39 Second Street
Presque Isle, Maine 04769
(207) 764-2571
www.presqueisle.lib.me.us

E-mail: turnermemoriallibrary@gmail.com

Monday, June 30, 2008

Book and Bake Sale

The annual book and bake sale has been rescheduled for July 19th and July 20th from 10-2. Stop by and buy a book and baked good and support your library. The selection will be great and you can walk away with good books at good prices.
While you are at the library, you may also wish to purchase a library tote bag celebrating the library's 100th anniversary for $10.00 to support the library building fund.

Free Children's Books Online

Imagine being able to read children's books online for free in any language of your choice. You can do just that by visiting the International Children's Digital Library online. You can select books by language, length, age group, genre, and other criteria.

From their website: The mission of the International Children's Digital Library Foundation (ICDL Foundation) is to support the world's children in becoming effective members of the global community - who exhibit tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas -- by making the best in children's literature available online free of charge. The Foundation pursues its vision by building a digital library of outstanding children's books from around the world and supporting communities of children and adults in exploring and using this literature through innovative technology designed in close partnership with children for children.

The ICDL collection includes 2657 books in 48 languages. Over a million people have visited their Web site. ICDL visitors come from 166 countries worldwide. After the United States, most ICDL visitors come from South Africa and China.

Click here to begin your journey and to read books online.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Teen/Adult Summer Reading Program

Would you like to do something fun and easy this summer? Then stop by the library and register for our Teen/Adult Summer Reading Program. You register, read books (ask us if you need good book recommendations), fill out a form telling us about the books you read and you'll be entered to win a beautiful reader's basket. Drawing to be held in late August. At the end of the program we will provide everyone with a list of books that people have read over the summer so you'll get some good recommendations from other readers.

In the meantime, here are some places to look for good books to read:


Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Book and Bake Sale Postponed

The Book & Bake Sale scheduled for June 19, 20, and 21st has been postponed. We'll announce the new dates soon.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Book & Bake Sale

Be sure to stop in the library for our annual Book & Bake sale. You'll find great books at amazing prices and good food too!
Sale will be on June 19, 20, and 21st

Summer Workshop

Acting for the Camera
July 2 - August 6
For Students in Grades 6-12

Meets in the library on Wednesdays and Fridays from 4:30-5:30. Dr. Richard Asam will be the instructor. You'll learn skills unique to performing for a camera, how to collaborate on developing a script, and how to record a show. Final edited performance will be posted on the library's Webpage.

Sign up now by clicking here or stop into the library to register. For additional information, contact Rick at 764-2571.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Summer Reading for Grown-ups







It's that time of year when we all dream of having the summer off and spending time at the beach, in a hammock, on a deck, or just in our own backyard reading a good book. There is something wonderful about summer reading and enjoying good books outside on a hot sunny day.

We have lots of new exciting titles on order and some have arrived already. Stop by to see what is new and please let us know if there is something you want that you don't see.

  • Home: My Early Years, Julie Andrews
  • Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie
  • Rogue, Danielle Steel
  • Sail, James Paterson
  • Fearless Fourteen, Janet Evanovich
  • Nothing to Lose, Lee Child
  • The Reapers, John Connolly
  • Tailspin, Catherine Coulter
  • Resolution, Robert Parker
  • Monster of Florence, Douglas Preston & Mario Spezi
  • When you are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris
  • Plague Ship, Clive Cussler
  • Death and Honor, WEB Griffin
  • A Champion's Mind, Pete Sampras
  • Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles
  • Point of Origin, Patricia Cornwell
  • Secret Servant, Daniel Silva
  • Navigator, Clive Cussler
  • Double Take, Catherine Coulter
  • Audition: A Memoir, Barbara Walters

