A Year of Personal Favourites

Every year at this time, various magazines, newspapers and websites publish their list of the year’s best books. Here, for example, is TheGlobe and Mail’s list.

 Last year, I published my own list of favorite reads.  I thought I might make it an annual tradition, so here are some of my favorites of 2016 (not all published in 2016). All are available in the Collingwood Public Library:

1.       Helen MacDonald. H is for Hawk. (Penguin/Random House, 2015).

After the death of her beloved father, MacDonald, jobless and directionless, sinks into despair. Inspired by T.H.White’s The Goshawk, MacDonald, decides to try and train a goshawk, the fiercest and most difficult of birds. This is a hard book to pigeon hole. Part memoir, part literary biography, and part animal story, MacDonald’s journey as an apprentice goshawk trainer is a heart-wrenching but ultimately satisfying read.

2.       Robert D. Kaplan. In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey through Romania and Beyond. (Random House, 2016).

As a young man, Kaplan became fascinated with the Balkans, particularly the troubled country of Romania. He made many visits, beginning in 1971, and as a journalist became the acknowledged expert on this region. In Europe’s Shadow is a summing up of all he’s learned and observed over thirty years. Travelling back and forth in time, between modern Romania and her often troubled past, Kaplan shows us how Romania’s geography, as the intersection between the Latin West and Byzantine East, has shaped her history.  An extremely literate, entertaining, and thoughtful book.

3.       M.G. Vassanji. And Home was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa. (Doubleday Canada, 2014).

Canadian novelist, Vassanji, explored his Indian roots in the Governor General’s Award-winning A Place Within. In And Home was Kariakoo, he decides to return to his African roots and revisits his childhood haunts in Kenya and Tanzania. Driving about the countryside, trying to reconnect with old friends and old memories, he gives us a remarkably intimate portrait of African life. This is not Africa as the tourist sees it, but Africa as it is lived by Africans, particularly Africans of Indian descent who have not always had an easy go of it in the post-colonial era. An affectionate, but honest portrait of East Africa.

4.       Helen Simonson. The Summer before the War. (Penguin/Random House, 2016).

Simonson sets her story in the small Kentish town of Rye in that golden Edwardian summer before the First World War blew everything apart. We follow the lives and loves of a small cast of characters who struggle against the constraints of class, society and gender, particularly the young teacher, Beatrice Nash, the first female Latin master appointed against some opposition to the local school. It is a gentle story about society on the cusp of change, ignorant of what is to come, and feeling that this golden age will last forever. Exquisitely written.

5     Adam Hochschild. Spain in our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).

Hochschild, perhaps best known for his account of the history of the Congo in King Leopold’s Ghost, here tells the story of the Spanish Civil War as seen through the eyes of American (and a few British) volunteers who served with the International Brigade. Some of his eyewitnesses are well known figures, like Hemingway and Orwell, but most did their part and are forgotten by history. “Never before,” writes Hochschild, “had so many men, from so many countries, against the will of their own governments, come to a place foreign to all of them to fight for what they believed in.”  Hochschild captures the idealism and the folly of the Republican cause with immediacy and sympathy.

6.       Sarah Bakewell. At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails. (Knopf Canada, 2016).

This was my favourite book of 2016.  I loved Bakewell’s previous book on French essayist Michel de Montaigne, so I couldn’t wait to read this, and it didn’t disappoint. She gives us a lively history of the existentialist movement told through the biographies of its leading lights, beginning with the movement’s predecessors, philosophers like Heidegger and Husserl, and moving through to Sartre and Camus. Bakewell is extremely good at explaining difficult concepts in a clear but entertaining manner, and injects her prose with a welcome dose of humour. She also shows us the influence the existential movement has had on our own world, not all of it useful, and manages to convince us that we still need the existentialists, particularly in an age where there are so many questions and so few answers. The basic question posed by the existentialists in the early years of the twentieth century is still valid: In an age without meaning, how does one lead an authentic life?

--Ken Haigh

Collingwood Public Library wins Georgian Bay Reads

Collingwood Public Library CEO Ken Haigh holds the
Georgian Bay Reads trophy, with defender Julie LeBlanc (in red)
and Dorothy Gebert, Public Relations Coordinator

Collingwood Public Library took the prize at the 2016 Georgian Bay Reads event October 22 held at Meaford Hall & Cultural Centre. It was a tense (but good-natured) battle of the books with representatives from Clearview, Springwater, Wasaga Beach, Meaford, and Collingwood Public Libraries attempting to convince the audience and each other of their chosen books’ merits.

