How to Find a Nonfiction Book at the Library

Non-fiction books at the Austin Public Library are shelved according to the Dewey Decimal System. Books are shelved numerically, that is, in number order, and are put into one of ten broad categories:

000 Computers, information & general reference
100 Philosophy & psychology
200 Religion
300 Social sciences
400 Language
500 Science
600 Technology
700 Arts & recreation
800 Literature
900 History & geography

The ten major areas are then broken down further into sub-categories. If looking for a book about the Sun, you would look under the 500s, the science category. Going deeper into the 500s, the 520s deal with astronomy, and getting more specific, the 523s deal with celestial bodies. Finally the 523.7s are books about the Sun.

After searching the library's catalog and finding the book you want, be sure to write down all of the call number. Examples of call numbers are 823.73 Ab or 791.43 R484e. Also note which library location owns the book. STACKS means that the book is not checked out, and should be in the library. To find that book about the Sun, follow the 500 shelves, past the 501s, 502s, 510s, until you get to the 523s. Now we move on to the number after the decimal.

Decimal numbers? I don't do math! Don't worry because it's all in numerical order. After the 523s begin the 523.1s followed by 523.2 then 523.3, and so on, until you reach 523.7. Once you reach the 523.7 area, look at the rest of the call number. For our example we'll say the author of the book is Wilson, so the last part of the call number will be Wi as in 523.7 Wi. Once you reach this point in the call number the books are shelved in alphabetical order by the author. A book by Standish (St) will come before the book by Wilson (Wi). View this slide show tutorial to find more about the Dewey Decimal System.

This Month's Featured Library Database!

Have you visited this month’s featured database, History Study Center? Maybe it’s time you should! History Study Center offers historical reference material from ancient times through today's current events. It houses over 40,000 documents that showcase historical events and provide students, historians, and researchers alike with quick and easy access to information.

History Study Center consists of five integrated resources that can be easily cross-searched through a single interface:
· Study Units: more than 500 Study Units containing 30-80 items
· Historical Documents: hundreds of primary source texts from historical sourcebooks
· Reference Works: articles from atlases, biographical collections, encyclopedias, and research guides. Updated monthly
· Multimedia: more than 3,000 captioned historical photos, political cartoons, and woodcuts; hundreds of historical video clips, captioned for context and easy searching; and annotated links to thousands of reliable websites
· Journals: cover-to-cover full text of 60 journals for runs that often go up to the most recent issue

A nice feature of this database is that you can create your own personalized area of History Study Center. Here you can store your saved searches and items selected between sessions. Do this by clicking on “My Archive” and create a profile.

You can use this database at the library or from home with your library card number. While you’re there, explore our other databases!

Job Ideas

A new book at the Library titled 100 Bull**** Jobs...And How to Get Them is cataloged in the 331s, which is the subject area for careers and job searching. Nevertheless, the book is hard to take seriously, but that perception may be because I am not a skillful bull**** artist. According to the author Stanley Bing, the jobs included in the book are pleasant, well paid, and highly respected. Mr. Bing has been reporting on corporate life since the early 1980s, so he may know what he is talking about. Below is list of some of the jobs he profiles.

Aquarium Cleaner for the Rich
Aromatherapist
Backup Dancer
Business Book Author (Bing's job)
Closet Organizer
Cold Caller
Consultant
Handler
Headhunter
Investment Banker
Life Coach
Media Trainer
Motivational Speaker
Personal Publicist
Personal Trainer
Poker Teacher
Raw Chef

And let me add my own - Corporate Blogger. For more serious job searching, please see the Library's research guide, Job Searching.

Today is World Book and Copyright Day!

23 April is a symbolic date for world literature for on this date in 1616, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died. It is also the date of birth or death of other prominent world authors such as Maurice Druon, Haldor K.Laxness, Vladimir Nabokov, Josep Pla and Manuel Mejía Vallejo.
The General Conference of UNESCO decided that such as important day in world literature should be celebrated, and ten years ago established the International Day of the Book and Copyrights. The day is honored more in countries other than the United Sates.