Coming in July 2008

  • Tribute, Nora Roberts
  • Last Kiss, Luanne Rice
  • Fractured, Karin Slaughter
  • The Garden of Evil, David Hewson
  • Hit and Run, Lawrence Block
  • Killer View, Ridley Pearson
  • The Last Patriot, Brad Thor
  • Moscow Rules, Daniel Silva
  • Death Angel, Linda Howard
  • Silent Thunder, Iris Johansen
  • Say Goodbye, Lisa Gardner
  • Queen of Babble Gets Hitched, Meg Cabot
  • The Sand Castle, Rita Mae Brown
  • Uneasy Relations, Aaron Elkins
  • Into The Fire, Suzanne Brockmann
  • Books: A Memoir, Larry McMurtry
  • The Dangerous Days of Daniel X, James Patterson
  • Chasing Darkness: An Elvis Cole Novel, Robert Crais
  • My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories they Told Me
  • My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike, Joyce Carol Oates

Friday, June 13, 2008

Catch the Reading Bug

Summer Reading Program
for Children


Come in and learn more about the summer reading program. You can register in the library or online. The theme this year is the amazing world of insects. Special guests will come to the library to talk about the world of bugs.

For more information and to register online click here.

First meeting is June 25th at 1:00 in the children's library. All other meetings will be from July 2 - August 6th on Wednesdays.

Contact Sue McPherson at 764-2571 for additional information.

Here are some neat bug sites to visit (courtesy of Librarians' Internet Index www.lii.org).:

Smithsonian Institution
http://www.mnh.si.edu/insect/
This is a starting place for locating the Smithsonian Institution's projects and content on insects, including exhibits, fact sheets, research, and classroom guides. Includes links to pages on mosquitoes and cicadas.


Purdue University Agriculture
http://www.agriculture.purdue.edu/agcomm/newscolumns/OSLarchives.htm
Compilation of columns featuring fun facts and trivia about insects, with titles such as "Hissing Cockroaches Not Warm-and-Fuzzy Pets," "Insect Words Can Be Pests to Crossword Puzzle Addicts," and "Not All Insect Legs Are Made for Walking."

Information Center for the Environment (ICE), University of California, Davis
http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/
"This website describes over 34 years of data collected by ... [a] professor of Evolution and Ecology at the University of California, Davis, in his continuing effort to regularly monitor butterfly population trends on a transect across central California." Features butterfly data, profiles of study sites (such as Donner Pass and Suisun Marsh), bibliography, photos, links to news and related websites, and more.

The Smithsonian Institution
http://www.si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/nmnh/buginfo/statebugs.htm
Quick list of the state insects for the "41 states in the United States [that] have officially designated State Insects." It also notes that "California was the first state of the United States to select a state insect. The Dogface Butterfly, Zerene eurydice, was officially adopted as the state insect of California in 1929."

Smithsonian National Zoological Park
http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/Invertebrates/Facts/insects/
Fact sheet about the insect class, which "comprises the most diverse group of animals on the earth and constitutes more than half of all described animal species." Includes images and links to related articles and fact sheets on praying mantids, Hercules beetles, insect farmers, communication, and camouflage and mimicry.

Ted Shapiro

The weather on Wednesday night (6/11) was just what you might expect when you have a meteorologist coming to speak at the library. We had intense showers, big storm clouds, a double rainbow, and a dramatic sunset. Those who attended the talk by WAGMTV's chief meteorologist, Ted Shapiro, certainly learned quite a bit about weather clues.

Some of the weather sites Ted went to during his talk were:
NOAA Photo Library (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
National Weather Service Historical Photos
National Weather Service Caribou Maine

Ted will be teaching an Introduction to Meteorology course at University of Maine at Presque Isle this fall. The course number is EDU 186 and class will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:40-2:55 beginning September 2nd. The course in open to all interested parties. Maine residents 65 and older can take the course for free (only fees are for textbooks).
For additional information, contact Ted at 764-4461 x261.

Another site you may enjoy is the National Weather Service Online School for Weather.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

The Immigrant Experience

Local high school students often come to the library looking for books about the immigrant experience as part of an English class assignment. Library staff have compiled this short list to make the selection process a bit easier.

While many of us remember reading Willa Cather's My Antonia, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, and Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club, there are many other titles to explore that highlight the immigrant experience, and some are listed below.

Love Wife by Gish Jen

Describes a mixed American family with a second-generation Chinese-American father, a WASP mother, two adopted Asian daughters, their half-half biological son, and a Chinese grandmother.


Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Indian American second generation experience. Growing up American with Indian parents and never quite understanding or finding your place in the world.


