Francis, who loved the animalsMade the first manger scene,With ox and donkey, cow and lambbut not a dog was seen. Perhaps he knew in his saint’s heartthat some are called awayto guard the others through the nightIn old times, and today. There was a dog …
In 1988, Mary and I purchased a little nativity scene at a market in Mexico City. The figurines are all about an inch tall, and the set has become something we absolutely need to put out every year. It contains the usual shepherds, sheep, cow …
Portland certainly needs a new system of governance, but adoption of the Charter Commission’s proposals would make a bad system worse. One problem is the complicated and untried combination of ranked-choice voting with multi-member districts to choose the members of the City Council. Should the …
Proposed Portland Charter Reform is Confusing and Un-democratic Read More
An acquaintance of mine surprised me a few weeks ago with an invitation to be a worker on a fireworks crew that would be firing off the official Indepence Day fireworks shows for the cities of Ilwaco and Long Beach, Washington. These cities are in …
When my local public library to an online catalog from a company called Bibliocommons, it now requires library users who want to place a book on hold to register with that company, which then keeps track of everything they have checked out. This is a …
“Discovery Tools” were being pushed for libraries as being better than a traditional online catalog because they could incorporate websites and magazine articles into the search. What sounds good turned out to be a mess, and academic libraries in particular saw big declines in library …
How Does Switching to a Discovery Tool Affect Circulation? Read More
A piece that appeared in Library Journal arguing that the often repeated truism “librarians are forbidden from giving tax help to patrons” is untrue, and that proving this help can be a real service to the poor. BackTalk: Tax Help at the Library | Library …
This book was written with Bob Cooper, another librarian. From the days when Excel was still fairly new, it taught librarians how to use Excel and apply the program to studying use patterns of their collection. Unfortunately for the book, but fortunately for Excel users, …
This is a book that for every day of the year gives an incident or two on something that happened on Minnesota that day of the year. It was serialized by the Minneapolis Star Tribune every day of 2002. It was the best-selling book of …
Shortly after President George W Bush launched the second war on Iraq (2003), which was officially done to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. At almost the same time, an article titled “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam” written by his father, President George H.W. Bush and …
