Lane Libraries Staff Site

Susan Thrasher (OXB Children's) was the winner of the November Employee of the Month drawing. Rebecca Smith, who nominated Susan, said " Susan's enthusiasm for children's service is much appreciated by the patrons and staff of Oxford Lane Library.  She provides an outstanding "Baby Time" program for our youngest patrons and their care givers.  Susan is always looking for creative programs that allow our patrons to explore the world through our collection of materials.  She goes the extra mile to connect our patrons with the books and materials that they are seeking.  Thank you Susan for your dedication to bringing young children, their families and books together."  Susan receives her choice of a Borders Books and Music $50 gift certificate or 4 extra hours of vacation to be taken within the quarter.

Other nominees were Audrey Morrison (LPL IS), Bill Moe (OXB IS), Brandy Bailey-Van Kuren (LPL Circ), Danielle Cope (OXB Circ), Debbie Niewerth (FFB IS), Fran Meyer (LPL IS), Jessica Wray (FFB Floater), Kathie Hild (HR), Lori Schoemer (Business Office), Rhonda Wiseman (FFB Children's), Sarah Morrison (LPL Page), Susan Henry (BKM) and Terry Beck (SML).

The Pay/Print equipment and software has been installed in Hamilton. As of Friday, printing requires exact change, as Millennium has not yet filled their coin box. We will install the remaining print stations in Hamilton sometime before the end of November.

The 2008 listing of staff members reaching recognition milestones.

Systems Dept. is aware of the problem of Yahoo! Mail attachments hanging. We think it is related to the filtering server, and we are looking for a way to resolve it without disabling the filter completely. If you have a situation where a patron absolutely has to have an attachment, you can ask them to email it to your gmail account and get it to them that way until we get this fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience.

A record of past winners of the Employee of the Month and Supervisor of the Quarter awards are now available at the bottom of the Council page.

Karri Marshall (BKM) was a member of Leadership Hamilton Class 18.
Click picture for larger image

It’s not the kind of fare usually associated with librarians. But public libraries from Queens, the highest-circulation public library system in the country, to York County, in central Pennsylvania are embracing urban fiction as an exciting, if sometimes controversial, way to draw new people into reading rooms, spread literacy and reflect and explore the interests and concerns of the public they serve. 

“We’ve got people who are reading for the first time. We’ve got people coming into our building asking for Terry Woods” — the creator of Angel — “who have never come here before,” said Lora-Lynn Rice, the director of collections at the Martin Library in York County, which held a symposium on urban fiction during National Library Week in April. “Why would we not embrace this?”

[see full article at New York Times]

Katrina Bate (LPL IS) pointed out new functionality offered in Google Labs: Calendar and Docs gadgets to integrate with gMail.

See: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-calendar-and-docs-gadgets.html

Gmail Labs has been a really fun way to easily try out new ideas and get some of our pet feature requests implemented quickly. We wanted to take this to the next level and let you start adding your own stuff to Gmail. Today we're launching a few Labs experiments that let you add gadgets to the left-nav, next to Chat and Labels.

To get you started, we've worked with the engineers from the Calendar and Docs teams on two highly requested features: a simple way to see your Google Calendar agenda and get an alert when you have a meeting, and a gadget that shows a list of your recently accessed Google Docs and lets you search across all of your documents right from within Gmail. [more]

from the Journal-News, October 24:

HAMILTON — In 2005, a local resident showed up at a historical society meeting with a large map of Butler County that had been found in an attic along with some other old documents. "The person recognized it as a wall map and recognized that it might be of value," said local historian Thomas Stander. "The individual also had other papers and documents — advertising, old letters, things like that — but nothing compared to the map."

continue reading article at journal-news.com

Smith Library also has this map, one of three known to exist. The other one is at the Library of Congress.

We'll be installing the pay/print system upstairs in Hamilton on Wednesday, October 29. We will install the additional print stations at a later date, as the renovation progresses.

New computers have been ordered for Oxford, and we hope to install them before November 15. After these are installed, we will install the pay/print system at Oxford.