake over twenty hours--just hit 36.  Which is probably why I do it so often.  24 to 44 hour wake periods are to me what alcohol is to the drunk--a form of self medication that lowers anxiety and inhibition.

I wish I could bottle whatever it is that floods my brain sometime after twenty hours awake and take a swig upon waking.

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2010 Support Your Library Reading Challenge

This challenge hosted by Home Girl's Book Blog could not be more perfect for me if it had been designed by me for me. The library is where I get 90% of my reading material anyway. And I've blogged often about what the libraries of my life have meant to me and in 2007 blogged about the 6 month closure of our county wide library system and it's impact on me. So even though the year is half over I'm going to jump into this one. Though I will be putting in the list as read those library books finished since January 1st this year. So I won't be starting from scratch.

There are several levels:

--The Mini – Check out and read 25 library books.

--Just My Size – Check out and read 50 library books.

--Stepping It Up – Check out and read 75 library books.

--Super Size Me – Check out and read 100 library books.

(Aim high. As long as you read 25 by the end of 2010, you are a winner.)

OK then in order to aim high I have to aim for Super Size Me as I check easily two to three times that many each year. Finishing is another story. Especially with NF, as finishing within six months of beginning is rare. So I will count only those which I finish before December 31 and read more than 50% after January 1.

This post will carry the list which I will add to as I finish them.

1. In the World but Not Of It : one family's militant faith and the history of fundamentalism in America / Brett Grainger
2. Sharp Objects [text (large print)] / Gillian Flynn.
3. Look me in the eye : my life with Asperger's / John Elder Robison.
4. The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder [text (large print)] : a novel / Rebecca Wells
5. The conversion / Joseph Olshan
6. The Penelopiad / Margaret Atwood
7. Fool on the Hill / Matt Ruff
8. The cross gardener / Jason F. Wright
9. Push : a novel / by Sapphire.
10. Out of the Dark [text (large print)] / Sharon Sala
11. The Expected One [text (large print)] / Kathleen McGowan
12. Dead until dark / Charlaine Harris
13. Under the dome : a novel / Stephen King.
14. Shadow tag [text (large print)] : [a novel] / Louise Erdrich.
15. The time traveler's wife [text (large print)] : a novel / by Audrey Niffenegger
16. The lost symbol : a novel / Dan Brown
17. The anthologist / Nicholson Baker
18. Payback : debt and the shadow side of wealth / Margaret Atwood
19. Boneshaker / Cherie Priest
20. Big fat paycheck: A young person's guide to writing for the movies / Colton Lawrence
    

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Oregon Rivers

These are a few of the videos I found while researching Oregon rivers as part of my work for my Book Drum project for The River Why by David James Duncan. Most of the novel is set on Oregon rivers.

I gave the video featuring our local Rogue River the top position. And it looks like I've been partial to Southern Oregon and the coast in spite of having grown up between the Columbia and Cowlitz in SW Washington on the Oregon border and visited the Willamette near Portland often.

Wondering what Book Drum is? Its a new site that provides a way to annotate a novel with multi-media material that explains or enhances the story. Like maps, videos, photos, glossary, author bio, links, quotes from reviews and more. Setting is one of the categories and The River Why is mostly set on or near Oregon rivers. The Rogue River is named specifically. In fact the protagonist was conceived near it.









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Book Review: Dewey: A Small Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron

Dewey : a small-town library cat who who touched the world
Vicki Myron
© 2008
Grand Central Pub.
265p

In honor of National Cat Day I'm going to do my review of Dewey: A Small Town Library Cat Who Touched the World which I read nearly two weeks ago. The book had to go back to the library before I could do the review and I haven't sent for it again yet so I'm going to go by memory with a little help from online sources for facts like names and dates.

The story of Dewey is co-written by Vicki Myron the head librarian at the Spencer Iowa library where Dewey was found one bitterly cold morning in January 1988 in the overnight drop box. Judged later by a vet to be approximately 6 weeks old, he was so cold his shivering created an alarming noise inside the metal box the staff was preparing to unload. He was huddled in a corner under an avalanche of books and the outside slot had been jammed open by a book.

Vicki picked him up and he looked into her eyes and began purring. Her heart was immediately won and it wasn't long before the hearts of many in the town of Spencer, then going through the tough farming crisis of the 1980s were won as well. The library board and then the town council agreed to allow Dewey to live in the library as The Library Cat, his duties to include lowering the stress of those willing to lend their laps for one of his naps and acting as ambassador for the library at every meeting held in the library's conference room as well as general public relations.

A naming contest was held among the library patrons and Dewey Readmore Books was settled on. Dewey did his job so well that visits to the library increased from 60K per year to over 100K and Dewey and the Spencer library became famous worldwide. Families from all over the states put the library on their vacation itinerary in order to meet Dewey and have their picture taken with him. He was featured in many cat magazines, library journals and at least two documentaries over his 19 years at the library and his death in November 2006 was mourned around the world, evidenced by the over 200 media carrying his obituary.

Interspersed with the story of Dewey from his kittenish antics (rubber band bandit) to his adult escapades (his encounter with a bat and his one great escape) are the stories of the town of Spencer and of Vicki's own journey to her position as librarian. The main thrust of the story is the effect Dewey had on the morale of the town during the hard times as farmers went into bankruptcy and manufacturing jobs absconded.