Julie LeBlanc, host of Georgian Bay Life on Rogers TV, was Collingwood’s representative and enthusiastically defended The Manticore by Robertson Davies to win the Georgian Bay Reads trophy. Michele McKenzie of Clearview Public Library won the Popular Choice Award for They Left Us Everything by Plum Johnson.

For the last 8 years, this literary competition has brought together Georgian Bay area libraries and their patrons to celebrate Canadian authors in an event filled with lively discussion and amiable rivalry.

Winning the award means that Collingwood Public Library will hosting next year's event. Stay tuned for details in mid 2017!

-- Dorothy Gebert

Libraries and Learning

As part of our strategic planning process, we asked people to fill out a community survey.  One of the questions was: “What kind of services do you think Collingwood Public Library should offer?”  When we tabulated the results, “Maker spaces” ranked last with our respondents.

A maker space is another name for a community workshop where tools are shared, especially expensive tools that individuals could not afford to purchase on their own. In the public mind, maker spaces have become identified with 3-D printers (a good 3-D printer will cost $10,000.00 or more), and that is perhaps unfortunate.  The roots of the maker space movement go back to the do-it-yourself movement of the 60s and 70s, as Laura Elizabeth Pinto writes:

“[T]he DIY (do-it-yourself) activist movement (or DIY ethic)[was] established with the lofty goal of getting “off the grid,” by recycling, repairing, gardening, sewing, building, making music and preserving food as an act of anti-consumerism.  DIY in this form began to emerge in North America in the late 1960s and early 1970s,grounded in social and environmental movements of the day. Rather than buying new things, the DIY ethic dictated that individuals should create, repair and fix for sustainability, and to lessen, or even eliminate, their reliance on corporations.”

But whereas these early DIY practitioners were independent creators, the current maker movement stresses “collaboration for social learning.”  This is why public libraries have embraced the movement.  Public libraries are places where the community gathers and shares knowledge, so they are obvious places to create a shared work space.  Thus the term “maker space” has come to mean “a place where individuals come together to create.”

The problem, as I see it, is that the maker movement, which began as an anti-consumer, pro-environmental movement, has been co-opted by the very corporations it set out to oppose.  You can buy “maker” kits now from “maker” magazines.  Even the phrase “Maker Faire” is a registered trademark. The term “maker” has become so widely used, that it has become meaningless. 

    

And many libraries seem to have forgotten the philosophy that launched the maker space movement in the first place. Library maker spaces have become another programming space where you hold extremely expensive craft programs.  You see events where you can register to learn how to design your own monogrammed key fob on a Mac computer and have it printed on a 3-D printer.  Libraries explain that they need to offer these entry level craft programs to introduce the technology to the community.  The idea being that, once people see the potential of this new technology, they will return again and again to create their own projects.  But the opposite seems to happen.  Once people realize just how slow the process is and how expensive the materials are—a small chess piece can take hours to print, and, depending upon the size, can cost upwards of ten dollars in material costs—they lose interest.  As library guru R. David Lankes said in his keynote address at the 2016 Ontario Library Association Super Conference: “A 3-D printer isn’t an answer for anything.”

I am not opposed to the maker space ethic, indeed it warms the cockles of my socialist heart, but I don’t believe that wasting valuable library floor space on little-used and expensive equipment is the way to go.  Too many libraries create maker spaces because they feel obligated to, because everyone else is doing it, without thinking through whether or not it is actually needed or wanted in their communities.  Collingwood library users clearly don’t want us to spend our limited resources on a 3-D printer—that message was loud and clear in our survey results.  On the other hand, many people expressed a desire for more learning opportunities.  Now we just need to discover what sorts of learning opportunities they desire.  We’ve offered writing workshops, digital film-making workshops, and have a regular ongoing series of technology talks.  We even had a tea expert in the library recently, teaching us about the different varieties of tea and their properties.

 

If you have any ideas for interesting library learning opportunities, please let us know your thoughts. Learning needn't be expensive.  It may just be a matter of creating the right social connections.

