The folks that brought us usa.gov have established a blog of their own over at http://blog.usa.gov/roller/. The blog is called Gov Gab and is maintained by "a team of five bloggers with different backgrounds and interests, all experts on government information via their jobs at USA.gov, Pueblo.gsa.gov, or 1 (800) FED-INFO."

The blog is a week old and so far have had conversational, user-friendly postings on photo resources, gov't travel sites, apartment hunting and organic foods. If you're familar with Lori Smith's blog on MySpace, you have a sense of the tone of this blog. The sites featured are taken from federal, state and local web resources. If this week is an indicator of the quality, this will be a great resource. I hope it gets maximum promotion from librarians and other interested parts.

The blog accepts comments according to this reasonable sounding policy:

We welcome your comments and expect that our conversation will follow the general rules of respectful civil discourse. This is a moderated blog, and we will only post comments from bloggers over 12 years of age that relate to topics on Gov Gab: Your U.S. Government Blog. We will review comments for posting within one business day. You are fully responsible for everything that you submit in your comments, and all posted comments are in the public domain. We do not discriminate against any views, but we reserve the right not to post comments.

According to a reply to a comment I saw, the blogging team is very open to suggestions for future topics:

We would love to get ideas for future blog topics! You can email any of us by clicking our name above our posts and sending us a message.

Spread the word! The more the merrier around here.

Consider the word spread. Thanks much to Ray Matthews of the Utah State Library for pointing out this new blog to me. Now go and do the same for others!

Anyone who has ever had to teach about federal regulations is always thrilled to have good, hopefully entertaining, examples for this topic. And now that instructors have access to the Reg Map, we can actually give a step by step explanation of this once murky process (thank you, General Services Administration). As is the case with legislative process, our students' first question is frequently "How do regulations come about?" We reassuringly tell them that executive agencies produce regulations, frequently due to statutory mandate, and that the regs are published first in the Federal Reqister, now Regulations.gov as well, before being codified in the CFR.  From the Reg Map, we learn that that there are other Initiating Events besides legislative mandate: such as recommendation from an external group.

Well, a recent news article offers a fine example of an external group directly petitioning the federal Executive Branch: environmental organizations are asking both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to more tightly regulate air fresheners. The groups don't need to approach Congress; they can go directly to those agencies whose mission it is to keep us safe.  And since the air freshener industry, a $1.72 billion annual sales concern, is cranking out "sprays, gels and plug-in fresheners offer[ing] no public health benefits" but potentially causing "breathing difficulties, developmental problems in babies, and cancer in laboratory animals," I am glad the groups are taking action.  The groups are asking for labeling of all ingredients in air fresheners and a banning of allergens or items appearing on California's Proposition 65 list of chemicals. Here's a report from the National Resources Defense Council, one of the groups involved.

The "right to read" is essential in a democracy and is abridged when citizens can get "authentic" government information only from government-controlled
computers. 

Stories such as the following two make us even more concerned about privacy and the right to read because they show the lengths to which the government will go when it has any access to information about the reading habits of citizens.

It is particularly revealing that these articles show that the government defends its right to do this by saying that some materials are acceptable and some are not. A DHS spokesman says, "We are completely uninterested in the latest Tom Clancy novel that the traveler may be reading" but the book "Drugs and Your Rights" fell into the category of an item that "leads the inspection officer to conclude there could be a possible violation of the law." 

This is precisely the problem.  Under these conditions, citizens may fear reading things that they think a low level bureaucrat might find suspicious -- and thus the right to read is abridged.

• U.S. Airport Screeners Are Watching What You Read, by Ryan Singel, WIRED (09.20.07)

• Collecting of Details on Travelers Documented; U.S. Effort More Extensive Than Previously Known by Ellen Nakashima Washington Post (September 22, 2007)

See also: Rovere on Privacy and Privacy: "I have nothing to hide" and Privacy and the "Terrorist Surveillance Act"

Do you need Sunlightalinazinosec? The Sunlight Foundation helps to celebrate the power of the Web on OneWebDay!

