Bookmobile day 7: the Safeway library
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!
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Bookmobile Day 5&6: Serendipity strikes again
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. Continue reading
Bookmobile schedule
It just occurred to Shinjoung and me that we never posted the schedule for our bookmobile trip. So, with 1000 mea culpae, here's our schedule :-) If you live in any of those areas, please come on down and see us, contact your local newspaper and let them know that we're coming, and tell all your friends. We'll be in Red Bluff, CA tomorrow, then over to the coast where we'll spend Thursday and Friday in Humboldt and Saturday in Mendocino (Willits and Ukiah). And one more little bit of housekeeping, a big thanks to Jessamyn over at librarian.net for posting about our trip and getting the word out to a much larger library audience! Continue reading
Dead crows: thoughts on local government information access, part I
It's been a pretty typical week for me in Tacoma, Washington (my home when I'm not at work in Seattle). But as I reflect back on the past seven days, I can see how local government information popped into my world in at least two conspicuous ways (and I'm sure many other more subtle ways). I'll share one story now.
On Monday afternoon, upon returning home from walking my dog, I noticed an unfortunate sight: a dead crow lying near our driveway, at the base of a telephone pole. I had just disposed of a dead sparrow I'd found in the same vicinity the day before, so this concerned me. I remembered that dead crows could be a sign of ... some health hazard, I couldn't remember which. Without thinking, I consulted the real, tangible phone book's blue pages (a hidden pasttime of many of us govdocs types), figuring I'd call the county health department. I flipped past the federal government pages, the state pages, and found the county health department and its numerous entries. Aha! West Nile Virus hotline. I called the number, and, because it was after hours, got a voicemail message. Gratifyingly, the voice said something along the lines of "If you're calling to report a dead crow, please provide your name, contact info and a detailed location for the crow. We'll call you back during business hours. Check out our web page as well."
The next day at work, I received a courteous, professional call from the Tacoma Pierce County Health Department. The Environmental Health Specialist told me she was going to stop by my residence and remove the bird for testing. She also conjectured that the crow was probably a juvenile who had been electrocuted by the power lines, a common occurence, but she would remove it all the same. When I got home, I found her business card and several Washington State government brochures (yes! it was a multi-jurisdictional day!) about mosquito repellent, West Nile Virus, and Dead Bird Reporting. Jackpot -- tangible gov docs, delivered to my doorstep! Overall, I was quite pleased with how this terribly old fashioned combination of the phone book and telephone worked so quickly and efficiently. Reviewing the web pages was a fun exercise after the fact, but I liked talking directly to the specialist. Out here, Dex is one of the prominent phone books. Its online version doesn't seem to include government, at least not in an obvious way, leaving users with the impression that there are two types of phone numbers in the world: residential and business. The blue pages rock.
Continue readingGAO’s conclusions on sectarian violence declared secret by Pentagon
US auditor queries military Iraq casualty figures, Yahoo! News, Sep 7, 2007
Continue readingAn independent US government auditor on Friday cast doubt on US military statistics expected to show a huge dip in sectarian violence in Iraq under the current troop surge strategy.
Comptroller General David Walker said there was a "significant difference" of approach between the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which he heads, and Pentagon evaluations of violence in Iraq...."We could not get comfortable with (the military's) methodology for determining what's sectarian versus nonsectarian violence," Walker told senators....
Walker was unable to go into further details, as the rest of the GAO's conclusions in the report on sectarian violence have been declared secret by the Pentagon, and urged senators to read the classified version of the study.