This tradition started in 1929 in Catalonia, Spain. On April 23rd, men give flowers to women who will then give them a book in exchange. According to Wikipedia: “half of the yearly sales of books in Catalonia are sold at this time - over 400,000 sold and exchanged for over 4 million roses.”

Today libraries and schools around the world celebrate books, and promote reading through different activities and programs. In Spain for example, there are two-day read-a-thons of Don Quixote. Some publishers choose this day to release a new title, such as Artemis Fowl. Just remember, there is always a good reason to start reading, so today might be the day you want to come to the library and pick up a book from one of these authors:

• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
  
• A midsummer night's dream by William Shakespeare
  
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Explore Alternative Histories

According to A Handbook to Literature, alternative history is “a species of fiction—also called allohistory—in which much depends on some major reversal of known geography or history.” I am currently reading Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which explores what might have happened if Charles Lindbergh had won the 1940 presidential election against Franklin Roosevelt. Since this is the first alternative history book I’ve read, I wondered what other authors had written about in this genre. The majority of the titles I located delved into different outcomes of World War II or the Civil War. There are, however, quite a few that explore a variety of other topics including the Black Death, the Red Baron, and a 1986 Mars landing. While some alternative history fiction takes a realistic approach to the subject matter, most of these "what if..." stories are classified as a subgenre within science fiction. However, many also cross over into fantasy, horror, and mystery, so there’s something for everyone. Check out our Good Reads section for a list of alternative history fiction or other lists that might pique your interest. For more information about the alternative history genre and a much more extensive list of titles and references, visit Uchronia: The Alternate History List.

Jazz: America's Art Form

Love to listen to jazz? How about listening to Dr. James Polk, Grammy-nominated musician, discuss jazz? Come on down to the Howson and Carver Branches to see jazz films and learn about various jazz topics for free.

Jazz is an art form invented in early 20th century America. It has evolved into an enduring expression of creativity and innovation. The history of jazz is much more than the history of an extraordinary musical genre — it is also the story of central social, political and cultural issues of the 20th century that continue to play a part in our fledgling 21st.

The next installment of the series will be Monday, April 16th at Carver on the topic of the Swing Era. After you attend a lecture or see a jazz film, come back here and tell us how it went.

For more information and media clips on the Looking at: Jazz Project visit their website, lookingatjazz.org. This project is presented in collaboration of The National Video Resources, American Library Association, and Jazz at Lincoln Center, and funding comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thanks to our partner, the Texas Music Museum.

Farewell to Kurt Vonnegut

They say Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday, April 11, but maybe he just became unstuck in time. Maybe it’s we who live linearly who have passed through the moment of his death and come out the other side. He could be looping back around to his childhood.

Cool kids in the 70s walked around with Vonnegut paperbacks sticking out the butt pockets of their jeans. I wasn’t a big Vonnegut fan; I’ve read only four of his books. His early science fiction books are too science-fictiony; his later books are too hip.

Thankfully I didn’t start with those. The first one I picked up was Vonnegut’s life-changing Slaughterhouse-Five, one of the great works of anti-war art in any medium. Its protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, travels time, popping into and out of his life, some of it lived on another planet, some of it lived in Dresden on the day in 1945 when the Allies firebombed the city.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a memoir of World War II and a commentary on Vietnam. The book’s message has, unfortunately, been nearly continuously relevant since it was written in 1969. The library owns copies of it and of other Vonnegut books, as well as these classic anti-war volumes:

All Quiet on the Western Front
Remarque, Erich Maria

Johnny Got His Gun
Trumbo, Dalton

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
Sheehan, Neil

Catch-22: A Novel
Heller, Joseph

The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories
Crane, Stephen

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
Frank, Anne

A Farewell to Arms
Hemingway, Ernest

Hiroshima
Hersey, John

Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
Vonnegut, Kurt

Three Poems to Celebrate National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month. The Faulk Central Library is celebrating with a 1st floor poetry book display announced by a large computerized image of Walt Whitman, who said in Leaves of Grass:

Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I,
Therefore for thee the following chants.