Told this way the story is also an ode to libraries and the role they play in communities today. They are no longer (if they every were) the stuffy book mausoleums depicted in so much literature and movies over the decades. Speaking of which: The book became a best seller soon after it's release and soon after that rumors abounded about a movie deal in the works with Meryl Streep in the role of Vicki. Such rumors seem to be confirmed by the story in the Spencer newspaper last April of screenwriter Pamela Gray's visit to Spencer to interview those who knew Dewey and see the sites of his antics and escapades. All I can say is, Hollywood better do right by the modern image of the library. Because if they don't they could damage efforts all over the country in small communities to keep their libraries open and staffed and stocked.

And yes, because of my own experience with the library closures in Southern Oregon in 2007, this story touched me personally not only because of my own love of cats and libraries but because of the way the role of the library in a community was depicted and how this justifies keeping them open and properly funded even--most especially--in the hard times.

There's a bio of Dewey at the Spencer library website.

They also have a spread of photos of Dewey

The Spencer Friends of the Library sell postcards featuring Dewey and the funds are used for library items and functions not covered by the budget.

And Dewey has a Facebook page!

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Sunday Serenity #48

This YouTube is of an Easter Egg hunt at the Lithia Park in Ashland, Oregon about ten miles south of here. Lithia is my favorite park in the entire Rogue Valley. I used to hang out there to do my homework or class reading when I was going to then Southern Oregon State College (now known as Southern Oregon University) in the late eighties.

The video was shot and posted by the Ashland Daily Tidings, Ashland's Newspaper. I just discovered there are nearly 200 more videos posted by the Tidings so I'm going to be exploring them for potential posting in the future, looking for things that show off the local color.

I love Ashland and would like to live there but it is currently way out of our price range. But you know what? I'm going to stop being ashamed of claiming my love for it and my desire to spend more time there.

That might sound strange if you don't know this area but there is a lot of tension between the 'artsy,' 'tree hugger,' 'elitist egg heads,' and the 'working class,' 'Jefferson Stater,' 'red neck,' 'Libertarian,' 'Patriots,' among these valley communities whose economies were once dependent on mining, agriculture and timber and have been suffering the throes for the past thirty or so years of a transition to a tourist, retirement (read out of state millionaires), and high-tech dependent economies; similar in some respects to what happened to the Silicon Valley in the last thirty years of the 20th century.

Note that I put all the labels in quotes to indicate that for the most part they are the pejoratives each side uses against the other. I don't hold with stereotyping and labels lend themselves to that kind of thoughtless empathy-blocking relating that is as unattractive in the one as the other. It is probably evident from a casual perusal of Joystory that my sympathies lean toward the 'artsy' and the 'tree-hugger' and the 'egg head.' But I spend more time among those with the 'working class' and the 'red neck' sympathies and I know them to be good people with hearts of gold and no more deserving of the disdain directed at them then are those to whom they direct their disdain. I just wish they could all see each other past the labels the way I do and could come together to solve their community problems in a win-win way.

Not least (but not only) because these tensions were a direct cause of the inability to create a long term solution for our local library funding. Players on both sides made in-your-face power plays that aimed at win-lose solutions that showed no respect for the dignity or the legitimate anxieties of the 'other side.' The solution that opened the doors of the 15 library branches after seven months of closure is temporary, covering only two to three years and some consider it 'union busting.' So the joy of having the libraries back is a bit dampened by the sorrow of seeing so many of my favorite people (read librarians) loose so much (read jobs, benefits, income) and the anxiety of watching this whole drama play out again in two years.

OK. This post kinda went off track. But I'm going to let it stand and swing it back to topic in closing. To restate my intent: I'm going start practicing a sense of serenity about owning my love of Ashland and all it symbolizes for me in spite of the fact that I interact daily with those for whom 'Ashland' is an expletive because of what it symbolizes for them.

Join us for a moment of serenity.

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Monday Poetry Train #36

Creating Poetry
by John Drury

I just checked this out of the library again for the first time in over two years. I first discovered it on the Phoenix branch library shelves in 2002 or 2003. I was excited about it then but so must have been many others in our area because I was seldom able to renew it at the end of three weeks.

Since it was a book that belonged to the Phoenix branch I never bothered to order it as I just watched for it to show up on the shelf again. I hadn't spotted it for a long while and wondered if it had gotten lost or something. I finally saw it again the day of the Phoenix branch library grand opening for the new building and I realized it had probably gone into storage when we moved out of the old building into the tiny temp building. There were probably other copies in the system which was one of the criteria the librarian used to decide which books stayed and which ones went on ice.

I remember seeing it on the shelf the last day the old building was open and chose not to check it out because I already had such a large haul that day--the day the Phoenix branch closed for two weeks for the move into a temporary building. (And if I thought that was cause for panic, what do you think it was like when I learned the entire county system was closing indefinitely for lack of funding and no stockpiling allowed? Can you believe that was a year ago the clock was ticking down on me?)

