World Fellowship Center Announces Oral History Workshop Weekend

The New Hampshire Humanities Council asked me to share this information with the NH library community.

(Albany, NH) - The World Fellowship Center has received a grant from the New Hampshire Humanities Council to present “Building Community with Stories: The Art of Gathering and Presenting Oral History.”  This oral history workshop will be held the weekend of September 14-16, at the World Fellowship Center, located at 368 Drake Hill Rd, Albany NH.

Are you interested in collecting the stories of your family, your community, your organization? Teachers, community historians, organizational leaders, family historians, writers, performers, and all those interested in enhancing their oral history skills are invited to attend.

Jo Radner will lead this lively, hands-on workshop that will guide participants through effective strategies of interviewing, designing oral history projects, and presenting community stories.  Jo will give special attention to the kinds of projects envisioned by participants and will present examples of possible outcomes of oral history projects, from theatrical performances to websites, walking tours to print publications, school projects to immigrant festivals.

Oral history projects can serve to unify relations between newcomers and long-term residents, build stronger communities, reinforce family bonds, improve students’ understanding of history, and forge collaborations amongst diverse community groups.

Jo Radner is an oral historian, folklorist, and storyteller. She has taught oral history workshops and performed community stories from Maine to Hawaii. She is past president of the American Folklore Society and the National Storytelling Network. Learn more about her work at www.joradner.com.   

On Saturday, September 15, at 7pm, there is a free event open to the public entitled, “The Stories We’ve Heard: Performances of Oral History”. Jo will perform stories based on family and community oral history and participants in the weekend-long workshop will join her on stage.

The fee for attending the entire workshop is at the reduced cost of $30 ($20 for the second registrant from the same organization or family), thanks to the generosity of the New Hampshire Humanities Council. Anyone from the public is welcome to attend with advance reservation.  Meals and overnight lodging are also available if desired, at the picturesque World Fellowship Center.  Nightly rates include three meals and begin at $51 per night per adult. Non-participants are welcome to come along and enjoy World Fellowship’s waterfront, hiking trails, grassy recreation areas, and proximity to North Conway and the White Mountains. 

The New Hampshire Humanities Council nurtures the joy of learning and inspires community engagement by bringing life-enhancing ideas from the humanities to the people of New Hampshire. They connect people with ideas. Learn more about the Council and its work at www.nhhc.org.

The World Fellowship Center is a secular, non-profit intergenerational camp and conference center established in 1941. Its mission is to promote peace and social justice through educational and multicultural programs, inspired by the natural beauty of the White Mountains. For more information, go to www.worldfellowship.org.

For information about the program, contact Jo Radner at jradner@american.edu or 207-925-6244. To make a reservation for this workshop, contact the World Fellowship Center at 603-447-2280 or email reservations@worldfellowship.org.

Brief NHU-PAC outage Fri 8/31 7:35am

There will be a brief interruption of NHU-PAC searching to update keyword indexes starting around 7:35 Friday morning, August 31. The outage should last no more than 5 minutes.

Online again 8/24

Friday, Aug. 24, 11:25 a.m.: The NHU-PAC and other state sites are back online again.

Connectivity issue 8/24

Friday, Aug. 24, 11:20 a.m.: There seems to be a connectivity problem with the state's networking which has made the NHU-PAC and other state websites unreachable to many users, starting around 11:10 a.m.

Van Delivery News September 2012

The NH State Library will be closed on Monday, September 3, 2012, in observance of  Labor Day. There will be NO VAN DELIVERY on this date.

For a complete list of all of the holidays the State Library is closed, please visit http://www.nh.gov/nhsl/services/librarians/van_delivery/instructions.html (the van delivery instructions) and scroll down to "NO Van Service".

If for any other reason (e.g. bad weather) van service on a particular route(s) does not operate, libraries will be notified via an e-mail message and this blog. If your library does not receive van service on a particular day, please check your e-mail and this blog before calling the State Library.

Please remember to properly label each item which you are sending via the Van Delivery Service. This will help ensure these items make it to the correct destination in a timely manner.