I chose three 2006 collections of poetry from Central’s new book shelves, and found three short poems or “chants” to share with you. Please see the catalog to place a hold on the titles.

The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea by Mark Haddon 2006 Vintage

Midas

You rarely hear the prologue-
Where ants are marching from the window
to the crib, each one carrying
a grain of wheat to feed the infant king.

the meaning of the story still unwrapped,
the picture fresh as water in a clay jug
or a hot loaf not yet frozen solid
by the king’s greed.

The Republic of Poetry by Martin Espada 2006 W.W. Norton

Advice to a Young Poet

Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head


The Wanton Sublime by Anna Rabinowitz 2006 Tupelo Press

from THUNDER, SWEET LONGING

Love me loudly or in whispers,
Love me so long, deep night
Is aware of me
And breaks
Into day with a seamless song…

Please visit APL’s Online Database page to find your favorite poem full-text in Litfinder.

Miniature books: tiny works of art

How many times have you stopped by a Miniature Books booth in a city fair? Or have seen them by the check out counter of a bookstore? The first thing I think when I see a miniature book is: “How cute!!!” But it wasn’t until “serendipity” put in my hands a little article about the history of these books that make me see them in a different way.

Miniature books were inspired in the very old miniature Japanese wood blocks and Ethiopian scrolls made more than 4000 years ago. During Medieval times, monks would spend months and sometimes years writing and drawing miniature books, which were preferred for portability issues. Right after the invention of the moveable type in 1468 Peter Schoffer printed the first pocket-sized book titled "Diurnale Moguntinum”.

Over the years, miniature books have had an important role in the history of humankind. They had not only been companions of travelers but had also have a significant part in revolutions when people used them as an important tool of their propaganda campaigns.

In the United States a miniature book is not bigger than 3 inches but in the rest of the world, books of up to four inches high are also considered miniature books. So, are you ready to start collecting them?

More info about this topic:

• Miniature Book Society
• 400 years of Miniature books IU Lilly Library Exhibition
  

The End of the Road

I hope your thoughts do not normally dwell on how we will survive if there is ever a huge disaster that wipes out the majority of the world’s population, but the well-written, post-apocalyptic novels below will keep your attention. Unlike most post-apocalyptic stories, these novels were not written by science fiction authors.

Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier 2006
The City is inhabited by those who have departed Earth but are still remembered by the living. They will reside in this afterlife until they are completely forgotten. But the City is shrinking, and the residents are leaving because of a deadly virus that has struck the inhabitants of Earth.

Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian 2006
After the earth is flooded below seven miles of water, only a hospital is preserved which is presided over by four angels.


Into the Forest by Jean Hagland 1996
Two sisters, alone in the Northern California forest, face the challenges of survival after a war has brought about the collapse of industrialized America.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood 2003
An evocative, intriguing tale on the bleak future of the human race that takes the reader back and forth between a post-apocalyptic world and the earlier events that led to the disaster.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy 2006
A father and son try to survive starvation, the elements, and cannibals in a postapocalyptic America

Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham 2005
Brilliantly conceived, empathetic book includes three novellas separated in time: the1890s, the present, and finally 150 years in the future .

Mad Magazine

In the mid-sixties when I was (ahem) younger, the best day of the month was when MAD magazine came in the mail. I’d buy a couple of bags of sunflower seeds, hole up in my room, and spend all afternoon reading every word of MAD, stopping only after I’d carefully tri-folded the back cover (there’s a trick to it). My mother professed to be appalled by my taste in literature, but if my MAD went missing, I’d usually find it on her bedside table.