Carl Malamud, FGI's open govt hero, has done it again! In a recent letter to Marybeth Peters, the United States Register of Copyrights, Malamud and others have asked Peters to provide bulk access to a "vital public database" -- the copyright catalog of monographs, documents, and serials.

The letter recognizes that "sales of the database may be a significant source of revenue for the Copyright Office" and that "budgetary requirements or the assent of congressional oversight committees" might make it difficult to make the data available right away and offers an short term alternative of "...we would like to offer to set up a collective fund for purchase of a single copy of the database, making it available for anyone to use. This would provide a public distribution channel...." The letter also says, "We ask only that you help us clarify that there is no copyright on the database so that we may freely redistribute it."

The letter was signed by the Digital Library Federation, Harvard University Library, Public Knowledge, Stanford University Library, the Association of Research Libraries, the Internet Archive and others. For more see:

• Library Journal
• National Journal

The copyright catalog of monographs, documents, and serials is not a product, it is fuel that makes the copyright system work. Anybody should be able to download the entire database to their desktop, write a better search application, or use this public domain information to research copyright questions.

A price tag of $86,625 places this database beyond the reach of university libraries, small businesses that wish to provide a better copyright search service, and academics or citizens wishing to analyze the copyright registration process. Additionally, setting copyright restrictions on the copyright database, a “work of the United States Government,” runs directly counter to the well-established principle that such works shall be in the public domain.

I hope LC and the Copyright Office take this letter seriously and releases the database to the original owner, the public. However, I am not sure whether Ms. Peters will be amenable considering the post about her on BoingBoing a few days ago.

Have you ever tried to open a WordPerfect document when all you have is Microsoft Word? Or maybe you've received a Microsoft Works document and found that your version of Word won't open it. If you've been around documents for a while, perhaps you've tried to open some of the spreadsheets that agencies distributed in Lotus format and found that you couldn't open the files If so, you've experienced first-hand the problem that Aliya Sternstein describes in an article about the importance of open formats for government information:

• The Risks Of Software Choice In E-Government, by Aliya Sternstein, National Journal's Technology Daily, (Sept. 20, 2007 pm edition)

One of the big technological battles going on now is between the truly open ODF format and Microsoft's so-called open format, OOXML. Sternstein writes "Microsoft and its supporters maintain that having a choice between any and all open file formats would be advantageous for governments" but that "[g]iving U.S. agencies a choice in file formats could be bad for record-keeping because down the road, records might be saved in different, non-compatible formats or agencies might be held hostage by one company's product line."

Will Rodger, public policy director with the Computer and Communications Industry Association, says:

"It is hugely ironic that promoters of OOXML and critics of ODF say you need to look at what their technologies do. As far as we can tell, the greatest impetus for the development of OOXML is to create technologies that perpetuate the proprietary lock-in [that] governments were trying to eliminate in the first place."

(See also:   Government Information in Legacy Formats: Scaling a Pilot Project to Enable Long-Term Access, by Gretchen Gano and Julie Linden, D-Lib Magazine (July/August 2007) Volume 13 Number 7/8, and a project a colleague of mine, Doug Tower, worked on several years ago, the UCSD GPO Data Migration Project and the page that describes some of the processing for that project, Processing and Quality Control. Also see: Microsoft vs. Open Formats.)

Many of us who are drawn to U.S. federal publications end up traveling to our Nation's capitol fairly regularly, if we don't live there already.  Over time, we develop constellations of memories about "the first time I did" this or that in Washington DC.  We attend GPO-sponsored events like the formative Interagency Depository Seminar (alumna, class of 1993) or the Depository Library Conference & Council meetings; we tour famous sites and museums; we recall our first time on the Mall, seeing cherry blossoms, and riding the Metro.  Special people in our lives are willing to show us "their" Washington DC, and their perspectives further enrich our understanding of all the secrets within the Beltway.
 