--Ken Haigh

Are you in the know?

There are a lot of exciting and different things happening at the Collingwood Public Library. A great way to keep in the know about library news and events is by subscribing to the library's email newsletter. 

It's free and comes to you twice a month - on the 1st of the month (What's On) to let you know what's coming up and on the 15th (What's Happening) to tell you about interesting library news. 

If you don't want to miss out on any of the events, programs, concerts, classes, and workshops going on at the library each month or the new books and movies coming out on a regular basis, sign up at the library's Public Services Desk or online at collingwoodpubliclibrary.ca

--Dorothy Gebert

A friend recently forwarded an article to me by John Degen, the executive director of the Writers' Union of Canada. In the article, Degen asks the question: "Are libraries losing their way in the digital age?" 

It is a very timely and thought-provoking question. Degen's job is to protect the rights of Canadian authors, and this shapes his view of what a publicly-funded library should be. He doesn't like the fact that so many libraries are re-branding themselves as "information commons." He feels this posture is self-defeating and worries that the rush to digitization and the promise of universal access to information is just the first step towards the privatization of information. He cites the controversies surrounding  Google Books and Canadiana.org as examples of this kind of slippery slope. He worries that putting everything online will only end up making the institution redundant, and points out, quite rightly, that "digitization" isn't the same thing as "preservation." If everything is available on his iPhone, he wonders, then "why bother with libraries at all? Let's just make sure everything is available digitally, and we can tear down all those dusty old buildings." In the current model, he charges, "serious research of actual information is often now secondary to entertainment. Is that really what we want from our libraries?"

It's clear that Degen believes that libraries should concentrate on collections. He doesn't mention library programming at all.  This is very out-of-step with current library thinking, where the library is seen as a public space that allows for the free exchange of information in whatever form. But then Degen is defending what he believes to be the traditional role of the library.

These are all very good points, but it's clear from some of his comments that Degen is not very familiar with library practices. For example, he wonders if the attraction of digitization is due to the fact that libraries are running out of space.  Well, yes, of course this is the attraction.  Libraries are always running out of space.  That is why we frequently purge our collections to make room for new material. We call it "weeding" to make it sound more attractive, but it has been a common practice for decades. The other whimsical notion he has is that books on library shelves are loaned "many hundreds, if not thousands of times." Anyone who has worked in a library knows that this is not true.  Modern books start to fall apart after the first dozen or so readers. It's rare for a book to survive thirty readers, let alone a hundred.  

Degen mentions Anthony Panizzi, the Principal Librarian of the British Museum Library from 1856 to 1866, who said:

I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that the Government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect.

He admires the sentiment, but wonders if it is realistic. But then, Degen admits he is not a populist. "Libraries are not about commonality; they're about exceptionalism." (I can think of a few librarians who would take issue with that statement, particularly those in the community-led libraries movement, who see libraries as the front line in helping the homeless and the disadvantaged). Libraries, according to Degen, should be about learning and self-improvement, not about streaming Netflix or updating your Facebook page. This is a very conservative view of what a library should be, but it is a valid one and worth considering in a time of rapid change. You can read the entire article here.

Author! Author!

Do you ever wonder how authors come up with their ideas? Or what inspired them to write a book in the first place? Why not ask them yourself! At the Collingwood Public Library, we bring in writers on a regular basis to talk about their latest books.

Our Author Talks series hosts three major authors each spring and fall. In the past couple of years we’ve hosted Ian Hamilton, Cathy Gildiner, Richard B. Wright, Alison Pick, Susanna Kearsley, and others. This fall, we have booked three award-winning authors, two of whom we are welcoming back with new books to talk about.

• Debra Komar is a forensic anthropologist who solves historical crimes using modern investigative methods. The Bastard of Fort Stikine, which she presented to us last fall, was recently awarded the 2016 Canadian Authors Award for Canadian History. Her latest book, Black River Road, is being published this August and she will be here on September 8 to fill us in on how she investigated a 19^th century unsolved crime with the most unlikely suspect.

• New to us this year is novelist and Globe & Mail critic Kate Taylor who on October 6 will be discussing Serial Monogamy (to be published this August) about what really makes up a relationship and a life, shifting between contemporary Toronto and the Victorian England of Charles Dickens. Her previous two books have won her the Commonwealth Prize, the Toronto Book Award, and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction.

