New DVDs in the Library

Looking forward to the long Thanksgiving weekend? Here is the list of all the new DVDs the library has acquired for this month that you can checkout from the library. There is a mix of the old and new along with some non-fiction.

Clear and Present Danger
Dare Not Walk Alone
Fred Claus
Futurama - Bender's Game
The Gary Cooper Collection
Get Smart
Hancock
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Kung Fu Panda
Lust For Life
Meet Dave
The Perfect Holiday
Princess Mononoke
The Public Enemy
Pyongyang Concert
Sense and Sensibility
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
This Christmas
Tropic Thunder
Up The Yangtze
Vicky Cristina Barcelona

The Most Requested Titles

Here is a list of the most requested books in the library. Along with the title is the number of holds as of the time of this posting.

Twilight 66
Brass Verdict : A Novel 58
Lucky One 55
Brisingr, or, The Seven Promises of Eragon Shadeslayer and Saphira Bjartskular 46
Gate House 45
Cross Country : A Novel 43
Divine Justice 40
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle : A Novel 39
The Shack : A Novel 30
Extreme Measures : A Thriller 29
Eclipse 28
New Moon : A Novel 27
Rough Weather 24
Bones : An Alex Delaware Novel 22
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society 20
Salvation in Death 20

If you want, you can compare our most requested items to the LA Times and NY Times bestseller lists.

Online Resources Part II
Jeff Price, Reference Librarian

I mentioned in the email newsletter article that knowing which database to use was half the battle to find good information. Also, its not a question of not only knowing which tool, but how to use the tool you selected. Some online sources are ebooks. (Electronic versions of reference books that the library most likely has in hard copy.) So when you look up something online using one of these tools, you can find an exact copy, words and pictures, of the information in a printed book. Examples from our collection include Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia and the Middle Ages Reference Library.

Other sources are kind of a hybrid, some information is only available online while other parts are reprinted from reference books. So these types of resources are databases which contain the articles from many different reference works. For example, the Biography Resource Center contains articles from many different types of sources that contain biographical entries. Consequently, this is a fantastic tool to start with if you are doing any research on a person, from the earliest of recorded history to the most current pop idol.

Another resource I would put in the category is the Literature Resource Center which has entries from a veritable alphabet soup of different sources. (CLC, TCLC, SC, NCLC...) All of which have reviews and criticisms from reference books online for people to access.

Our ProQuest database is very focused and contains the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times only. But there is a unique twit to this one. The default search looks at both the Times and Register going back to the mid-1980s. But if you want to go way back using the Los Angeles Times Historical Database, you need turn off searching the current articles and select specifically the historical archive, which isn't very intuitive for people use to a Google type search.

And the two most unique online resources we have which isn't geared for children are the Learning Express Test eBooks and Online Practice and the Overdrive down-loadable books, which I'll talk about next time.

Blast from the Past

In April 2002, the library opened its expanded south wing. Prior to then, there was a very nice garden where the Technology Center, Fiction, Biography, Local History and Genealogy section of the library now stands. Here are some photos of the "Garden of Knowledge" that was originally part of the library grounds.

Photos taken by Kathleen Kelton