There are also special Washington DC people we visit -- our family or friends -- who are completely outside the govdocs realm.  For fifteen years, I've had a standing date (always dinner and a walk) with a reference librarian from the Library of Congress, Art Emerson.  Art served as the Library of Congress subject expert for Australia and New Zealand.  He was a contemporary of mine from the University of Michigan School of Information and Library  Studies (its old name).  Art and I would look forward to our annual time together:  what new memorial would we see?  What museum just opened?  What ethnic restaurant was fabulous and as yet undiscovered by the hordes?  I'll never forget the night he took this small town girl on a no-holds-barred tour of the Metro's steepest escalators, because he knew what fear and excitement these inspired in me.  He took special pride in my teary-eyed first glimpse of the LC Main Reading Room and the restored Jefferson Building.  When he visited the Northwest this past year, we took him to see Seattle's favorite Australian import, Lauren Jackson, play a mean game of basketball.
 
My friends and I were shocked to learn that Art Emerson died last week.  A health problem had been building, stealthily, for some time, until it finally manifested itself and ended his life.  He was 51.  He had spent a glorious year at the State Library of New South Wales.  He helped people all over the world discover treasures of one of the greatest libraries on Earth, and a federal library at that.  He was still planning his next trip to Australia, perhaps planning his next book project after his Historical Dictionary of Sydney.  He had a wicked sense of humor and a mind that would be the envy of any scholar.  With the serendipity that always seems to happen around a death, I turned over a scrap of paper on my guest room floor last night to find that it was a card for Tony Cheng's Seafood Restaurant and Mongolian Barbeque, the last restaurant I visited with Art.  I'm too sad to eulogize him further right now, and FGI is not the place to do so.  But I thought in Art's memory, I would ask the FGI readership:  what are some of your favorite secret spots in  Washington DC?  What special person introduced you to these?  How has Washington DC changed who you are as an information lover?

What happens to the record of congress, public input, even roll-call votes when members of congress are given 15 minutes to object to a bill being automatically approved? Roll Call has the story:

• 'Hotlined' Bills Spark Concern, by John Stanton, Roll Call, September 17, 2007 [subscription required, but a copy is freely available here]

Senate conservatives are upset that the leaders of both parties in the chamber have in recent years increasingly used a practice known as "hotlining" bills -- previously used to quickly move noncontroversial bills or simple procedural motions -- to pass complex and often costly legislation, in some cases with little or no public debate.

The increase was particularly noticeable just before the August recess, when leaders hotlined more than 150 bills, totaling millions of dollars in new spending, in a period of less than a week.

The practice has led to complaints from Members and watchdog groups alike that lawmakers are essentially signing off on legislation neither they nor their staff have ever read, often resulting in millions of dollars in new spending.

...According to the Library of Congress' legislative database THOMAS, of the 399 bills or resolutions passed by the Senate this year -- which range from recess adjournment resolutions to the Iraq War supplemental bill -- only 29 have been approved by a roll-call vote. The rest have been moved via unanimous consent agreements, the vast majority of which were brokered using the hotline process.

(See also, just for fun, the Stinking Badges Home Page)

Our bookmobile trip is over and we are back to our respective day jobs. However, there are still some stories we couldn't leave behind so we'll be posting a few more items over the next few days. Here's the first one:

Our visit to the Hoopa library on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation was unforgettable. We drove from Arcata to Hoopa around 8:30 in the morning. The weather was just about to turn to fall so we could feel a crispness in the air as the sun shone through the pine and cedar trees. The road (Rtes 299 and then 96) to Hoopa is incrediblly beautiful.

The library was small but well organized. Despite it being early morning, quite a few community members gathered at the library to see the bookmobile or to use the library. We could tell the community was tightly-knit because everyone knew each other and no one was a stranger to them.

