Be a Superpatron

From the web: Ten ways for superpatrons to build better libraries. Good advice all around!

It's National Poetry Month...

Do you know where your daffodils are?

You can find them at the above link, or in the Fitchburg Public Library stacks at 821.71 Word. Or you can see a slightly different version here:

Inventing English

For all language lovers, there was a wonderful episode today of the NPR program "On Point" called "Inventing English: From Beowulf to Eminem." It's available for listening online.

Fitchburg Public Library is a HOTSPOT!

Thanks to City Hall and Comcast the library is now offering wireless Internet access for all of you who have laptops with wireless capability. You do need a username and password available from the information and reference librarians.

Poem-of-the-Week: "Then we will fight in the shade"

A good line can last forever. (Well, for 2500 years, at least.) And it can appear in different media, in different languages, and in both classic literature and popular culture.

Here's a scene from pop culture that's hitting it big at the box office this month, with a famous 2500-year-old line at the end:



Here's another version of the very same scene from about 100 years ago, and even then it was “news that men have heard before”:

The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
His fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air,
And he that stands will die for nought, and home there's no returning.

A prize can go to anyone who finds on the Library's shelves the next and final line of this verse, or identifies its author. (Or perhaps identifies "The King with half the East at heel.")

Silent Cops and Sleeping Policemen

A colloquial term for speed bumps placed across a road to slow down traffic is "sleeping policemen." This is apparently a variant of the term "silent cop" used to designate upright posts often set in the middle of intersections to channel traffic and prevent car jams. When was the term "silent cop" first used for these structures? According to one linguistic researcher, the term "silent cop" first appeared in 1914 in the Fitchburg Sentinel.

Have any other English words or expressions originated in Fitchburg? There's a good research question for someone.

A visitors map for us

I've added a visitors map to the blog sidebar so we can see where people are coming from who visit the FPL blog. Click on it to get a bigger view. (Once a page appears on the web, people from all over the world find it.) These little additions are called "blog widgets" and there are lots of them out there, from visitors maps to weather stickers to clocks and much more.

Poem-of-the-Week

[Here's an example of the kind of thing that could appear in the FPL blog as a regular feature. It would require keeping a bag of candy in the reference desk so appropriate rewards could be given out. Feel free to edit or delete as you see fit.]

Here's a timely poem for us in the month of March. The first ten people who come to the information desk with with the name of the author (maybe shown in a book) will get a piece of chocolate (to be eaten outside), so start searching! You can't leave the answer as a comment; you have to come to the desk in person to receive your reward.

TOSSING his mane of snows in wildest eddies and tangles,
Lion-like March cometh in, hoarse, with tempestuous breath,
Through all the moaning chimneys, and 'thwart all the hollows and angles
Round the shuddering house, threating of winter and death.

But in my heart I feel the life of the wood and the meadow
Thrilling the pulses that own kindred with fibres that lift
Bud and blade to the sunward, within the inscrutable shadow,
Deep in the oak's chill core, under the gathering drift.

Nay, to earth's life in mine some prescience, or dream, or desire
(How shall I name it aright?) comes for a moment and goes—
Rapture of life ineffable, perfect—as if in the brier,
Leafless there by my door, trembled a sense of the rose.

The New York Times on LibraryThing

The New York Times has a story today about LibraryThing.com, the online cataloging system for personal libraries that some people from FPL participate in.

Words of Wisdom

Are you interested in words, phrases, slang expressions and colloquialisms? Check out Michael Quinion's website to learn the definition and origins for words such as cockamamie, eleemosynary, and floccinaucinihilipilification or from where the phrase "push the envelope" comes.

104 years

February 27th is an important anniversary for the Wallace Library, as the picture above illustrates. Thank you, Rodney!
Wallace Library and Arts Building, Built 1884. Photograph June 1, 1959. See comment for more information.

Mimus polyglottos

In the swirl of snow in the courtyard today, our own Library Mockingbird still guards his hedges (but the musical shuttle in his throat is still until spring).

Book blogs

One of the most elegant book blogs on the web is BibliOdyssey (which has links to many other interesting book blogs on its blogroll). We'll start making a list of interesting book and library blogs for people to browse -- watch for them to appear on the sidebar.

Word of the Week

Beclown: v., to make into a clown, as in "He has beclowned himself."

(This is an example of the sort of thing that could be a regular feature of the Fitchburg Public Library blog: a word of the week, an author of the day, a map of the month, a seasonal poem, a book of the month; many such possibilities are open to us.)

(How about a call number of the week?)

Thoreau at Fitchburg, 150 years ago

In February, 1857, 150 years ago this month, Henry David Thoreau came up from Concord to give a lecture for the members of the Fitchburg Athenaeum. Thoreau is the subject of the wonderful recent children's book Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, which you can check out from FPL or even read online.

Even books were new once

Welcome to the FPL blog!

Welcome to the new blog for the Wallace Library in Fitchburg, Massachusetts!