Only 18 more days until the 2009 Weinberg Memorial Library Book & Plant Sale!
Tag: lackawanna county
Save the Date! Countdown to the Book & Plant Sale
Mark your calendars for April 25th and 26th! We’re just 63 days away from the Weinberg Memorial Library’s annual Book and Plant Sale, and the Library’s already buzzing with plans for this year’s event, which will be held in the 5th floor Heritage Room. As always, the Book and Plant Sale benefits the Friends of Harry & Jeanette Weinberg Memorial Library Endowment Fund.
Right now, we’re collecting donations of books, plants, and tag sale items. If you’d like to donate, you can drop off your books or other contributions at the Library, in the boxes just inside the Monroe Avenue entrance.
We’re also looking for volunteers. If you’d be willing to help us sort books and set up/take down the sale, please let us know! Give Barb E. a call at 941-4078, and she’ll add you to the volunteer list.
This year’s sale starts on Friday, April 24th with a special “Preview Sale” for current Friends of the Library and Schemel Forum members (and current University of Scranton students – bring your Royal Card!) from 4pm – 9pm. The sale is open to the public on Saturday, April 25th from 9am – 9pm and on Sunday, April 26th from 12pm – 4pm. We’ll see you there!
U of Scranton yearbooks online, from Aquinas to Windhover
January, named after the Roman god of gates and doorways, is not only a great month to celebrate the new year, but also to remember the past. The Weinberg Memorial Library has just made it even easier to reminisce by digitizing all of the University of Scranton’s yearbooks, from the 1916 Aquinas to the 2007 Windhover.
The Weinberg Memorial Library’s Digital Services department is proud to present the University of Scranton Digital Yearbook Collection, a 74 volume set of almost 20,000 digitized pages – all available to the public. You can browse the books to get a feel for each year’s unique student culture, or search the books to find photographs of your favorite University faculty, staff, and alumni!
Questions or comments? Contact the WML Digital Services department!
The Schemel Forum – Spring 2009
This Spring, the Weinberg Memorial Library’s Schemel Forum is offering a wealth of cultural enrichment opportunities, including three evening courses, a national issues forum, two luncheon seminars, and a piano recital. Check out the Forum schedule (and the incredible range of the topics to be discussed) here.
At the April 29th Schemel Forum Luncheon Seminar, Parag Khanna, author of The Second World, will speak on “A 21st Century Look at Global Politics and Economics.”
What is the Schemel Forum? According to the Forum’s director, University Senior Fellow and author Sondra Myers, “It is a noncredit, continuing education program for cultural enrichment at the University of Scranton, named for the late Rev. George Schemel, S.J., who was respected within the U.S. and abroad for his spiritual and educational talents… Schemel Forum courses are intergenerational and participatory.”* The class sizes are small, so discussion is encouraged (and lively!).
Why is the Forum important? Here’s Sondra again: “The Schemel Forum enriches the environment by stimulating people to think beyond their own fields of knowledge and create new ground for interaction, for envisioning the future, making new friends, and enjoying new experiences with old friends.”*
The Forum is open to the whole Scranton community – and University students, staff, and faculty are encouraged to get involved. If you’re interested, check out the course offerings, and then contact Kym Fetsko at 570-941-7816 to register.
*Both quotations are from “Talk of the Times with Sondra Myers,” an article by Patrice Wilding in the September 3, 2008 Scranton Times-Tribune.
The Streets of Scranton, now on Google
It’s even easier to find your way around Scranton, now that street-level photographic images of the city are available on Google Maps’ Street View feature. Using Street View, visitors to our area or even newly minted Scrantonians can get a feel for what it’s like to drive or walk down our streets.
In an article titled “NEPA Goes Global on Google” in Saturday’s Scranton Times-Tribune, staff writer Laura Legere described the benefits of Street View: “Google touts the program’s practical uses: it can help travelers preview landmarks on the way to a destination, shoppers discover if there are parking meters in front of a store, and homebuyers can peek at the neighborhood around a promising house.”
To use Google Street View, just go to Google Maps at www.maps.google.com. Search for an address you’re interested in, and then click on the orange stick figure right above the zoom bar on the left hand side of the map. You can drag the stick figure to “fly” over the streets, or just click on it to get into a full Street View image. Once you’re in Street View, use your mouse or arrow keys to navigate through the entire 360-degree view. As usual, if you need help using Street View, just ask one of the friendly librarians at the Weinberg Memorial Library for help!
You might notice that not all addresses or streets that you view in Google Maps have Street View images available – that’s because Google hasn’t yet photographed *all* of the streets in the Scranton area. While West Scranton is well represented, and major roads throughout the area are visible, downtown Scranton, the Hill section, and the University campus aren’t in Street View at this time. Google is constantly updating their maps, though, so keep your eyes open for Google cars on campus – you can spot them by the large cameras mounted on their roofs.
Going digital
This fall, the Weinberg Memorial Library is one of 14 institutions participating in a mass digitization pilot project. The program is headed by PALINET, a network of more than 600 libraries, archives, and museums in the mid-Atlantic region, with a goal of making electronic copies of interesting books available to the public via the internet.
So far, we’ve had six local history books digitized by Internet Archive. All six were written before 1923, which means means that they’re in the public domain – so we can post them on the internet without violating anyone’s intellectual property rights. What’s fantastic about the digitized books is that:
- they’re now accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime (while the physical books are only available to people who visit the WML Special Collections library in person, during limited hours), and
- they’re full-text searchable!
Check out our books on the Internet Archive website here. You can browse through the books using the “flip book” viewer, and you can also download PDF copies of each book. If your family is from the area, be sure to use the full text search box in the flip book viewer to search for your last name – the books are great resources for genealogists. Or just look at the great pictures, like this 1882 line drawing of the proposed design for the Lackawanna County Courthouse from “Memorial of the Erection of Lackawanna County” (if it looks a bit different from what you see on the Square today, it is!) —
