Digital bookmobile @ Lancaster Sprawl, 4/14, 12-6 p.m.

Image via WikipediaDigital Bookmobile National Tour event

One of the interesting things about the event below is the realization that it's being funded by the makers of these digital toys, because they have to create some demand to get our little cash-strapped library to spend money on their ephemera instead of honest-to-God books, which endure much better and don't require the user to have spent hundreds of dollars to use. Still, if you like that sort of thing, you might want to know about this:

Hosted by Salem Public Library
12 noon-6 p.m. Wednesday, April 14
at Lancaster Mall, 831 Lancaster Dr. NE

Salem Public Library is hosting an April visit from the Digital Bookmobile, an interactive download experience inside a 74-foot, high-tech tractor-trailer. The Digital Bookmobile offers interactive learning stations where visitors have an opportunity to search the library’s digital media collection, use supported mobile devices, and sample eBooks, audiobooks, and video, all available locally through the Library2Go digital download service, which is available at Salem Public Library and all area libraries in the Chemeketa Cooperative Regional Library System.

Readers of all ages are invited to stop by and learn about digital downloads, visit the Salem Public Library resource table, and even sign up for a library card on site.

The Digital Bookmobile is a service of Salem Public Library and is operated by OverDrive, Inc. Information about all aspects of the Library2Go download service is available from the Salem Public Library Information/Reference Desk at 503-588-6052 or www.salemlibrary.org.

Sonja Somerville
Community Relations Coordinator
Salem Public Library

Phone: 503-588-6083
E-mail: ssomerville@cityofsalem.net

Now is the Time for All Good Citizens to Come to the Aid of Their Heritage Center

Image via Wikipedia

The new thing, the Willamette Heritage Center ... i.e., Mission Mill Museum married to the Marion County Historical Society and given an unfortunately colorless name ... needs all our help.

The good folks running the show have a survey about how you use the place and what you think the priorities are. Check it out -- doesn't take long, and the more people from Salem and surroundings who complete it, the better.

Groups like the historical society and the folks who have worked so hard to preserve the mill have done something very, very important. Salem is very, very young in a historical sense -- yet, we are preserving less of our history than ever, thanks in large part to our own American sense of "history is bunk" but also because technology is sweeping things aside. If we're not careful, we're going to have more newspapers from 17th and 18th C. Philadelphia than from 19th and 20th Century Salem.

The public library should be the great archive of all county newspapers and should be working tirelessly to get them all rescued from the destroyers (the people who thought we should microfiche everything and then pulp it) -- but the library budget is imploding. So we're left with the county historical society, so we need to support them and help them thrive. To be ignorant of history is to remain a child forever, as the saying goes. We're going to face some hard, hard times in years to come -- it's important that we have access to the knowledge of how other people faced prior hard times here.