For a look at what excites me, here is a glimpse at the table of contents. It is inspiration, induction, and education for the would be poet. I'm hoping it will also be stimulation of new poems to post here as it is chock full of exercises that have passed muster for others. See, poem writing kinda snuck up on me. I never planned on writing poems. The ones I've written just sorta happened to me like waking up or blushing. Now I'm hoping to see if I can learn to make poems happen on purpose like making the bed or brushing my teeth.

I had just ordered a bunch of books on poetry writing and poetry appreciation about the time I learned the libraries were closing indefinitely as I had planned to make 2007 the year that I would make a formal study of poetry writing and reading. I put that project on hold in favor of trying to wrap up several more already in process. Now I'm returning to it.

If you are interested in more of the saga of the Southern Oregon Library Closures click on the label below. It was a local story that made national news and I was even interviewed by a SF Chronicle reporter.

There is nothing like temporarily loosing something you love and depend on to make you really appreciate it.

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Sunday Serenity #42

print for sale at art.com

Dolphins have become a symbol of joy for me, and of the subset of emotions and states of mind contained in joy: peace, harmony, acceptance, hope...

I'm in a celebratory mood today, Saturday, after attending the Phoenix library's grand opening for its new building.

Though still not feeling well enough to make the walk, I got to go because Ed got off work in time to drive me. We still had to walk a couple of blocks because the parking lots of the library and the church across the street were full and the nearest spot on a residential street was well over a block away.

That was quite a turnout for our tiny town.

The occasion was twice as sweet with memories of this time last year when an indefinite closure of our county library system was looming. That closure went into effect last April 6 and lasted until last October 24 (29th for Phoenix).

The Phoenix branch, just one of 15 branches of the Jackson County Library System that closed for seven months last year, has been in a temporary building since June of 2005 after it moved out of its old building so City Hall could move in and thus allow for the demolition of the old City Hall building on which site the new library building was built.

I took my camera and went snap happy with it. I'm planning to do my TT with them next Thursday but I may not wait that long to post something.

Join us for a moment of serenity.

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Oh, Joy! The Books Are Back

The Phoenix branch of our library system opened at ten Monday morning. I was sitting on the brick-enclosed flowerbed by the front door when the librarian arrived to unlock the door at two minutes til ten. I had not slept. I had tried, but it was no go. The day before a big event has always been one of my insomnia triggers.

I was sooooo tired last night. My muscles and joints are still trying to decide if they reeealy want to know each other that well.

My haul included 7 novels for Ed; 5 novels and 5 NF for me; and 4 DVD. Sound like a lot? Ha! Then you don't know me well. Take a look at my profile pic. That was me bringing back the last of the books on the last day the libraries were open last April 6th. About a month before that, I'd had to bring back three or four times that many in the week before they put a 30 item limit on each card. At the heighth of last winter/spring I topped 130 items on my card alone.

That wasn't typical though. 60-80 items on my card is more typical. I kinda went a bit crazy after news of the impending library closure. I had dozens of projects ongoing. I tried to bring as many as possible to adequate stopping places. I panicked. Instead of doing a dozen things well in the last four months, I did six dozen in slip-shod fashion. I stopped taking notes. I tried to become a sponge for the words but no matter which thing I was working on, anxiety about several of the others kept my mind distracted.

I'm hoping I've learned some lessons that will stick over the last seven months. I probably wouldn't have committed to 70 Days of Sweat if I'd still been a slave to library book due dates. I probably wouldn't have committed to posting daily to Joystory either. I do not want to loose the momentum of giving quality time to my writing. I want to bring the ratio of fiction to NF reading back towards half and half. Fiction, my first love, had slipped to less than 10% of my reading over the last decade.

I also learned during the Read-a-Thon October 20th that my reading speed has slipped to between 20 and 30 pages per hour. That is a large drop from the 50 page per hour rate I was at 7 years ago. I'm hoping that removal of a cataract in my right eye and new prescription glasses will allow me to bring that back up but until then, an adjustment of expectations is in order.

Somehow, I got confused today and spent most of the day thinking it was the last day of October and that NaNoWriMo kicked off at midnight. It wasn't until just before dinner this evening that I figured it out. This afternoon I had finally gone to the NaNo site and reactivated my account and updated my profile. I'd been putting it off because part of the task was to grab icon gifs off their site for display in my sidebar. It had been so long since I'd altered my sidebar, I'd forgotten how to do it. I also needed to change the image at the top of the sidebar, shaming Southern Oregon for the library closures. The one showing a jumbled pile of books with a red circle and slash over them.

There were several other things I changed on my sidebar. I spent the evening after dinner plugging away at it, learning how to add URL links to images that refer to their site instead of to blogger's photo id. Also, in reverse, to add an image to a link in a link list. I made a number of changes but there are still more to do. For one, I need to totally revamp my link lists. This evening I eliminated at least half of the links in 'Blogs I Haunt' because I hadn't visited for months or I knew the link was invalid. I need to add in the ones that have become regular haunts over the last year.

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Thursday Thirteen #56

Thirteen Books, DVD or Authors On My High-Priority List Now That the Libraries Are Open Again

1. Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation.
I had only made it fifty or so pages into this before the libraries closed in April. I had to wait in queue twice for my turn.