One of our bookmobilista speils has been that anyone can download anay of the hundreds of thousands of books (the goal is 1 million!) free of charge; we thought that was universally a good meassge. However, Several Hoopa community members mentioned that not many people in the valley had computers and those that do have uneven internet access at best via the phone line. The library has 4 computers with DSL but the librarian mentioned that the internet connection was spotty and so she recommended that users get a magazine to read while waiting for larger files to download. As we've said previously, the digital divide is unfortunately alive in rural communities across the US. So a digital bookmobile was not the optimum solution for this community.

Regardless of their level of access to the information highway, in Hoopa the library IS at the center of their community and the community knew and cherished that -- that's the dream of every librarian! We interviewed several community members about what they thought was the role of the library in their community. Ms. Hayley Hott gave a particularly passionate response (see below).

Click To Play

Many librarians are struggling to know about the community that they serve, but we felt that this library was truly a success story. It might not be the largest collection or have an abundance of facilities, but it is loved and highly-used by everyone in the valley.

The Sunshine in Government Initiative has a new database of news articles and stories that are based on documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests:

• SGI FOIA Storybase

Read more about the database and how to search it here:

• The FOIA Files: Stories that FOIA Made Possible
  Countless media outlets, government watchdog groups and individual Americans have used the federal Freedom of Information Act to obtain important information on how -- and how well -- their government operates, knowledge that is crucial to a well-functioning democracy.
  • Systemic failures keep two million veterans & widows from benefits owed them.
  • Military tells next of kin one story about combat deaths, documents tell another.
  • $1.2 billion & 6 years not enough to start up anti-terror data mining.

The Sunshine in Government Initiative is a coalition of media groups committed to promoting policies that ensure the government is accessible, accountable and open.

 Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization By Oya Rieger

CLIR Seeks Public Comment on White Paper: Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) seeks public comment on a white paper examining preservation issues relevant to large-scale digitization projects such as those being done by Google, Microsoft, and the Open Content Alliance. The paper, Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization, was written by Oya Rieger, Interim Assistant University Librarian for Digital Library and Information Technologies at Cornell University Library. It is available at http://www.clir.org/activities/details/mdpres.html.

The paper identifies issues that will influence the availability and usability, over time, of the digital books being created by large-scale digitizing projects, and considers the relationship of these new resources to our print collections. It concludes with a set of recommendations for rethinking a preservation strategy.

In issuing this paper, CLIR aims to stimulate discussion among stakeholders and to generate productive thinking about collaborative approaches to enduring access. To this end, CLIR invites those who submit comments to indicate whether they would like their comments posted publicly on our Web site. CLIR will make public only those comments accompanied by permission to post (let us know if the comments are to be anonymous or signed), and all such comments will be moderated. Comments received without permission to post will be shared only with CLIR staff and the author.

Public comment is sought through Friday, October 5. Please address comments to Kathlin Smith (ksmith@clir.org). CLIR will issue a final print and electronic report later this fall.

Our 2 week bookmobile trip has finally wrapped up with our last stops today in Willits and Ukiah (both in Mendocino county). We just got home to San Francisco.  We are not able to write all our thoughts but we can tell for sure it was truly fun and learning experience.

We learned about the crucial roles that libraries play in rural communities. For many communities, the library is not just a place where you can check out books; it is the social, cultural and educational hub and more. People come to the library to join writing and knitting groups, book club, to fill out resumes and apply for jobs, submit their taxes, surf the Web, and on and on. It's been great to visit those 11 libraries over the last 2 weeks to see in person the central role that libraries play in their communities -- despite the budget cuts, staff shortages, lack of tech support, knowledge and infrastructure. Academic libraries could learn a lot about building and sustaining communities simply from observing small, rural libraries.

We'll write more tomorrow, and will post more flickr images as soon as we get a new camera cable (which I lost somewhere between Blue Lake and Willits :-) ).