• Terry Fallis has visited Collingwood Public Library several times and always to enthusiastic audiences. He’s back on November 10 to talk to us about Poles Apart, his take on feminism, blogging and the ridiculousness of male/female stereotypes. Terry is the winner of numerous awards including twice for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.

If any of these authors sound interesting to you, you’re welcome to come and hear them speak. Find out more about dates, times, and registration at collingwoodpubliclibrary.ca

-- Dorothy Gebert

Meet a Local Author

We started a new kind of author series this year with Meet a Local Author, where writers from Collingwood and the surrounding area have the opportunity to talk about and promote their latest work.

In January, David Wilding-Davies, owner of Ashanti Coffee in Thornbury and Collingwood, filled us in on the background to his book My Cattle Look Thin, a memoir of his time in Africa growing coffee.

The books of upcoming authors range from fiction to history to self-help.

 
On August 4, Collingwood science fiction writer Arlene F. Marks will talk about her latest novel The Genius Asylum and what went into the writing of the first in a series of novels about what life might be like for the humans living on Earth at the turn of the 25^th century.

On October 3, Meaford author Kay O’Neil will be discussing The Birth of Kerry’s Place: Canada’s First Treatment Center for People with Autism. This is very timely as October is Autism Awareness Month.

And, on November 22, Barrie life coach Lori Brant will talk about her amazing journey and how she is now helping others to better well-being in The Happiness Toolbox: Finding Happiness Regardless of Circumstances.

 

If any of these authors sound interesting to you, you’re welcome to come and hear them speak. Find out more about dates, times, and registration at collingwoodpubliclibrary.ca

-- Dorothy Gebert

The Importance of Libraries

Recently, it feels that libraries everywhere are under siege. A recent BBC story reported that  343 libraries in Britain have closed in the past six years, and 111 are slated for closure in the next year. Britain has lost 25% of its library staff in that same period, and there is a worrying trend that professional librarians are being replaced with volunteers. In fact, 174 public libraries in Britain are now run entirely by volunteers. A year ago, I would have said that this couldn't happen in Canada, but we recently learned that the government of Newfoundland and Labrador plans to close 54 of their 95 public libraries in the next two years.

In the midst of all of this doom and gloom, it's important t remind ourselves that there are people out there who feel that public libraries provide vital services to our communities, and they are willing to stand up and say so. One of these is the author Neil Gaiman. In a speech for a U.K. charity called the Reading Agency in 2013, he talked about the importance of reading and how visiting his local public library as a child turned him into a lifelong reader. He writes:

I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children's' library I began on the adult books.
They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader - nothing less and more - which meant they treated me with respect. 

Gaiman goes further and outlines what he feels is the central role of a public library.  Libraries, he says, are places that people go for information, free information.  Books are just "the tip of the information iceberg":

 A library is a place that is a repository of, and gives every citizen equal access to, information. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world. It's a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

It's a wonderful speech and worth reading in its entirety.  You can see it (or listen to it) online here. It's time we all spoke up for libraries.

Summer Reading Loss

With summer around the corner, our minds turn to sunshine, gardens, barbeques and beaches. At the library, we have our minds on summer reading loss.

Students and teachers work diligently during the school year to improve vocabulary and literacy skills. Once school stops, though, that learning can also halt. Research has shown repeatedly that a summer without reading often means starting from scratch when school starts again in September. There is an estimated three month achievement gap between students who do and do not read during the summer. Between grades one and six, this works out to approximately 1.5 years of lost reading development (Cooper, Nye, Charlton, Lindsay, & Greathouse, 1996).

So how do we encourage summer reading?

For starters, let’s remind ourselves that reading should be fun! During the school year, student may have “required reading,” but summer should mean recreational reading. Comic books, graphic novels, magazines and newspapers may not be traditional formats, but we’re still engaging in literacy when we read them. During the summer, let your children read what they gravitate towards, even if the format or content isn’t considered “high brow.”

No matter how old your children are, our core early literacy concepts still prove valuable: read, talk, write, sing and play. Encourage your children to keep a journal during the summer. Read aloud to them at the beach, or keep books on hands at the family cottage. Listening to Taylor Swift in the car can expand our vocabulary too – sing along!