William Gaines began publishing MAD in 1952, and by the early 60s, all of the artists and writers that made MAD great, Dick DeBartolo, Frank Jacobs, Mort Drucker, Sergio Aragonés, Al Jaffee, Paul Coker Jr., Dave Berg, and Don Martin, were on board. It was a fun place to work because Gaines was a MADman. When MAD’s only subscriber in Haiti failed to renew, Gaines flew the MAD staff there to get him to change his mind. He did.

Gaines died in 1992, and MAD began its creep toward corporatism, finally accepting advertising in 2001. Now it’s a slick, colorful, watered-down version of its formerly black-and-white, independent self. There are still funny bits, but its editors are no longer fearless, and circulation is less than one tenth what it was in 1974, MAD’s heyday.

Still, it was a good run. The library has these books that commemorate it:

Mad Art: A Visual Celebration of the Art of Mad Magazine and the Idiots Who Create It Evanier, Mark

Mad: Cover to Cover: 48 Years, 6 Months & 3 Days of Mad Magazine Covers Jacobs, Frank


Mad: The Half-Wit and Wisdom of Alfred E. Neuman: Classic Pearls of Idiocy

Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine Reidelbach, Maria

MAD About the Sixties: The Best of the Decade

Good Days and Mad: A Hysterical Tour Behind the Scenes at Mad Magazine DeBartolo, Dick.

(Austin Public Library subscribes to MAD magazine and MAD Kids.)

Get Organized!

Spring has arrived, so it’s time once again to do some spring cleaning. If you have a stack of books sitting around your house, consider donating them to the library. We accept donations of best sellers and popular titles for the Library's collection. Hardback books in good condition can be dropped off at any Library location. Paperback books can also be dropped off at any Library location for the Friends of the Austin Public Library Book Sale. Some branch libraries also have magazine give-away tables so you can leave magazines and take a few you haven’t read. Contact your local branch to find out if they offer this service.

Need more help to get organized? We have tons of books about house cleaning and organization. These are just a few of the available titles:

Spring cleaning : the spirit of keeping home

Speed cleaning 101 : cut your cleaning time in half

Cleaning and the meaning of life: simple solutions to declutter your home and beautify your life

Feather your nest: the complete guide to outfitting, cleaning, organizing and caring for your home

Clean like a man: housekeeping for men (and the women who love them)

How clean is your house?

Coming clean: dirty little secrets from a professional housecleaner

The Traveling librarian went to the Architects and Engineers Association Library in Costa Rica

I was lucky enough to visit Costa Rica one more time (it's so pretty there that once you go there you want to keep going back!). This time I visited the Architects and Engineers Association Library located in San José. This library is very new; it was formally inaugurated a year ago, but it has been serving patrons since the 1990s. It has a collection of 500 electronic documents and 3000 documents in hardcopy. It mainly compiles laws, technical articles, thesis, and papers.

This library serves approximately 12,000 members and adds 1,000 new members every year. All documents are related to the areas of engineering and architecture. This library is located in a small room in the building with a beautiful view of the North Mountains. The library is run by a single laborious librarian who was the initiator of a digital library for the library's associates which has been very popular and welcome. It's amazing what one person can do!

So if you are planning to buy or build a house in Costa Rica, this is a good place to get information about development laws, and even architectural venues in the country.

Literary Cookbooks

Writers often interject descriptions of food or meals partaken in order to move a story along, to add vivid detail, or as a way of depicting character. Writers are often good cooks themselves. Please savor the list of books below that include recipes drawn from your favorite books and authors.