Thanks to Steven Aftergood, the World Law Bulletin is now available.

For its own peculiar reasons, the Law Library [of the Library of Congress] has declined to make this serial available to the public....

But now a collection of back issues of World Law Bulletin, dating from October 2000 to March 2006, has become publicly available through alternate channels.

"World Law Bulletin", Secrecy News, September 10, 2007.

Day 11 was one grueling day - driving and setting up/breaking in Hoopa Indian Reservation, Blue Lake and Eureka for the Oysters & Ale library benefit for WiFi.  When we got back to the Arcata hotel around 9:30pm we were so tired that we decided to have a blogging/flickr-ing moratorium. It was worthwhile since we had a full day of excitement and interesting conversation with community members. We can't wait to blog about it when we get back to San Francisco.

6:20am this morning we got woken up from a sound slumber by a call from the front desk telling us that the bookmobile was about to get towed to make room for the Saturday farmers' market. James as the official bookmobile driver, got up, threw some clothes on and stopped the Man from towing us. Whew! Nobody can tow the bookmobile!!

Now we're up and on our way to Mendocino for a day at Willits and Ukiah before heading home. We'll wrap up the goings on these last two days tonight or tomorrow. Stay Tuned!

And now for my second tale of local government information and intrigue from Tacoma, Washington.

I live in a 1920's era house, and I have to admit that sometimes the first spurts of water out of the tap are slightly rusty (nothing to worry about, the plumber assures me, as if anyone would believe that).  But in this past month, I noticed that the water had a slightly tinted look to it, even after I'd let it run for a while.  It wasn't anywhere near as cloudy as the tap water I'd seen in Vancouver BC last year when I visited that city during a boil-water advisory. No, this tinted water looked a little off, tasted fine, didn't seem to kill me, and froze right up into sort of mod-looking ice cubes.  Normally, I'm skiddish about such things, but I didn't think too long and hard about my not-quite-right water.  I was thirsty, so I'd been drinking it anyway.

I was suprised to see in last week's mail, mixed in with the Val-pak coupons, cable TV come-ons, and various unwanted bills, a blanket-mailing to all Tacoma residents from the Tacoma Public Utilities water management superintendent.  The content of the letter said basically, hey, the water's yellow, we know about it, it's a normal seasonal occurence, and it happens when naturally-present iron and manganese pass through our treatment process.  Problems or concerns?  There's a phone number I can call.  I didn't call it, because I felt satisfied with the information, but I'm glad the phone number is available.

Mass mailings direct from government, aside from those related to taxes or elections, have always interested to me.  Here at work, we have agreed that the nuclear fallout shelter designs from FEMA, delivered en masse to American doorsteps through the early 1980s (as near as we can figure), are some of the most seductive.  By far our favorite is Home Fallout Shelter: Snack Bar, Basement Location, Plan D. I went trolling about on Worldcat, the open web, and Google Books, looking for a digitized copy from a .gov or .edu.  Found one on a web site called Millionaire Playboy(TM) which I approached with trepidation; it appears that Millionaire Playboy(TM) is a commercial outfit that reviews and sells kitsch to the pop culture and video gaming communities.   Why have these folks beaten us to the digitizing of these government classics, which they've no doubt gotten from a federal depository library (or from some hopeless collector with a worse hoarding impulse than mine)?  (Scroll down to the bottom of this off-putting Mr. Stinkhead column and you'll see a bunch of them.)

I'm signing off for the day.  The web has wearied me.  I've rambled too long, when all I wanted to tell you about was my yellow tap water and how my local public utility gave me the resources to learn more about it.

PolitiFact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. In the months ahead, the news staffs of both organizations will examine major claims by presidential candidates and rule on their veracity. Our Truth-O-Meter will help voters sort fact from fiction in the campaign. This is a working database and over time it will grow more valuable.

