Welcome Paulina

Aaargh! No, we didn’t make former Children’s Librarian Marybeth Varney walk the plank at the end of our "Treasure Hunting" summer reading program. She jumped ship, with our permission, and swam back to Maine. As she said, she had to leave the state to realize that she didn’t want to. She has a wonderful opportunity to start a new school library from the very beginning, and our loss is their gain. We will miss her.

However, her timing was perfect. Our new catch to be the Head of Children’s Services is Paulina Shadowens, pictured here with her friend Clifford. Paulina just graduated from the University of Rhode Island’s Library School with a Master’s in Library and Information Studies. But she’s not a stranger to NH. After traveling the Eastern seaboard with the Navy, her parents settled in New Hampshire and Paulina graduated from high school and attended the University of New Hampshire here. After working up and down the East Coast, Paulina obtained a Masters in English Literature, also at UNH. She finally realized that her love of literature, libraries, serving people and making a difference were all realized in one profession, librarianship. Thus came her second master’s program, and our lucky day!

Please stop in and welcome Paulina not only to the library, but also to Hampton. You will find her in Katie’s Room, at the Reference Desk, or out in the community in the preschools and elementary schools.

Fall Story Times

It's that time of year. The waning days of summer are upon us, days are getting shorter, nights are getting cooler, and schools are filling with teachers and students again. And that means it's time for the Children's Room to prepare for the regular fall story time routine.

Sign-ups begin on September 5th.
Story times begin the week of September 18th and run for six weeks.

The schedule is as follows:

• Toddlers, 15-36 months meet on Tuesday or Wednesday mornings at 9:30
• 3 year olds meet on Wednesday mornings at 10:30
• 4-5 year olds meet on Thursday mornings at 10:30

Space is limited, so please call or stop by the Children's Room to register, starting September 5th: 926-4729.

125th Anniversary Prize Winners

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE LIBRARY WINNERS!
The Lane Memorial Library’s 125th Anniversary Celebration concluded on August 5, 2006, the 125th day after the April 2nd anniversary with a drawing for the grand prize. For that 125 days anyone entering the library could put a free raffle ticket into the birthday box. Once a month from April on, the library drew a ticket and awarded a prize. Those winning tickets were again deposited for a chance at the grand prize drawing on August 5th .

The monthly winners were:
April - Ray Lemoine who won a copy of Hampton: A Century of Town and Beach
May – George Harvey who won a $25 gift card to Barnes and Noble
June – Kelly Kean who won a $25 gift card to the Olive Garden
July – Mary Pechewlys won a copy of Hampton: A Century of Town and Beach

The adult grand prize winner was Hannah Czarick, pictured above, who won the $125 gift certificate to the Library Restaurant.

The children's grand prize winner was 3-year-old Claire Becker, pictured here with big sister Margaret. Claire won the children's prize of 125 quarters.

Hampton Teens Become NHSPCA Adoption Angels

This year the Lane Memorial Library tried something different for our teen summer reading program. Rather than focusing on prizes (though we did have some), we asked the teens to read on behalf of the many homeless animals being sheltered and cared for by the NHSPCA. And read they did. Of the 63 sixth through twelfth graders who signed up for the program, 32% participated fully, keeping track of their reading time and submitting tickets to the “Adoption Angels” cans. Each ticket represented three hours of reading time, with some bonus tickets thrown in for reading from a wide variety of genres. During the eight weeks of the program, these Hampton area teens read for nearly 1,000 hours! That’s 60,000 minutes for those readers who prefer to think in smaller time increments. Not bad at all.

Dogs and puppies were the overwhelming favorites among our participants, followed by small animals and then cats. So, thanks to the generous support of the Friends of Lane Memorial Library, the teens have donated $100 to become the proud Adoption Angels of a space in the dog room. That space currently houses Kassie the Coonhound, and will provide for her care during her tenure at the NHSPCA. (We hope she finds a home soon.) Well done!

Treasure Reading comes to a Grand Finale!

The Children’s Summer Reading Program at Lane Memorial Library concluded Thursday, August 3 with a grand finale “Pirate Party.”

Our party began with a puppet show featuring the talents of Carol and Crew. We then enjoyed Pirate Cake while participants were awarded certificates of achievement and other gifts. The night was capped off by a raffle for prizes that included a $50.00 gift certificate from Wal-Mart and a $30.00 gift certificate from Toys R Us.

This year we had 213 Hampton area children register for “Treasure Reading.” Approximately 2556 books were read during a six week period for a total of 249,210 minutes. What a cause to celebrate!

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the boys and girls who did such a fantastic job of reading this summer. We would also like to thank all those parents whose support and encouragement helped make our reading program such a huge success.

To view more photos of our grand finale, please visit our new flickr site at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lanememlib/sets/72157594231874291/

~~The Children’s Room Staff

LibraryThing

Have you been to LibraryThing.com yet? If you are a reader you'll love this site. You may even want to contribute to it. This is a site where you can search through a rapidly growing catalog of close to a million different books contributed by over 50,000 individuals. Subscribers use LibraryThing to catalog their own book collections and share that information with the world. Some do it anonymously while others include a lot of personal information about themselves. Every title that is added gets "tagged" with descriptive words and phrases that can be searched by anyone using the site. In library lingo, we call these "subject headings." Each book gets a star rating by its contributor, and many also include short book reviews.

The real fun begins when you search LibraryThing. The search page allows you to search for Works (by title), authors and tags (or subjects). Once you have found a title that interests you, one of the first things you will see is that book's "Tag Cloud". A tag cloud is a list of the tags that people have used to describe this book. At first you may think that someone went wild with their computer fonts, because they come in all different typeface sizes. But the way a tag cloud works is that the larger fonts indicate a tag that has been used more often than the smaller ones. So these larger tags are the ones that most accurately describe the book. Click on any of these tags and you will be presented with a list of the books in LibraryThing that use the same tag.

Each book's record also has a graphical chart showing user ratings, from half a star to five stars. Following the chart is the "Book recommendations" section. Here you will find a list of the most common other books owned by the people who own this particular title. This may give you some ideas of other books to read that are similar to the first. Another list contains titles that are "similarly tagged", so these are likely to be on similar subjects and in similar genres. Finally there are the "special sauce recommendations", which list another group of titles. Don't ask me where this group comes from, because I couldn't find an answer on their website! Apparently they use some complicated algorithm to come up with other titles related to this one.

I could go on with some of the other features, but I'll let you explore them on your own. If you are a reader I expect you will enjoy browsing this site. It has many of the same features as flickr (where people share photos) and del.icio.us (where people share web links.) Give it a try.