Alice B. Toklas Cook Book
Alice b. Toklas

Between Two Fires: Intimate Writings on Life, Love, Food & Flavor
Laura Esquivel

The Book Club Cookbook: Recipes and Food from Your Book Club's Favorite Books and Authors
Judy Gelman

Book Lover’s Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Celebrated Works of Literature and the Passages that Feature Them
Shaunda Wenger

A Feast of Words: for Lovers of Food and Fiction
Anna Shapiro

Food to Die For: Secrets from Kay Scarpetta's Kitchen
Patricia Cornwell

Jan Karon’s Mitford Cookbook & Kitchen Reader
Jan Karon

The Jane Austen Cookbook
Maggie Black

Kafka's Soup: a Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes
Mark Crick

Read It and Eat: a Month-by-Month Guide to Scintillating Book Club Selections and Mouthwatering Menus
Sarah Gardner

Stirring Prose: Cooking with Texas Authors
Deborah Douglas

Taste of Murder: Diabolically Delicious Recipes from Contemporary Mystery Writers
Jo Grossman

Digital information, how much is out there?

International Data Group (IDG) did a study to learn the amount of digital information produced by individuals and organizations around the world. According to their report , the amount of digital information produced is equivalent to thousands of tons of books or comparable to 12 towers that cover the distance between planet earth and the sun.

Every day, individuals share more than 100 billion of MP3 files, and YouTube disseminates 100 billion videos every 24 hours. In one year people take more than 100 million pictures with their cell phones and 150 billion pictures with their digital cameras.

The storage unit that has been used is the gigabyte, but because of the large amounts of information produced, very soon we will see a new unit called an exabyte or the equivalent of 100 billion gigabytes. When this storage unit is exhausted, we will use zettabytes that will correspond to 1,000 exabytes.

Many people thought that libraries were going to disappear with the digital information age, but on the contrary, for libraries this influx of resources creates new challenges for finding reliable information quickly and easily, and storing and securing this information. Libraries are going to stay around, but we will have to reinvent ourselves to better serve our patrons.

To read more about this study you can visit the following links:

• Digital Information Balloning from CNN
  
• Tech researchers calculate digital info from Wired News
  
• IDC: World created 161 Billion Gigs of Data in 2006 from Toptech News

Music is in the air...

Springtime is here, and we're reminded again why we are lucky to live in this town. I'm speaking, of course, of South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual music festival that brings hundreds of musicians from around the globe to Austin to entertain music industry bigwigs and fans for five days and nights. There's never a shortage of live music in Austin, but from March 14-17 we will be absolutely inundated with new tunes.

Two of my picks are Boris, a loud metal sludge trio from Tokyo, free at Auditorium Shores Saturday the 17th at 5 pm, and later that night at 12:30 am the Stooges, Iggy Pop's legendary band together again, at Stubb's, and probably impossible to get into unless you have a badge.

If you're not able to get in to the Austin show, check out these DVDs and CDs from the library:
Live in Detroit
DVD 782.42166 LI (2004)
Iggy Pop & the Stooges live in Detroit

Raw power
CD MA IGGY 2530 (1997)
Iggy and the Stooges

Lust for life
CD MA POP 3015 (1990)
Iggy Pop

Iggy Pop! Live San Fran 1981
DVD 782.42166 IG (1981)

The big keynote speaker of SXSW this year is Pete Townshend, taking a break from the current Who tour. Not sure where or when Pete might be performing, but you know it'll be even harder to get into than the Stooges show at Stubb's. You might check out these DVDs and CDs instead:
Best of Pete Townshend
CD MA TOWN (1996)

Pete Townshend's Deep End live!
CD MA TOWN (1986)

Who's next
CD MA WHO 2392 (1995)

Who's next
DVD 782.42166 WH (1999)

Tommy and Quadrophenia live: with special guests
DVD 782.1 WH (2005)

And of course APL's own: John Schooley and his One Man Band will be performing Wednesday, March 14, 11:00 p.m. at the Lava Lounge Patio. See him now, before those industry bigwigs find him and whisk him away from us!

Bestsellers at the Library

If there are no publishing problems, it takes about two to three weeks for a book to become available for check out after it appears on the New York Times Bestseller list. Sometimes we are really lucky and get a new bestseller in a week and a half.

