State of the Library: September

What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month? - Doris Lessing

Hello all and welcome to the first "State of the Library" for the year. This is a monthly update of library activities and performance. I also try to give a few tools or insights of available resources that might help in your classrooms.

Electronic Resource Circulation

Usage
Physical resources (books, cds, videos, magazines) had a modest beginning this year with 123 checkouts, and as you can see from a comparison against previous years, that's a little below the median, higher than two years ago but lower than last year.

Physical Resource Circulation

Electronic resources took a jump from last year to 420 articles accessed (from last year's 253), continuing a trend in which electronic use exceeds physical. Still, last month's statistics would assign a checkout to over a quarter of our student population.

You can see other charts that isolate data from year-to-year or by database at the Library Wiki site.

Last month 8 classes received library training in classrooms and in the library, including Mr. Rice's psychology classes, Mr. Izurieta's advanced Spanish class, and Science Inquiry classes from Mr. Lee and Mr. Zarubin. Mr. Rice's psychology classes also set up blogs for research documentation.

Resources

San Jose, 1906

Primary Sources with Calisphere
The University of California's themed collections of primary sources chronicling the history of California. You'll find letters of environmental activist and scientist John Muir, historical maps of disasters, and collections representing California's diverse culture.

And with ARTstor:
Use these wonderful subject guides or follow the ARTstor blog to find collections of images for uses in history, languages, literature, theater, dance and more. ARTstor has recently come to agreements with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN), which will add 12,000 works from the national and regional museums of France, and the World Monuments Fund, which has added over 1,000 images of architecture and cultural heritage sites.

Don't forget to check out the fascinating work done by Mr. Zarubin and Dr. Haney with their students on gene mapping: link one, link two, and link three.

New Additions
We have many new additions to the library collection. We are in the process of replacing lost books as well as acquiring other works in fiction and non-fiction (as recommended by YALSA). We have also updated some study guides and college counseling guides after our summer weeding. I already have requests from the history, science and art departments for our next order!

October in history from Oxford Reference
• October 11, 1984: Kathryn Dwyer Sullivan became the first woman to perform a spacewalk.

• October 14, 1066: English king Harold II was killed at the Battle of Hastings, an event captured in the Bayeux Tapestry.

• October 22, 1879: Thomas Edison invented electric lighting, demonstrating 30 incandescent electric lamps connected in parallel with separate switches.

• October 24 and 29, 1929: The New York stock market crashed on 'Black Thursday' and 'Black Tuesday', wiping billions of dollars off the value of stocks.

• October 30, 1938: Panic spread when radio listeners confused Orson Welles' performance of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds with a factual report of an invasion from Mars.