The Congressional Research Service is the public policy research arm of the United States Congress and solely serves Congress as a source of nonpartisan, objective analysis and research on all legislative issues. Through the Congress, the National Agricultural Law Center is periodically receiving CRS reports related to agriculture and food issues. New and updated reports will be posted here as they are obtained: www.nationalaglawcenter.org/crs/

From the Guardian at www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6863800,00.html

"A three-year veil of secrecy in the name of national security was used to keep the public in the dark about the handling of highly enriched uranium at a nuclear fuel processing plant - including a leak that could have caused a deadly, uncontrolled nuclear reaction....The public was never told about the problems when they happened. ...In 2004, the government became so concerned about releasing nuclear secrets that the commission removed more than 1,740 documents from its public archive - even some that apparently involved basic safety violations at the company, which operates a 65-acre gated complex in tiny Erwin, about 120 miles north of Knoxville."

Analysis of e-Government from the Taubman Center for Public Policy, Brown University at www.insidepolitics.org/egovt07int.pdf.

Fortunately we got our pimped out (or at least with a new radiator!) bookmobile back from the mechanic today just in time for our visit to Humboldt County Library in Eureka. The library building looked like a beautiful retreat place where you can smell of ocean.

Eureka has quite a different community compared to other libraries that we've visited on our tour. Many of the people we talked to already knew about Internet Archive (or Project Gutenberg) as well as issues of public domain. This is the first time it's happened to us over the last 10 days. We were at the library for 5 hours and a stream of people stopped by the bookmobile and gave kudos for our work. We didn't even need to talk about the importance of the public domain and why community has to support their local library. It was easy to see how much the community supports their library. Many library staff came out to see our bookmobile including the new library director, Victor Zazueta. He told us that he believes the library is an educational institution and "poor man's university."

While talking about open source software in the library, he mentioned that Riverside County Library and the City of Redding had contracted out the management and operation of their libraries to a private company called LSSI. It's shocking to hear about a library being managed by a private company. This is wrong on so many levels. The library is an integral part of any community and we seriously doubt that a  private company could appreciate those roles as their main goal is making profit, not providing local history, education, knowledge commons, and cultural space. Victor told us that at Riverside, there were high school students working the reference desk. What a shame.

After breaking down the bookmobile we visited the library's local history and special collections. This is one of the most beautiful local special collections we've ever seen. The room was full of local history that are used by community members, historians, and scholars. We wondered if this collection would exist if the library were being managed by LSSI. Our two main messages this entire trip has been the importance of the public domain and supporting local public libraries. We hope our message resonates with each community that we've visited.

Tomorrow is our big day. We have 3 places scheduled - Hoopa, Blue Lake, and the Oysters and Ale Library Fundraising in Eureka. This will be fun and crazy! For more photo please check here.

This is bookmobilistas in action. Please check it out.

And this is *exactly* why we need a distributed system of digital deposit, collection, preservation and access.

"Cuts Impact Digital Work At Library Of Congress", National Journal's Technology Daily, Sep 11, 2007 PMedition by Aliya Sternstein

Budget cuts this year and a paltry funding outlook for fiscal 2008 are frustrating digitization efforts at the Library of Congress, according to Library employees. Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans disagree on how much money to supply the program in the future.

The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, established by Congress in 2000, devises means of finding, saving and providing long-term access to cultural resources that exist only in electronic format. But $47 million -- half of the program's funding -- was rescinded in fiscal 2007 to support other critical library programs.

Day 8&9: We left Red Bluff yesterday and we are now in Arcata gearing up for tomorrow's stop at the Humboldt County Library in Eureka, CA.