The life-expectancy of a bestselling novel has halved within the last decade, according to a long-term study of fiction bestsellers by Lulu, the world's fastest-growing source of print-on-demand books. The average number of weeks that a new No. 1 bestseller stayed on top of the hardback fiction section of the NYT Bestseller list fell from 14 in the 1970s, to 22 in the 1960s, to 5.5 in the 1990s, to barely two weeks in 2005.

In the 1960s, fewer than three novels reached No. 1 in an average year; and in 2005, 23 novels did. About 57% of the fiction bestsellers that debuted on the 2005 hardcover lists had runs of less than a month. Two fiction bestsellers that stayed on the list for longer than average were The Kite Runner and the The Da Vinci Code. Today I saw 6 copies of The Da Vinci Code on the shelf at Central, so I guess everyone has read that book.

Chat with a Librarian

Ever click “Chat with a Librarian”, seen this message pop up -- Welcome to Austin Public Library's Chat with a Librarian. A librarian will be with you momentarily.-- and wondered what’s happening on our end? Here’s how it works:

So you’ve carefully considered your question, spent time making it as clear and concise as possible, and now your cursor hovers over Login to Live Chat. When you click, we librarians in Telephone Reference hear our computers sing “TA DA!”, and that’s how we know you’re there. One of us sets aside what she’s doing as fast as she can (while your computer vamps with that Welcome… message), opens the chat window, accepts your request and we’re off!

Some questions are asked so frequently that we’ve developed FAQ scripts to cut and paste into the chat window; for example, we have scripted directions for how to put a book on hold. Others are unique and complicated and we might ask for contact information from you so we can do more research and e-mail you back. Mostly we try to answer your question while you’re logged in to chat

Give our chat a try, if you haven’t already, and spread the word!

An Author's Introduction

If you come to the Austin History Center, Tuesday, March 6 at 7 pm, you will hear the introduction printed below for Nate Blakeslee, the author of Tulia, Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town.

“Welcome to the Austin Public Library’s Meet the Author series. Tonight we’re talking about race, justice, and the war on drugs, with one of the most admired and effective investigative reporters working, Nate Blakeslee.

Mr. Blakeslee is a muckraker, and lord knows these days there is muck to rake. He’s written on Enron and Halliburton and radioactive waste, but it’s his reporting in The Texas Observer on drug busts in the panhandle town of Tulia, Texas, that has brought Nate awards and accolades--and a contract for a big-time Hollywood movie!

But as spectacular as that is, I suspect Nate is most proud that his work led to the freeing of innocent people, to accountability, and to changes in the law.

The book is Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town, and it’s a page-turner. Ladies and gentlemen, Nate Blakeslee.”

Mr. Blakeslee frequently called the Library’s Telephone Reference service (974-7400) to confirm facts and dates while doing the research for his book.

Libraries and War: Stories of Hope

It is known that the first targeted buildings in times of war are libraries. That is how millions of rare and valuable collections have disappeared, and with them, parts of the history of humanity. One can find information on the destruction of libraries and archives such as the Oriental Library in Shangai in 1934, the Naples State Archives in Germany in 1943, and the National and University Library in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992. These stories impact us not only as librarians, but as people who value library collections, rare literary gems, and reading.

In the last two years, however, there have been two interesting stories in the news about librarians preserving their collections during armed conflicts. The first story is about Alia Muhammad Baker, a librarian in Basra, Iraq. This librarian knew she had a very special library collection, and when the war started in 2003, she decided to move, during the night, all the books to her house and friends’ homes to protect them. The second story is about Hirsie Mohamed Hirui, a librarian from Somalia who keeps his library open even though the majority of the buildings in the city have been closed due to the high level of violence. “When people read, they are not worried about anything”, Hirui says. These are two wonderful stories about strong people who are trying to make a difference in the middle of chaos.

Austin Public Library owns the children's book Librarian of Basra: a true story from Iraq

To know more about the Somali library we recommend the following link:
Chaos Can’t Shut Somali Library