Finally, you can register your children in the TD Summer Reading Club at the library. Participants simply record how long they read during the summer for their chance to win free books. We’ll also be building a Tower of Books this year: for every piece of literature a child reads, a book will be added to the tower. Can the kids of Collingwood read more than the staff at the library?

There are all kinds of ways to encourage literacy during the summer. We want everyone to read ahead, not fall behind.

Happy summer reading!

--Ashley Kulchycki

References:

Cooper, H., Nye, B., Charlton, K., Lindsay, J., & Greathouse, S. (1996). The effects of summer vacation on achievement test scores: A narrative and meta-analytic review. Review of Educational Research, 66, 227-268.

Library Surveys

If you have entered the library recently, you will have seen a large box on the circulation desk asking you to "Take Our Survey."  What's that all about? Well, the Library Board of the Collingwood Public Library is seeking community feedback to help prepare a strategic plan to guide the library’s progress in the coming years. As part of that process they are asking library patrons to complete a survey.

Why now? Well, the last strategic plan was published in 1991, and much has changed in the library world since then.  For example, many traditional services are now found online. We have eBooks, online research databases, and downloadable audio books.  People are also using libraries in non-traditional ways: to hold public meetings, to create their resumes, to fill-in their tax returns, or to book airline tickets.  As well, the library is doing more community outreach than ever before, extending our services beyond the four walls of the library. 

The timing is right in other ways too. We can build on what we learned last year from creating the Town of Collingwood’s Community Based Strategic Plan. We have a new library board and their four-year plan, once published, can be revised and updated by the next board, which will be appointed after the next municipal election, thus setting a precedent of good management for the years to come.

 

A good library listens to the community it serves, and we want to hear what you have to say.  What are we doing well? What new services would you like to see?  Are there things we are doing now that you feel are no longer necessary?  This is an opportunity to have your say and to help us continue to provide first rate library service to the citizens of Collingwood.

Please take the time to fill out a survey. Surveys can be found at the library, at town hall, or can be completed online.

Literary Coffee House, May 7

In an earlier post, I wrote about the formation of our writers' group here at the Collingwood Public Library.  We are approaching our third anniversary and have decided to mark it with a flourish.

First of all, we have published our first anthology of work by the collective, MUSINGS, which is free to download from our website: here.  Check it out in epub, mobi or PDF.

Secondly, we are holding our first literary coffee house on Saturday, May 7 at 1 p.m.  Everyone is invited to attend and read their work.  You don't have to be a member of the group to participate. We ask that each reader bring a piece that would take no more than five minutes to read (perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 words).  There will be free coffee donated by our excellent neighbours, the Creemore Coffee Studio.  We hope that this will be the first of many such events, helping to nurture and encourage our local writing talent.

Berets and goatees are optional.

Seed Library Re-Launch

I spent the afternoon sorting garden seeds into smaller packets in preparation for the spring launch of our Seed Library on April 1 (no fooling). This marks the fourth year that we have had a lending library for garden seeds here at the Collingwood Public Library. A Seed Library, for those of you who are new to the idea, is a community-created library of garden seeds that are free to loan to anyone interested in growing their own garden.  Obviously, a seed library is a lending library only in the most extreme sense of the word “lending,” since you can’t return a seed once you’ve planted it in the ground.  But you can save some seed at the end of the growing season and return it to the library for use the following year.  That is how a Seed Library is supposed to work.  In practice though, it doesn’t, …or rather it hasn’t, and that is something that I’m hoping to change.

To that end, we have invited Jaden Calvert to the library on Saturday, April 9, at 1 pm, to run a seed-saving workshop.  Jaden was one of the founders of the Meaford Seed Library and is very knowledgeable about how to save garden seeds. I am hoping that he will instill some confidence is those of us who have never done this before, and we will see an overflowing seed library collection for 2017.

If this is something that interests you, please feel welcome to attend.  The workshop is free…just like the seeds. 