2. Anything by Ken Wilber

3. Marcus J. Borg's The Heart of Christianity.
Because someone just recommended it to me.

4. The last five or more titles published by Joyce Carol Oates.
A recent visit to the bookstore alerted me that I've missed at least that many. How did that happen?

5. Same thing for Stephen R. Donaldson's novels.
I've been thinking for some years that I would like to re-read his two Thomas Covenant Chronicles since I read them the first time over a decade before my exit from fundamentalism and I've been curious to see what new things I might see in the story after my explorations in religion and philosophy. I discovered at that same book store visit that he has just published a second volume in a third trilogy set in the same world. How did I miss that? Now I need to decide if I want to re-read the first six books first....

6. Stephen King's Dark Tower series.
I read the first five and then decided to stop and wait for him to complete the series and then start from book one again. He issued the final volume last year and I was planning to get started after NaNo last year but after news of the impending library closures the first week of December, I decided to wait.

7. Anything by Neil Gaiman.
I had just discovered him last spring. Brought home a couple of his novels for Ed who read them and agreed that they were my kind of story.

8. Anything by Holly Lisle.
Ed has been reading her for years and trying to get me to try one. Since I've been participating in her Friday Snippets since early June, I have regretted I never read one of her novels. I just read her Plot Clinic which I won in a 70 Days of Sweat drawing and am hoping our library system will have her World Building and Language Building and Character clinics too.

9. Shakespeare plays on DVD

10. Shakespeare from A-Z
This book compiles info about Shakespeare, the plays and his time in an encyclopedia format. It includes synopsis of each play, entries for every character and info about the production of the plays through time and famous actors who played Shakespearean roles.

11. Dracula
Both the novel by Bram Stoker and the movies made based on it are of interest to me because of my current reading of Elizabeth Kostava's The Historian.

12. Anything by Dorris Lessing, this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.
I discovered Lessing in the eighties and once had my own well thumbed and underlined copy of her The Golden Notebook. But like several other of my favorite novelists, I lost track of her latest during the nineties after the weight of my reading shifted to the non-fiction because of my quest.

While I'm at it I want to return to last year's Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. Another one I'd just discovered last winter. I had waited in queue for months for my turn with several of his novels and never got the chance to read them.

13. The movie, House of Sand and Fog, on DVD.
I read the novel in 2000. I had been in queue for my turn with the movie for months and my turn was next the week the library closed. I'll have to get in queue again as they did not preserve the requests records.

####

Of course, I'm not going to find many of these in the tiny Phoenix branch. I will have to put my requests in. But I have to go in to the library to do so as they aren't adding back the option of requesting materials online until mid November.

The Medford and Ashland branches opened yesterday but they both entail bus rides. I'm waiting for Phoenix to open next Monday morning. I'm planning to be waiting on the doorstep.



Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It's easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

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I Just Want To Celebrate

I Just Want to Celebrate.

Oh, Yeah.

Because we here in Southern Oregon are about to get what these folks in SF got last February:

It was announced in the Medford Mail Tribune, our local paper, this morning. The two main branches, Ashland and Medford, will open on October 24th. The rest of the thirteen branches will start opening the following week.

Phoenix branch, the one in walking distance for me opens on the 27th. It will be open only Monday through Friday for a total of 16 hours per week.

So much for my Friday Library Treks. But hey, some things are negotiable.

15 local library doors locked indefinitely was a crime against the mind.

Oh boy. I've either got to calm down or start dancing:

Run Come Celebrate by The Pepper Pots

Celebrate by Kool and the Gang

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Oh, Happy Day!

I hope getting excited and starting to celebrate at the hearing of good news isn't like the groom seeing the bride in her wedding dress before the ceremony. But I've been feeling like dancing a jig all week since I heard this news. And also like pretending that I hadn't heard it so that I wouldn't get too excited. Because it is still just a maybe.

A pretty solid probably. But still just a maybe.

And it is really ironic because it was just a week or so ago that I finally got around to putting that pic at the top of my side bar with the red circle and slash over a pile of books and the caption shaming Southern Oregon because the libraries are still closed and here the school year has started up again.

Then last weekend, there was this article in our local paper. They may have got it figured out and all fifteen branches may be open by sometime in November.

Running at half the hours with half the staff. But open.

Just in time for my birthday!

***********
I decided to go with this for my post tonight as I could knock it off quicker than I could prepare my Friday Snippet. Watch for my snippet--part 7 of Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes--sometime around noon Pacific Coast time.

I'm still not used to this new schedule my body seems to have settled into since I started getting well after that two week illness. Well, my body is apparently used to it But my expectations and ambitions haven't adjusted. I keep making plans that have to be put off because I tire out between eight and nine each evening where I was used to thinking of those hours between 9pm and 2am as my most productive of the day.

Not only have I been sleeping nights. But I've been sleeping one to two hours longer than I used to. And there hasn't been a single wake-a-thon of 20-36 hours--often my most productive times of all.

*************
Speaking of happy days. Today was the end of the first 70 Days of Sweat round. I just remembered that I still need to go check in.

I didn't make my goal in word count 60-70K. I think I'm somewhere between 40-50K, depending on what gets counted. But I still feel that I accomplished something way more important. I established an enduring habit because I spent quality time with my story world every single day since July 8 and unlike with NaNoWriMo the last three years, I have no anticipation of heaving a big sigh and setting it all aside for weeks or months.

