Thursday, June 6, 2019


Shakespeare garden is a themed garden that cultivates some or all of the 175 plants mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare.  In English-speaking countries, particularly the United States, these are often public gardens associated with parks, universities, and Shakespeare festivals.  Shakespeare gardens are sites of cultural, educational, and romantic interest and can be locations for outdoor weddings.  Signs near the plants usually provide relevant quotations.  A Shakespeare garden usually includes several dozen species, either in herbaceous profusion or in a geometric layout with boxwood dividers.  Typical amenities are walkways and benches and a weather-resistant bust of Shakespeare.  Shakespeare gardens may accompany reproductions of Elizabethan architecture.  Some Shakespeare gardens also grow species typical of the Elizabethan period but not mentioned in Shakespeare's plays or poetry.  Find a list of Shakespeare gardens at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_garden
See also The Shakespeare Garden by Sadie Stein at https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/05/17/the-shakespeare-garden/ and Plants For A Shakespeare Garden:  How To Create A Shakespeare Garden by Mary H, Dyer at https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/special/spaces/creating-a-shakespeare-garden.htm

The John Newbery Medal, frequently shortened to the Newbery, is a literary award given by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), to the author of "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children".  The Newbery and the Caldecott Medal are considered the two most prestigious awards for children's literature in the United States.  Books selected are widely carried by bookstores and libraries, the authors are interviewed on television, and master's and doctoral theses are written on them.  Named for John Newbery, an 18th-century English publisher of juvenile books, the winner of the Newbery is selected at the ALA's Midwinter Conference by a fifteen-person committee.  The Newbery was proposed by Frederic G. Melcher in 1921, making it the first children's book award in the world.  Besides the Newbery Medal, the committee awards a variable number of citations to leading contenders, called Newbery Honors or Newbery Honor Books; until 1971, these books were called runners-up.  To be eligible, a book must be written by a United States citizen or resident and must be published first or simultaneously in the United States in English during the preceding year.  Six authors have won two Newbery Medals each, several have won both a Medal and Honor, while a larger number of authors have won multiple Honors, with Laura Ingalls Wilder having won five Honors without ever winning the Medal.  The Newbery Medal was established on June 22, 1921, at the annual conference of the American Library Association (ALA).  Proposed by Publishers Weekly editor Frederick Melcher, the proposal was well received by the children's librarians present and then approved by the ALA Executive Board.  The award was administered by the ALA from the start, but Melcher provided funds that paid for the design and production of the medal.  The Newbery Medal was inaugurated in 1922, considering books published in 1921.  Find list of winners through 2109 and list of multiple award winners at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newbery_Medal

Patricia Battin was a librarian who well knew the clutter and chaos of big institutional libraries that never threw anything away.  As she rose in her profession in the 1970s and ′80s, she became a champion of reformatting books and old newspapers, using microfilm, computers and the emerging internet to preserve material and make it accessible while creating more shelf space for new items.  In the 1980s, she led a national campaign to save millions of disintegrating books that were published between 1850 and 1950, persuading Congress to increase its funding for microfilming these so-called brittle books.  To many librarians, Ms. Battin, who died on April 22, 2019 at 89, was a pioneer and a visionary.  Horrified that the printed word seemed to be crumbling to dust before her eyes, she helped lead the profession out of the dark ages and embraced the digital revolution.  To others, however, this revolution was misguided.  It was, they said, stoked by hyperbole and had devastating consequences:  the destruction of irreplaceable original documents.  Leading the charge was the acclaimed writer Nicholson Baker, who argued that printed works were not crumbling and that librarians were exaggerating the problem to feed the new technologies.  His polemical book “Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper”(2001) amounted to a declaration of war on reformatting, which at one time required the guillotining of book bindings to flatten the pages for the microfilm camera.  He aimed his arrows at all manner of respected institutions and individuals, including the librarians of Congress, the New York Public Library and, singling her out by name, Ms. Battin. From 1987 to 1994, she was president of the Commission on Preservation and Access (now the Council on Library and Information Resources), a private nonprofit group dedicated to preserving published materials and archives in all formats.  Hired in 1974 by Columbia University as its director of library services, she created one of the first electronic card catalogs.  In 1978, she was promoted to vice president for information services. She was the first woman to head an Ivy League library and one of the first university librarians to oversee both library services and information technology.  This included responsibility for Columbia’s computing center, which put her at the nexus of all scholarly information in the campus’s 26 libraries, regardless of how it was stored or disseminated.  With the rise of computers, her profession was upended.  She moved to Washington to head the newly formed Commission on Preservation and Access in 1987.  She warned at the time that perhaps a quarter of the world’s great collections were brittle, with some volumes already turning to dust.  The commission encouraged publishers to print books on longer-lasting alkaline paper and developed a national strategy for research libraries to work together to save their collections from the “slow fires” of acidic paper.  For her work, she won the Librarian of the Year award in 1990 from the Association of College and Research Libraries.  She retired from the commission in 1994 and went on to lead a three-year “virtual library project” at Emory University.  In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Humanities Medal.  Katherine Q. Seelye 

Word of the Day  polemology (countable and uncountableplural polemologies)  noun 
The study of human conflict and warquotations ▼
Antonym:  irenology  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/polemology#English  June 6, 2019 is the 75th anniversary of D-Day on 6 June 1944, the start of the Allied invasion of NormandyFrance, during World War II that laid the foundations for the Allied victory on the Western Front.

James Holzhauer Prompted a Fundamental Question About Jeopardy by Joe Pinsker  https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/06/james-holzhauer-jeopardy-legacy/591022/

'Jeopardy!' Star James Holzhauer on His Children’s Book Strategy  by Karen Springen   You told the New York Times that reading kids’ books is part of your Jeopardy! strategy, and said the library’s children’s section is the place to go for books “tailored to make things interesting for uninterested readers.” Which books and series did you find the most helpful?  I particularly enjoyed Zachary Hamby’s books on mythology, and the Classics Illustrated series of literary adaptations.  I’ve lived in four different cities since I started my Jeopardy!journey [in 2012]:  Seattle; San Diego; Naperville, Ill.; and Las Vegas.  All had excellent library resources.  Facts learned from children's books:  One of my episodes had clues on the minutemen and Paul Revere—I had just read a book on the American Revolution—as well as one about Maurice Sendak.  Read interview at https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/79918-jeopardy-star-james-holzhauer-on-his-children-s-book-strategy.html

Your library:  a place for all reasons

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2106  June 6, 2019

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