Digging to America by Anne Tyler

The story of two families in America that both adopt Korean infants. They meet at the airport while awaiting their adoptive daughters. One is a middle-class white couple and the other is an Iranian-American couple. Their friendship and the differences in their approach to raising their daughters is chronicled in this work.


A Free Life by Ha Jin

The story the members of a Chinese family as they begin a free life in American after the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. The family lives in Boston, New York, and Atlanta while seeking success in America. Read about their struggles and successes as they seek out the American Dream.


Typical American by Gish Jen

A story of the transformation of Chinese immigrants into typical Americans who find greed and consumerism attractive.


Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen

Chronicles the life of a Chinese-American teenager growing up in an affluent Jewish suburb of New York City.


Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran by Azadeh Moaveni

The story of straddling two cultures and struggling to find one's place.

Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia by Carmen Bin Ladin

The wife of Osama Bin Laden's brother describes her life and divorce, and provides an insider's look into Saudi culture.


Over a Thousand Hills I Walk with You by Hanna Jansen

Based on a true story of a Rwandan Tutsi girl who is the only survivor of her family's massacre.


China Boy by Gus Lee

Story of a seven-year-old Chinese boy and his life in the San Francisco of the 1950s.

Ten Thousand Sorrows: The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean War Orphan by Elizabeth Kim

An immigrant's brutal and disturbing memoir of abuse at the hands of fundamentalist parents and a sadistic husband.


The Spirit Catches you and you Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman

The story of Western medicine and Hmong culture and the clash of Hmong history, culture, spiritual beliefs, and ethics against the beliefs of Western medicine and society.


Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos Eire

This memoir of two brothers who were airlifted out of Cuba to the U.S. in 1962 is a very beautiful and moving account of the Cuban immigrant experience.


Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this work describes the history of a Greek family in Detroit. The narrator and protagonist, Calliope Stephanides, an intersexed person of Greek descent, has 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. The bulk of the novel is devoted to telling his coming-of-age story growing up in Detroit, Michigan in the late 20th century.


The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

An Indian-American family's transformation as they reconcile their past with the demands of the present.


Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this work explores Indian assimilation in American culture.


The Houseguest by Agnes Rossi

The story of an Irish soldier and his family, who come to America in the 1930s and settle in Patterson, New Jersey.


Colors of Freedom: Immigrant Stories by Janet Bode

Newly arrived teenaged immigrants describe their experiences in America, recount traditions of their native countries, and present short stories, poems, recipes, and artwork. Also provides interviews with native-born American teenagers, who share their family histories.


Kids Like Me: Voices of the Immigrant Experience by Judith M. Blohm and Terri Lapinsky

A collection of 23 stories about the immigrant experience based on interviews with of people ranging in age from 10-21 and representing 23 different cultures.

Meteorologist Ted Shapiro at the library tonight

Local WAGMTV chief meteorologist, Ted Shapiro, will be at the library tonight (Wednesday, June 11th) at 7 pm to give a talk on:

How To Use Weather Clues
Join us in the library's multipurpose room at 7pm.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

Open Source Software

Lisa Shaw, Teen Librarian, has compiled this list of open source software for those interested in finding and using free programs. If you have a need and you don't see it on the list, contact Lisa.

For those who have not used open source software and would like a definition, click here.

Whether you plan to spend some of your Economic Stimulus payment on a new desktop or laptop computer but don't have a lot to spend on extra goodies, or whether you are a local business trying to find ways to trim expenses on software, the following 15 applications are almost all Open Source. (This means they are constantly being improved and shored up by everyday programmers who believe programs and applications should be freely available to everyone.) All are free to download and/or use. All run on Windows and most also run on Mac and Linux.

Visit your local library to learn what other sites offer free applications or programs for your computer!

1. OpenOffice www.openoffice.org Free office suite with word processing, spreadsheet, draw, slideshow presentation, and database, Exports directly to PDF if desired. Completely compatible with MS Office's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as well as Starwriter and GoogleDocs.

2. Scribus www.scribus.net Free desktop publishing which allows you to design and print brochures, flyers, etc. Exports directly to PDF. Requires Ghostscript download, which can be tricky (or maybe that was just Lisa that found it tricky!) - visit your library for assistance if needed. You will probably also need GIMP ... .