If you need a refresher on how items should be marked for the van, please refer to the Van Delivery Service - Instructions, http://www.nh.gov/nhsl/services/librarians/van_delivery/instructions.html, and scroll down to number 3 of the guidelines, "Addressing material to be sent on the van".

To print a current van directory list arranged in alphabetical order by library, please use the PDF version which is available at http://www.nh.gov/nhsl/services/librarians/van_delivery/documents/vandirectory.pdf

You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and print this pdf file. If you do not have it installed on your machine, you may down load it for free from http://www.adobe.co.uk/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

Due to the ever increasing load of materials transported by the New Hampshire State Library van delivery system, our vans can reach maximum capacity before the end of a van route, especially following long weekends and holidays. Our drivers can decline to accept materials if they feel they cannot fit them safely on their van. We are also asking libraries to please be aware of volume during times when there is likely to be a problem. You should prioritize your materials to be picked up, in case some items must be left until the next van pick up. That will allow us to immediately transport the most important items as quickly as possible.

If you have any questions you may contact Donna Gilbreth at 271-2060 or Diana DeCota at 271-2206.

NHAIS Status

NHU-PAC appears to be working as usual following the state system work scheduled for this morning.

Early morning NHU-PAC outage Monday 8/20

The NHU-PAC is among State of New Hampshire services that will be offline Monday, August 20, from 2 to 6 a.m.   Also affected will be the NHAIS-L and NHAIS-ILL e-mail lists.  We’ll be testing NHAIS resources after network connectivity is restored.  If any problems are found, they’ll be noted here on the NHAIS Notes blog (which isn’t part of the outage).

MARC21 bibliographic records - 020 tag

The ISBN is a 13-digit or 10-digit publisher assigned number and is assigned to various types of material including books, visual materials and sound recordings, etc. In a perfect world, each ISBN would be unique. Unfortunately, numbers can be, and are erroneously assigned to multiple books by the publishers, or recycled from an item no longer in print. The 020 tag in MARC21 bibliographic record has no indicators and contains the ISBN (International Standard Book Number). The ISBN is found in subfield 'a' the indicator for which is implied and does not appear on the record. On occasion, you may find an ISBN preceded with a ‡z (subfield z). This indicates that the ISBN listed in that subfield is not valid. Another sub field code that is optional, but may be found in the 020 tag, is ‡c Terms of availability and most typically would list the price of the item.

Each ISBN has four parts: the language group of the country of publication, the publisher's identifier, the title number, and a check digit. The 13-digit number differs from the 10-digit number not only by the 978 (979 for other locales) which begins all of the 13-digit numbers, but also by the formula calculated check digit at the end (numbers 0 through 9, or the letter x) . Therefore you cannot drop the 978 from a 13-digit ISBN as a shortcut to the 10-digit number. For example 9780312626686 and 0312626681 for the same record are different from one another. Likewise, you cannot drop the beginning zero/s from a 10-digit ISBN or the ending check digit 'x' from either number.

When printed in a book, an ISBN may appear hyphenated separating the four parts; but you should not use the hyphens when searching (or creating) a record. Each ISBN appears in it's own 020 tag, so do not type both the 13-digit and the 10-digit ISBN into a search box and expect a valid result. You must search by either one or the other. If a book appears in both hard cover and paperback editions, and if the publishers are the same, both ISBNs may be found in separate 020 fields of the same record. In the case of books, you may find the ISBN located on the back of the title page, on the back cover of the book or on the dust jacket if there is one. (NOTE: When a book has been rebound, an ISBN may be found on the back cover of the book that differs from the one found on the title page verso. The correct ISBN to use to identify the material would be the one found on the title page verso.) On materials other than books, the ISBN is normally found on the packaging.

ISBN searching is an easy way to find records in NHU-PAC and is an excellent place to start. If you don't find a match by ISBN, there may still be a matching record in the database for your item, so you should try another search (title or author are good choices) before assuming no record is available.