I may ease up a bit but I can't imagine going even one full day without doing something related to it. I will probably get real focused on character sketches, outlines, notes, scene concepts, time lines etc. between now and the start of round two. I also need to decide which of the three or four stories that still qualify I want to dedicate to NaNoWriMo and get completely immersed in dreaming it by the last week of October.

It is going to be hard to tear myself away from the characters in Faye's story though. So I'm not going to. Any new material I add to Faye's story during November will count as sweat for Sven. Besides, since most of the POV characters of the other six or seven novels based in Faye's story world have at least a walk-on if not a serious supporting actor role in her story, any work on Faye's story is like priming the pump for any of the others.

See? How wrapped up I am in it? That's what the Sweating for Sven challenge did for me. Even if there wasn't going to be a second round I'm not about to abandon Faye and her world again just because the challenge ended. It has become its own reason for being a part of my days.

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Thursday Thirteen #38

Thirteen Things about going to the book store Sunday 1. It had been five years since the last time we went book shopping. 2. It was a twenty minute ride in a hot car with no air-conditioning. I walked inside with my sunglasses still on, so could see nothing at first. Taking them off before entering would have been worse because the RP causes a significant lag adjusting to changes in brightness. The bigger the change in either direction, the longer the adjustment. Removing my sunglasses immediately after entering rather than before cuts the lag at least in half. But for those moments before I remove them, it is dark as a raven against a moonless night sky. 3.. It was more than a few moments before I could remove my sunglasses, as is often the case when being escorted by my husband. Because I am carrying my cane in one hand and have the other on his elbow or in his hand, I do not have a free hand to remove them. Thus I was hit with a bombardment of sensations on my other four senses. The coolness of the air. The sudden hush. And that unmistakable smell of new books. 4. Before I could remove my sunglasses, those sensations caused a series of flashbacks to about a dozen interrelated book store and library visits over the past ten years. Including the several book shopping excursions in the year after Ed got his dot.com job in the Silicon Valley in 1999, when on at least three occasions he had set me free in a book store saying he would let me know when my pile went over budget. I presented him with piles as big as I could carry in one arm and still use my cane with the other. Must have been over a $100 each time. He didn't even blink. 5. But simultaneously with that memory came the memories of the second-hand book stores in which we sold off my personal library to pay for one more week in the motel we had moved into when we got evicted from our house after his dot.com job went dot.gone. I had left that store in tears as they tallied up the worth of the books. 6. Immediately on the heels of that memory was the equally devastating memory of the moment I received the news at the Phoenix library that our Southern Oregon library system was going to be shutting its doors. 7. Thus by the time I removed my sunglasses my eyes were full of tears and all I could see was a smear of color and light. I almost put them back on but instead, I avoided blinking until the tears dried and meanwhile reached out to touch and caress and pick up books whose titles I could not read. I held them open in front of my face so I could inhale their scent. 8. It was a good ten minutes before I could get my bearings and start looking for Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I had set my sights on back in March when Oprah announced it as her book club selection. She had already moved on to the summer book selection but my desire for The Road had only been reinforced by viewing her recent interview with McCarthy. 9. Ed had taken off on his own reconnoiter of the store almost as soon as he had me clear of the entrance. As soon as I could see the sign indicating the fiction section, I headed there. I entered the aisle of the Rs' and worked my way backwards. I had just reached the Ms when Ed caught up with me. He asked if it was Mc or Ma and I said I couldn't remember. Not being able to remember something which I know perfectly well that I know perfectly well, having seen the book cover online and on Oprah, having typed it into the search engine and into my journal, having looked it up in the library catalog, this is one of the insidious symptoms of the anxiety disorder that has plagued me since preschool. 10. Ed had grabbed the book and was handing it to me almost before I finished speaking. As I took the book, I noticed his hands were empty. I asked with surprise if he wasn't going to pick something up. The book store visit was primarily on my behalf so that I could use the gift card I got for Christmas but since the library closure in April Ed had reread his box full of paperbacks, the books my niece had lent us and several from my collection. He was in more need of fresh reading material than I was. I hated to be the only one walking out with a book even if it was one he was interested in too. I pointed at the 20% off sticker on The Road, which I realized meant he would have to cover less than two dollars after the gift card instead of the five or six we were expecting. But he was already gone. 11. I never try to find him in a store once we are separated. The best idea is to stay put and let him look for me in the last place he saw me. I started meandering backwards through the alphabet again but had only reached the Ls when he was back, flashing the cover of a Terry Pratchett hardback for under six bucks. I asked him to show me to the discount section so I could see what all they had. He complied and took off again. A few minutes later he was back saying, I changed my mind, and showing me a John LeCarre. I smiled but refrained from teasing him for this so typical pattern of showing immense enthusiasm for a choice only to change his mind five minutes later and transfer the enthusiasm to his new choice. 12. I wasn't ready to leave yet so he took off again. When he returned the next time he asked for my book and gift card. I put down the book whose jacket I was reading to fish out the gift card. He left me to continue browsing while he checked out. I was still perusing the same book when he returned. I put down the book, glancing once more at the front cover, hoping I could remember the autor and title long enough to get out to the car and pull my notebook out of my purse. Once we were clear of the doors outside he moved off to the side to light up a cigarette and asked if I wanted to see what he got. Wasn't it the LeCarre? He just grinned and pulled out the same book I had been looking at when he came to fetch my book. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. 13. He swears it was coincidence, that he already had it in his hand when he came back for my book and card. He chose it primarily because it was twice as long as either of the other two. But it was still a mystery/intrigue which he was in the mood for. But his grin when he asked if I wanted to see, told me that he had at least recognized that I was likely to be equally enthused by it. And I am. It contains multiple elements, any one of which, would make it a must read for me. Its a mystery full of intrigue that crosses centuries. There are elements of the paranormal. The clues are buried in ancient manuscripts and library archives. It features a strong female protagonist. There are a plethora of allusions to historical and literary trivia. And the prose is a sculpted work of art in every paragraph I dipped into. I can't wait..... As much as I am enjoying the Snicket series, I am sooooo ready to move on to more adult, more complex fare. So my goal this week has been to finish A Series of Unfortunate Events. I was nearing the end of book ten last Sunday and am now two-thirds done with book twelve. One and a third to go. Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. Tink 2. Gattina 3. Miss Frou Frou 4. Miss Frou Frou 5. Tempest Knight 6. Lisa Andel 7. T.A.Chase 8. Susan Helene Gottfried 9. L^2 10. A-Country-Mom (formerly Stephanie) 11. Joy T. 12. MyUtopia 13. Ann 14. Thomma Lyn 15. Madame Rubies 16. julia 17. Rhian / Crowwoman (leave your link in comments, I'll add you here!)