Comfort is our enemy

I recently had the good fortune to attend the annual Ontario Library Association conference in Toronto.  The keynote speaker was R. David Lankes, a professor at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies and one of the most frequently-cited thinkers on modern library service.  Lankes stated that innovation was essential to library survival. There was no longer any room for “worker bees” in the library world. He warned that if we didn’t take leadership for innovation into our own hands and create homegrown ideas, then innovation would be imposed from without, by governments looking to cut services or by technology giants looking to control information services. He is an advocate of community-led libraries, where direction is taken from informed citizens.  What services do your communities want you to provide? asks Lankes. (Lankes is famous for saying, “Bad libraries build collections; good libraries build services.”).

There were some surprising local initiatives on display at the conference.  Edmonton Public Library, for example, has created a website for streaming locally-made popular music, called Capital City Records, which is curated by the local music community.  Libraries in Denmark are now being run, in-part or in-full, by self-service, with no staff! 

One topic that came up again and again was that many public libraries were developing services for the homeless and the marginalized, for the simple reason that the public library has become the de-facto shelter for so many people in reduced circumstances.  John Pateman, the CEO of the Thunder Bay Public Library, noted that the presence of so many homeless people in the public library could be disconcerting to the traditional middle class library user, but he emphasized that, if we are to provide equitable service to all sectors of our community, some discomfort would be necessary.  He quoted Jean Vanier, stating, “To comfort the afflicted you have to afflict the comfortable.” Comfort is the enemy of good library service.  "We've always done it this way" is no longer good enough.

On the other hand, the bloom seems to be off the rose for library makerspaces.  Lankes noted a recent Salon.com article that reported:

 According to a survey conducted by Maker Media, 8 out of 10 Makers are male. Their median age is 44. Their average household income is $106,000. Nearly 83 percent are employed, and 31 percent have job descriptions that fall into scientific or engineering categories. 97 percent are college graduates and 80 percent have some post-graduate education.

In other words, makerspaces are preaching to the choir and not addressing the needs of the underprivileged.  A 3-D printer, said Lankes, isn’t really an answer to anything.

--Ken Haigh

Green Electronics?

At the library we actively promote the use of Smartphones, tablets and eReaders, because many of our library materials are now available in electronic form. We also offer courses on how to use these electronic devices. But I sometimes worry that our dependence on these devices is not doing our planet any good. E-Readers, for example, are touted as being "green" because they save trees, but we know that the manufacturers expect us to replace them every eighteen months.  So how green are they really?

Here is a nice video that sums up the problem of planned obsolescence:

On top of this, we are all increasingly aware that many of the components needed to create these devices, minerals like tungsten, tantalum, and gold, are mined in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where profits from the sale of these minerals are used to finance longstanding regional conflicts.  We also know that many of these devices are manufactured in Third World sweatshops under poor working conditions.  Taken all together, that new Smartphone in your hand is not looking so smart.

But what if we could buy a phone that was repairable and up-gradable, where the manufacturer did his best to ensure that the components were sourced from reliable suppliers and manufactured under safe conditions, and where the employees were paid a fair wage?  Google is promising something of the sort with its much-discussed but still-to-be-released, Ara.

One company in the Netherlands has just released the Fairphone 2.  It looks promising.  The problem is that it is very expensive.  My other concern is this: Will Fairphone sell enough product to guarantee its survival, or would I be buying the cellphone equivalent of the eight-track tape?  I do hope that this is the model of the future and that other companies will follow suit.  Imagine buying a phone that was this simple to repair or upgrade.  It could last for years.

See a review of the Fairphone 2 here.

--Ken Haigh

Book Donations

Libraries welcome donations of books. Our budgets are limited, so donations help to fill in the gaps in our collections and help to replace copies of existing books that are worn out through constant use. But we are discerning in what we accept.  What we ARE looking for are recent titles, published within the last five years, that would appeal to a wide readership. What we don't need (and I say this in the nicest possible way) are old magazines, encyclopedia sets, textbooks, Reader's Digest condensed books, or anything that has been stored outside (in a garage perhaps) or in a basement and that smells musty.

Below are a few recent examples of donations we cannot use:

The truth is that many books have an expiry date beyond which nobody wants them or needs them anymore.  The best thing to do with these books is to recycle them.  Paperbacks and magazines can go in regular household recycling.  Even hardcover books, if you cut the covers off, can be put out with your paper recycling.  I know this sounds heretical coming from a librarian, but it is a sad fact that most books eventually end up being recycled.