What I Learned from the Previous Post's Workshop

Now, what was there that I didn’t already know or that I can use at our library? Oh, ye of little faith!

I’ve got a scavenger hunt to do this summer and I might just make them search in the e-titles for stuff and set up a NetLibrary account.

We should have a demo mp3 at each branch (I guess Ref handles that in our main one) to show people how it works.

We should take this on the road, every time we set up a table or the bookmobile or something at a function, we should demo the e-titles and hand out info.

We should demonstrate it to Fran’s book groups.

The One Book, One Community should be a NetLibrary title.

I’m going to check out Project Gutenberg and Librivox.org to see what is available.

While dithering with my notes, I visited the Project Gutenberg site and am currently listening (that is, at home) to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden read by computer. This was an excellent choice because of the Yorkshire dialect, which the computer-generated voice cannot deal with and ends up spelling out: “Tee-aitch-apostrophe …” And it simply cannot deal with the name of the manor, Mistlethwaite, which comes out sounding like a person: Miss Thelthwaite. Clever of it to not call it Mist Lethwaite, though. Despite the lack of emotion and the dialect problems, I find the story (which I’ve read many times) very engrossing and can’t wait to get back to it and download another section. And that is a teeny problem, it downloads one piece at at time (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8812) and there are over thirty pieces. But that’s nice, too, because you can just download a bit of it if you don’t have a lot of time to wait for it to download. And then, at least on my machine, it’s still there when you download more, so it accumulates.

I have not yet listened to any of the volunteers read on Librivox because I want to finish The Secret Garden first! They’ve got the Quijote being read on that, which may be helpful to our summer high school readers. It’s also being read in Spanish. Wheeeee! I’ll blog that later for y’all.

I’m going to go through our e-titles (and maybe Gutenberg) and compare the Summer Reading Lists for District 50 etc. to see what we have e-vailable that could can be recommended to the older kids (who don’t do the SC Book Award nominees) … isn’t Frankenstein one of those? And I should make a sign or a bookmark for this.

Next time I go on vacation, I’m not going to check out so much hard copy to carry with me when I can download something when I am away and read/listen to it from a laptop (which I’d better get out and buy but I’m not going anywhere until August, I think). And then I’ll probably need new glasses.

How kosher would it be to buy an annual out-of-town card from RCPL (what is that, $50?) and then check out, download, and burn all the Rabbit Ears and Weston Woods stuff?