Our time in Red Bluff reminded us the resemblance between our physical and our knowledge landscape. Red Bluff is a town of 10,000+ people but houses and businesses are so spread out that everyone drives their car (actually it was mostly trucks and SUVs which probably accounts at least in part for the poor air quality) which creates a feeling of disconnect from the community. We didn't see any active public places (parks, squares etc) where community members were getting together and sharing their space in common.We are witnessing the shrinking of public spaces where culture and community emerge. This is mirrored in the erosion of the public domain. As knowledge/information has become more and more hyper-commodified, the idea of public ownership of culture drifts into the fog of history. This bookmobile has been a great opportunity to remind ourselves and those we talk to about the importance of the public domain in the creation of culture and community.

In reaching the crest of our journey, we will have a busy few days coming up including being part of Oysters and Ale festival, a WiFi fundraiser for Humboldt County Library at the Eureka Marina on Friday. We've been ready for all kinds of technical difficulties and have backup plans for all contingencies *except* for our wheels. And wouldn't you know it, we've run into a blocked radiator in the bookmobile. No way around it but to get it in the shop for repair now! So far the bookmobile has been good to us so we are very hopeful. We will keep you posted.

On the way to Jeter Victorian Inn we drove past the Herbert Kraft Free Library (Library Journal Vol. 46 p. 216) which was the first public library in Red Bluff. The library looked exactly like a Carnegie library, but in front of the building was a sign - "House of Design." It turns out the Tehama County library outgrew the building and moved to the old Safeway building about 16 years ago.

The original library was funded by Mrs. Kraft in memory for her late husband under the condition that if the building was not used as a library it would be returned to her family's estate. When the library moved, the city lost the property and eventually it got sold to the current owner who turned it into a gift shop. The library was filled with fake decorative flowers, soaps, candles, etc, but we could imagine how the library would have looked in the past. The rotunda of the library is beautifully restored stained glass and the sunlight through the glass amplifies the church-like atmosphere.

While Kraft library maintains the elegance of the past, the current public library is eclectic for sure. It's in a circa 1960s Safeway building that converted to the library. The current library is not aesthetically pleasing from the outside -- however, the ceiling inside has 3 large wooden beams that look like waves; But we thought it's an interesting idea to convert commercial property to public space, especially since our public spaces are dwindling -- there are many towns and cities where the only "public space" is their shopping mall!

Red Bluff was not on our itinerary, but we decided to just go ahead and set up the bookmobile in front of the public library guerrilla-style. We showed up at the library around 2 without notice and asked a librarian if we could set up the bookmobile. After we described who we were and what we were doing, she said ok with no hesitation.This was our first guerrilla tactic and it worked ("no one expects the Spanish inquisition!"). Our backup plan was to set up right across the street from the library but this was *much* better because we were somewhat cooled under the large Safeway awning :-)

The library was the teen after-school hangout spot so we had a chance to talk to many young library users. One teenage boy was very interested in our music collection, especially heavy metal. So we searched and found a music file from the archive collection and turned on the music on our laptop. We hardly understood the lyrics, but he was obviously pleased and said "cool!" quite a few times. Another teenaged boy asked us to find Italian books because recently his grandma told him that he was of Italian decent. We found books on Italian grammar and Italian cooking for him and showed them to him on the spot. He was so excited to see the books and thrilled to take one book that we had just made for him. When we see young kids are interested and excited about our collection we get excited too.

The travel book was right. Ref Bluff is blazing hot in summer. While we were standing in front of the library for bookmobile, we dreamed that the building was still a Safeway and we could go to aisle 4 and get a drink; but then the delirium would wear off and we'd remember this is not a Safeway but a library and there are other types of sustenance inside.

In my previous post, I promised to tell you about our B&B owner, Mary. When Mary opened her house our eyes got big and our jaws opened. Her Victorian era house is decorated with a Victorian theme mixed with kitch, but it was literately full of stuff. There is not an empty space in her house where you can rest your eyes. Every inch of her house has something on it: the walls are filled with myriad paintings, cowboy boots, stirrups, the dressers, tables and shelves are filled with old hair brushes,wax cylinder records, porcelain nuns, birdcages, etc. There is no way that we can describe her house, so we really want you to see our photos. She gave us a tour of the house which I videotaped and hopefully will make available soon.