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It's easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!
View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

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Help! I Don't Know How To Be Without a Library.

From the Jackson County, Oregon web site, the final update for the night was posted just before midnight:

PRECINCTS COUNTED (OF 51) . . . . . . . . . . 51
REGISTERED VOTERS - TOTAL . . . . 110,952
BALLOTS CAST - TOTAL. . . . . . . . . . . . 58,588
VOTER TURNOUT - TOTAL . . . . . . . . . . 52.80%

15-75 Local Option Tax for Public Library Operations
JACKSON COUNTY

Yes . . . . . . . . . . . . 24,253 = 41.74%
No. . . . . . . . . . . . . 33,852 = 58.26%
Total. . . . . . . . . . . 58,105


We got the first half of the fifty-fifty requirement: The better than fifty percent turnout of registered voters. But for the second time in under a year, Jackson County, Oregon has said a resounding NO to a library funding levy.

It is going to take me a few hours, if not days to assimilate the understanding that I'll be without library resources for at least several more months. The earliest another measure can get on the ballot is September.

I don't know how to be without a library in my life!

My first memories of visiting the library are from the time my baby brother was still in a stroller. He was 22 months younger. So those memories go back to age three. I have very vivid memories of receiving my first library card at age five and then upgrading to a 13 year old's card with 'upstairs' privileges in the adult stacks. That was in Longview, Washington where I lived until I married just after my 21st birthday and since then I have lived and held cards in Oceanside, California,, Longview again, Jackson County, Oregon, Longview again, Sunnyvale, California and Jackson County again. During the late eighties I had a card with the Southern Oregon State College (now Southern Oregon University) in Ashland as well as the county card. In Longview in the late nineties I had a card with the Lower Columbia Community College as well as the city card.

Remind me again how I am supposed to do this. I know I worked out a plan and nothing has changed to alter its parameters, though there was a close call this past two weeks with the malware attack putting my laptop and relatively unhindered access to the Internet in jeopardy. Maybe I'll feel a bit better by tomorrow night, after I've had a chance to adjust to the let down of the slim hope I was holding onto; after I've had a chance to review my plan for how to live and continue my work for a time without library resources. It isn't a long-term plan though. If this is still going on a year from now I'll have to be reminded why I want to continue living in a community where vested interests are holding access to knowledge hostage and the majority of those who care enough to vote about it are A Ok with the idea.

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Turned my library levy ballot in here this morning. Phoenix City Hall now occupies the building which was the Phoenix Library a year ago. Our new library is being built on the lot where City Hall used to be. But will it ever open its doors?

Today is D-day for the library levy. Ballots must be turned in by 8PM which is less than three hours out now. To pass there needs to be better than a fifty percent turnout of registered voters plus better than fifty percent in favor. Word on the local news at five is that turnout is running at 48%. Close enough for hope but not close enough to relax. No word yet on how the votes are falling. Opinion on both sides has been strong and outspoken.


Nobody needs to guess where I stand.


I walked my ballot over to City Hall in Phoenix this morning, dropping it in the box just before nine. To do this, I had to stay up way past my usual bed time of late. I had hoped not to be leaving it to the last minute like that. The ballot arrived in the mail the same week the malware attack hit my laptop. Possibly the same day thought at the moment I can't quite remember whether the ballot arrived on Saturday the 28th or Monday the 30th. I will never forget the moment my laptop started blitzing the screen with browser windows and pop ups faster than I could close them. Just before 3AM that Saturday morning.