3. GIMP www.gimp.org Free GNU Image Manipulation Program allows you to edit, layer and manipulate photos and images - just as the name implies. Think along the lines of Photoshop.

4. Paint.net www.getpaint.net Free digital photograph editing software. Makes cropping screenshots and photos a breeze! Saves easily to portable image file formats.

5. Inkscape www.inkscape.org - Open Source graphics editor. Great drawing tools. Fun one for kids to try.

6. Pencil http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil/ 2D animation software. Allows you to draw, layer - even add a music bed!

7. AutoStitch www.photo-freeware.net/autostitch.php Allows you to "stitch" together several photos into a panorama.

8. Audacity audacity.sourceforge.net Audacity allows you to break down your own music (created or loaded) or other voice audio into sound waves that let you edit down to the slightest hiccup. This is handy for studio musicians, voice-over artists, or anyone who likes to edit their music mixes. Users of SoundForge will find this looks very similar.

9. LilyPond lilypond.org Like to compose your own sheet music? LilyPond is a free, Open Source program which allows you to enter your music information in a language which the program understands and which will give you back elegantly engraved sheet music which can be put into PDF. LilyPond's site offers a ton of help and cheat sheets. If at first it looks too "programmy" to write, I promise you it will soon make sense. After all, if you have already learned the difference between writing a treble clef and a bass clef, this will soon come easily to you, too!

10. Jahshaka jahshaka.org Free Open Source video editing, effects and compositing suite. Improvements are being added all the time. Certainly worth a look for those interested in trying their hands at videography.

11. Blender www.blender.org Free Open Source tool for 3D creation and animation.

12. Songbird getsongbird.com Free desktop media player that finds, collects and stores music. Sort of like a customizable desktop jukebox.

13. SpiralFrog www.spiralfrog.com Free LEGAL music downloads. The site is supported by advertising, and they ask that you re-register every so often. They explain all this on their site. Windows only at this time.

14. InfraRecorder infrarecorder.sourceforge.net Free Open Source CD and DVD burning software. Runs on Windows.

15. Firefox www.mozilla.com/firefox/ Free Open Source browser alternative to Explorer, Safari, Opera, etc. Lots of interesting optional add-ons available.

This list is by no means exhaustive. Beta releases of applications warn you that they might still be working out a few kinks, but the ones we have listed here have stable versions and have been around enough to be considered overall pretty reliable. What are your personal hobby, entertainment, or business application wants and needs? You might be pleasantly surprised by what your local library has available for suggestions!

Know Your Candidates

I just finished reading Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama and thought I would next read something by John McCain. We have the following titles at the library by both Obama and McCain if you have an interest in learning more about the candidates.

If you enjoy reading political works or biography and memoirs, stop by to see what we have and ask us to get any titles you'd like that aren't on our shelves. If you have recommendations for purchase, we are always happy to hear from you.

Barack Obama
  • The Audacity of Hope
  • Dreams from My Father
John McCain
  • Why Courage Matters
  • Faith of My Fathers
  • Worth the Fighting For

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Maine Romance Authors Panel Discussion and Open House


From 1-4 on Saturday, May 31st, we celebrated the library's centennial by having a panel of Maine Romance Writers talk about their genre today and answer questions from the audience.
The writers who presented were (l to r): Jennifer Linforth, Lori Libby, Judi Phillips, Pam Champagne, Michelle Libby, and Nina Pierce.



We had great refreshments and a beautiful cake made by library cataloger Bonnie Smith.
Thanks to all who contributed to the event and to those who attended.


Wal-Mart Booth, May 31st




We had great fun meeting everyone at our Wal-Mart booth on Saturday, May 31st. Curious George was there and the children really enjoyed seeing him and having their photos taken with Curious George. He was even asked to sign autographs!


We spent the morning handing out information about our summer reading program, passport and notary services, selling our new bookbags to support the building fund, and signing up new members with library cards. We answered lots of questions and were able to talk to many community residents about library services.

Special thanks to Sue McPherson, Children's Librarian for organizing the booth and to Wal-Mart for allowing us to set up in their store. An enormous thank you to Curious George for coming to the booth and getting everyone excited about the summer reading program!