As much as we were impressed by her house we were so heartened by her hospitality. Mary is a small, feisty and sweet woman to whom you just want to talk all day long and find out about her exciting life. None of us expected anything like this in Red Bluff, but this was a sweet treat on our journey. We're heading to Arcada for our next stop but we know we will come back to Red Bluff to see Mary again in the future. And make sure to stop by if you're in Red Bluff and tell her Shinjoung, James and Sarah, the bookmobile crew, sent you!

Every time I travel around U.S.  without exception, I'm always in awe by the grandiosity of the land. It's just a big country especially compared to my native South Korea.

Yesterday we stayed in Weaverville, CA and spent time exploring the town. We didn't have a plan for the bookmobile but we visited the library anyway.  Sadly the library was closed on friday and only open 20/week because of budget cuts. (See the photos).

Weaverville is a small historical gold rush town with a population of @ 3500. A logging mill is the only industry that sustains the town today, but during the gold rush era, over 1000 Chinese gold miners lived there.  Now the miners and Chinese are largely gone but they left their stories and the glimpse of their lives behind. In Weaverville, there is a Daoist temple, Joss House, built by a chinese entreprenuers in 1874 (Also called "Cloud Forest Temple", 雲林廟, Yunlin Miao)  where the miners worshiped. The land was donated by the local Methodist Church, according to the State Park ranger. After 126 years, the temple is still standing firmly. Wandering around the ground of the Joss house, we all wondered about the lives of those intrepid Chinese miners. For more on the CA gold rush, see From Gold Rush to Golden State and Guld Rush Introduction

We left Weaverville this morning and drove to Redding where the temperature hit over 102 F. While we drove through downtown, we saw the library sign and, like hypnotized people, just followed the  sign and ended up in the parking lot of the library.

The Redding library's new building just opened this January so we could still smell the new furniture, fresh signage, and unfilled shelves. It was hard not to notice a "customer services" sign at the circulation desk -- a term that should *not* be used in any library IMHO. The Redding library is quite big and bright, and interestingly powered by solar power which we thought it is an great example of how library can be an example of green building design. The library has a small section of government documents tucked away in one corner of the 2nd floor (*not* the basement!) and according a reference librarian, they are in the process of cataloging and converting from dewey to Sudoc. It's always nice to see government documents in a public library.

We left the library without knowing where we would spend the night.  When we were just about to get into the car, James paused and looked at Sarah and me and said that he left his keys in the ignition of the bookmobile. According to AAA service person, James was the 4th "James" with car trouble that day.

While James was dealing with AAA (Thanks AAA!), Sarah and I looked through several California tour books in the library to find a place to stay.  Since Sarah has to be in Anderson on Monday morning (about 10 miles south of Redding) we couldn't drive too far afield and so Mt. Shasta unfortunately was out of the question.  There were nothing much around Redding except the same old franchised restaurants, hotels, walmart, home despot ( :-) ), strip malls, etc. So we decided to flip a coin -- heads we'd stay in Redding and tails in Red Bluff. One of the travel books noted that Red Bluff is blazing hot during the summer.  It turned up tails  so we drove to Red Bluff. We found a B&B called Jeter Victorian Inn from a travel book and  drove there to see the house before making the reservation. On the way to the B&B, we saw the main street of Ref Bluff and it looked like another declining small town in the U.S. So we had low expectations for the B&B.

Lo and behold, when we arrived at the B&B,s we saw a beautiful Victorian house with an amazing Garden. We rang the bell with curiosity. The proprietress (her name is Mary, and she turned out to be an extremely kind and gracious hostess) opened the door and we saw the inside of the house. Immediately we knew that we were going to stay. Mary and her house are full of stories that mesmerized us all. We will tell you all about them in our next posting.

We don't have great WIFI access so I won't be able to upload the photos today but more tomorrow.