For over a week, I feared that I was about to loose access to the Internet and my files at the same time I was loosing access to the library. Panic is not a strong enough word to describe my state of mind. Over the next twelve days my laptop got at least as much attention as a newborn in intensive care. After a week of playing Whack-A-Mole with the malware, my husband was at his wits end and told me to start preparing for a probable reformatting of the hard drive. By which he meant for me to collect my personal files for back up. Since some of my files needing back up were still on the PC, I started working with them during the times the laptop was busy with scans or restarts.


One of the biggest backup projects on the PC was my email corrospondence trapped in the AOL software. I had discovered only after I had been using my laptop for three months that transferring AOL mail files from one computer to another would overwrite the files on the destination computer. I would have had to choose between the two years preceding my Dad's death while I was in Phoenix communicating with my parents and siblings three to five-hundred miles north of here, or the three months following his death while I was in Longview, Washington communicating with my husband here in Phoenix. Then there was the email related to web site admin on both. No way to choose. Thus the only way to salvage the PC email files was to copy and paste them into text files or save them as HTML pages.


I knew that project was going to be huge which was why I procrastinated on it so long and because it was hooked in my mind with the whole issue of backing up my files it tended make me avoid thinking about it. But this latest scare has really got my attention. I hope I never need another lesson in the importance of backing up your important files regularly. A lot of the stress of the last two weeks would have been avoided if a few keystrokes could have backed up my files.


I had been estimating that the PC email retrieval was going to take two or three night work sessions. Access to the PC for me is limited to between 9PM and 5AM. Or I can get back on it after my husband leaves for work on the days his mother also works--Tuesday through Friday. Which is what I did this morning because I had to stay up until I could walk the ballot over anyway. I had come very close to completing the project before five but had a couple dozen more emails to sift through and some double checking with my photo folders that I had already copied the pictures over to them. That took me a bit less than an hour after my husband left for work this morning. I estimate that I put in close to thirty hours on that project alone over the last ten days.


The email was the last of the files on the PC needing to be accounted for and organized for backing up. Now I can focus on the files on the laptop. And the good news is that the laptop is cooperating at the moment. The aberrant behavior has been nearly zip since Friday evening. There is hope we will not have to reformat the disk after all. But I refuse to loose the momentum or the motivation on the file back up project. I am still hoping to hit the target my husband set a week ago which was this coming Saturday. The day he was going to take the hard drive back to its out-of-the-box state.


But for the next several hours my focus is going to be on following the election returns on the local news. The fate of ballot measure 15-75 holds my fate in its hands. Life will go on without library access but wouldn't be a life I would recognize or feel at home in.

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Yaaaay!!!

Am back on my laptop. My husband had it powered up again by noon. I didn't claim it again until after four though. Between the need for more sleep and wanting to reward him for his efforts with a few hours of its use, I rolled back over and went back to sleep after witnessing the power light on the front light back up again.

I am so grateful to be back on the familiar territory of my keyboard and files and desktop preferences. The PC was once familiar territory and I could have once again gotten used to the clunky, oversized keyboard. I could have moved all my files, including my browser bookmarks and reconfigured my old personal desktop on the PC to accommodate my visual impairment with larger fonts and higher contrasting colors than the family uses on its desktop. I could have and I was prepared to if it had become necessary.

I had talked myself out of the initial urge to roll over and play dead for the seeming inexorable series of misfortunes--loosing my fur baby, Gremlin, companion of fourteen years; loss of access to the library; my husband's grandmother's fast failing health; severe money stresses; a number of health issues, including vision, which have taken slides recently; breaking the ear piece off my reading glasses and damaging their lenses somehow which permanently fogged them--I could go on. Suffice it to say that it has been a daily struggle to stay committed to the vision I have for my writing and the web presence intended to give it an audience. The loss of the power cord Wednesday night was especially frustrating as at first it seemed insurmountable. My first reaction had been panic followed by temptation to despair. But I managed to resist the the lure of despair, a once too familiar companion.

I had developed contingency plans and begun to envision adapting to the new situation. It was heartening to discover that the habits of commitment to my writing which I had been developing since January 2004 had taken strong enough root to resist the old tendency to fold at the first sign of adversity.

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I'm trying to remember the last time I spent 24 hours without lifting the lid of my laptop. Can't.

Don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. Guess it depends on the criteria for judging. At any rate, I was able to follow through on my plan to make the best of the situation. I choose to set my panic on a back burner until Friday evening at least. I should know by then if the hiatus is going to be hours or weeks longer.

Meanwhile, I did get four loads of laundry done and put away Thursday. I lost track of how many TTers I visited. I started and finished The Bad Beginning, Volume 1 of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Then started The Reptile Room and am more than 3/4 done with it as well. Both are re-reads, as I mentioned in my TT 29 below. But I am out to see how fast I can read the entire series. I had finished Volume 3 The Wide Window last September shortly before we got the WIFI. It was about then that my intense affair with the laptop and nearly unlimited web access really took off. By the time I came up for air towards the middle of October it was time to get serious about my NaNoWriMo project so I set aside the Lemony Snicket series, intending to reward myself with them after NaNoWriMo. I was really looking forward to spending most of December bingeing on fiction. My niece was excited about the prospect and was loading me down with books she wanted to share with me.

Then early in December I got the news about the upcoming library closure. Well the rest of that story can be followed via my posts since then. Any regular reader will know I was fairly obsessed about the looming library closure from that point til the day the doors were locked April 6th. The days since then have been about groping toward balance again, as I've posted several times. Not that I don't continue to pine for the library. But was starting to refocus. And now this, with the power cord giving up the ghost. It is hard not to see it as some kind of cosmic joke. Hey I'm not laughting.

Maybe someday I will.

I think I am rambling. Think it is time to go to bed. It is hard to let go of the computer knowing it will be 9pm before I can be back on it. But I have had little sleep in the last twenty-four hours and am going to have to give over the computer to my husband in about fifteen minutes anyway and if I don't get to sleep before six, I tend to get a second wind that will take me past noon even if I have been awake for over twenty-four hours. If I let that happen, I would essentially be giving up tomorrow night's session on the PC in my in-laws front room. It is all coming back to me. This was my life between January 2002 and September 2005.

(my apologies to TTers who left comments and who I have not visited yet or put your links on the front page. I will make that my first priority with tonight's session)

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Attention Jackson County Oregon

Attention Jackson County Oregon

Save Our Libraries

Yes on 15-75

The caption under the picture is a link to the local PAC set up to promote the levy measure on the May ballot for funding Jackson County Oregon's 15 branch library system for another three years.

Ballots will be mailed on April 28 and must be turned in by 8PM May 15. (Note: if mailing your ballot, be sure to mail in plenty of time. For those who have been used to dropping your ballots into the locked ballot boxes at your local library branch in past elections, here is the list of official drop sites established for this election.)

Final day new voter registration will be accepted for this election is April 24.

Here is a PDF of the voter pamplet.

Please Jackson County, Save our library system!

You can bet I'm going to have more to say about this over the next month.

So this evening marks one full week since the library doors were locked. I can still barely believe it. Meanwhile I am tending to the promise I made to myself the day I posted this Thursday Thirteen regarding the things in my life I have neglected in the four months between learning of the impending closure and the day the doors were locked. I am groping my way toward balance. Sleep and writing are the two things that have gotten the most attention this past week. With this post I congratulate myself for having posted every day for a week.

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Save Our Libraries

This is the picture now displayed on the home page of our library system's web site.

There is is a mixture of sadness and anger in our community this week. There is a strong consensus that loss of library access is not good for the community but there is not much consensus on what should be done about it.

The sadness needs little explanation. The anger is a complex cauldron.

Some of the anger is directed at the county officials because of a perception that funds have been mismanaged, or that they dithered too long in creating a replacement for the Federal safety net monies due to expire last year.

Some are angry with the Federal environmental laws and the 'loony tree-huggers' who filed suit after suit over the years to stop the logging on the Federal lands which was providing the income for the rural counties that then needed to be replaced with the 'safety net' money known as the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act which expired in December when Congress failed to renew it.

Some are angry because they perceive the library closures as a blatant attempt by certain county officials to manipulate public sympathies against the logging restrictions and in favor of solutions that propose selling millions of acres of public land to create trust funds for the counties.

Besides sadness and anger there is anxiety on the part of supporters of county ballot measure 15-75 which would fund the libraries at current levels of service for another three years with a tax of 66 cents per $1000 of assessed property value. This is estimated to average about $9 per month for the average home owner in the county. Anxiety stems from several concerns, not the least of which is that tax measures are notoriously difficult to pass in Southern Oregon. Then there is the requirement of a better than 50% voter turnout with a better than 50% yes vote in order for the measure to pass and Southern Oregon is also known for low voter turnout. The fact that a similar levy garnered less than a 50% approval last November when hotly contested Federal Congressional and State Gubernatorial races provided a bigger draw than the election this May is expected to contributes to the anxiety.

Those who suspect that interest in last November's version of the levy was impacted by the hope then current that Congress would vote to renew the county safety net after the fall recess. A hope that was to be disabused. If that was the case then, a similar reluctance to pass the levy could be induced by the fact that a three year extension of the county monies has been inserted into the emergency appropriations bill for the Iraq war--the one Bush is threatening to veto because of the time lines it contains. But that D.C. imbroglio could drag out for several more weeks and it hasn't been decided yet whether, if it passes, the county monies would be forthcoming at the beginning of the fiscal year this summer or at the end of this year.


Nor does it help that county officials are murmuring to the effect that even if the levy passes it could be months, if not the beginning of next year before the libraries could be reopened because of the complexity of collecting and disbursing the money..

Thus it is that the campaign to save our libraries is going to be an uphill battle.

More information about the issues involved can be found on the website of the Association of Oregon Counties.

The Southern Oregon Library website is still hosting its infoblog which continues to post breaking news relevant to the library closure and personal testimonials. One post from January 27 is regularly updated with links to the most recent news from newspaper articles to TV broadcasts and even blogs. The newer links are added above the older links which makes this particular post a good resource for following the complexities of this story over time.

Meridith May's San Francisco Chronicle article is still one of the better overviews of the situation as it stood a month ago.

And Open Democracy, an anonymous local blog, gives some good background info as well as a taste of some of the passions and personalities involved in this local drama which is fast becoming a national spectacle.

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