OverDrive Open House?

So I have a question for everyone today. Would you be interested in having a time where library staff would be available to help you with our new OverDrive website. You would be able to bring in you own equipment (mp3 players, eReader, etc....) and learn how to set it up and use it. What's OverDrive you ask? Only a very easy way for you to browse our online collection of eBooks and Audio Books, to download them at home or here at the library and enjoy them wherever you go. 

We will show you "hands on" how to set it up and use it and you will be all set up to download audiobooks onto your mp3 player or how to read eBooks on you laptop or eReader. You will walk away knowing all you need to know to use this great service.

 - Brad                           Leave me a comment here

Such Databases! Who Knew?

In exploring about on the library's website, as I have not had the chance to do with the busyness of Summer, I decided to check out the "Databases" link.  I knew that we had some really cool databases, but WOW!  I was not aware of some of them!  I am very excited, can you tell?  

I regularly "push" the ones I am most familiar with:  World Book (awesome!),  Tumblebooks (so fun!), and of course our online card catalog iBistro.  I was also aware of several of the others.  Byke language learning (yes you CAN learn a new language FREE!), Inspire, Reference USA......what's this?  Global Road Warrior?!?!  Cool!  Oh yeah, it is a very "Me" thing!  Want to know more about Chechnya or Djibouti?  Global Road Warrior can help.  There are even printable maps.  Got a school project, or just curious about the world in which you live?  Yeah, go there.  

How did I not know we had this?  I don't know.  Next up for exploring is A to Z Maps Online, also on our database list.  What can I say, I like maps.  These are not the only available databases, obviously, a full listing can be found on the Database list. 

One more thing I like:  our Digital Library.  Download e-books and audio books.  So 21st Century, don't you think?  I will always love a "real" book, but also appreciate options.  Thanks OCPL!

-Jennifer Frye

Youth Services

Shared Reads

Despite its provocative title, The Poisoner’s Handbook, by Deborah Blum, will not help one dispose of moles, voles or any other pesky, unwanted creatures. Instead, what it does is provide a lively account of the professionalization of New York City’s coroner’s office in the first part of the 20th Century with a particular emphasis on toxicology.

Dr. Charles Norris was the man charged with bringing modernity to the office which, before that, was a haven of patronage with no particular medical knowledge required. Dr. Norris was a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University’s School of Medicine. He had studied pathology and bacteriology in Germany and Vienna and upon his return to New York he worked first as a lecturer in Pathology at Columbia and then as a lab director at Bellevue and Allied Hospitals. His love of research served him well as he both invented and improved upon methods for detecting any number of toxic substances. 

Dr. Norris, a former athlete, was born to a wealthy family who instilled in him a strict sense of civic duty. Each of these qualities served him well as he not only furnished and equipped a professional medical examiner’s office at his own expense he at different times had to cope with austerity measures that caused the city to eliminate clocks and transportation for the coroner’s office. 

Dr. Norris, along with the majority of medical examiners in the US, opposed Prohibition which was inexorable ossifying its way into the Constitution at the same time Dr. Norris was struggling to bring the coroner’s office into the 20th Century. Dr. Norris and his colleagues warned that the prohibition of alcohol sales would lead people to concoct their own home brews which would invariable lead to a rise in poisoning deaths through consumption of ethyl and methyl alcohol. When this prediction came true, Dr. Norris and his colleagues petitioned the federal government to take steps to render denatured alcohol less toxic. The government responded by making denatured alcohol more toxic, reasoning that the person who knowingly consumes illegal alcohol was, in the words of Wayne Wheeler of the politically powerful Anti-Saloon League of America, “in the same category as the man who walks into a drug store, buys a bottle of carbolic acid with a label on it marked ‘poisonous’ and drinks the contents.” The fact the Federal government would knowingly poison its own citizens, who they first rendered as a new criminal class, was eye-opening to me.

Another interesting case discussed was the “Radium Girls.” Radium had been discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie and it was immediately perceived as a miracle cure for any number of diseases and conditions as well as having many industrial and cosmetic uses. One of these industrial uses was making the dials of clocks and watches glow in the dark. I had read something about the Radium Girls in the past, in a book of Ripley Believe It Or Nots, I believe, and knew the girls had been poisoned from licking the brushes they used to apply the radium paint to the dials. The Poisoner’s Handbook adds so much to this tale. Not only did the women lick their paintbrushes to a fine point, something they were taught to do by management, but they also decorated themselves, painting their nails, hair and clothes, so they would glow in the dark as well. The Radium Girls began to drop dead but first their jawbones splintered, their teeth fell out and they began to suffer with debilitating anemia. The company behind the glow in the dark dials, U.S. Radium Corporation, hired a team of Harvard scientists to investigate and the Harvard scientists concluded that the death of the Radium Girls were connected but not caused by their employment and so was launched a was launched a lawsuit that was eventually settled when the body of a Radium Girl who had been dead five years still showed high levels of radioactivity in all her bones and tissue.

Another fascinating case that sort of bookends the book involves a brilliant young chemist hired by Charles Norris, Alexander Gettler, who testified in the 1923 murder trials of a 24-year-old woman named Mary Frances Avery Creighton who stood accused alongside her husband John of murdering her own younger brother for insurance money. When Raymond Avery died a doctor listed “gastroenteritis” as the cause of death and there it might have lain except for an anonymous letter that piqued the interest of the local police. The body of Raymond Avery was autopsied and a large amount of arsenic was found. The couple was tried and found not guilty of this charge but as soon as they were released Mary Frances was arrested again and charged with poisoning her mother-in-law, Anna Creighton, whose death had also been listed as “gastroenteritis”. Alexander Gettler testified in that trial that what appeared to be arsenic crystals was actually the by-product of bismuth and within the space of three weeks Mary Francis Avery Creighton would once again be found not guilty of murder. Flash forward 13 years and Mary Frances Creighton was once again on trial for her life in a sensational murder case where she was accused of poisoning Ada Appelgate, wife of their housemate, Everett Appelgate, so that Everett could marry the Creighton’s 15-year-old daughter, Ruth. This time Mary Frances Creighton, along with co-defendant Everett Appelgate, was found guilty and executed in New York State’s electric chair at Sing Sing prison on July 13, 1936. Before she died Mary Frances would confess that she had indeed poisoned her brother for his insurance payout.

The Poisoner’s Handbook is filled with such stories and I would highly recommend this book to anyone who appreciates coroners, science, toxicology, medicine, history or who just enjoys a ripping good yarn. The author is a Pulitzer Prize winning science writer who teaches journalism at the University of Wisconsin Madison and wisely uses a device where she will name a chapter for a particular substance and then back it up with real life examples. In doing so Ms. Blum both educates and entertains. This book is available at the Owen County Public Library. Check it out!

~ Laura Wilkerson

   August 18, 2010

Last minute Friday addition

Hey just a quick note before I bounce out of here on this beautiful Friday afternoon. I'm working on adding a collection of RSS feeds to the owenlib.org website. For those of you that have no clue what this is, maybe this will help. If you click on the top menu where it says "News", this will take you to a list of categories. From here you can select from lists of soon to be lots and lots of websites. After choosing one from the list it will show you the top ten current postings from that site and you didn't even have to go there to find it. How cool is that? Im hoping to make the library site a "One Stop Shop" for all your website needs.

Just remember that there is lots more work to be done on this next week. More websites to add. Feel free to test it out. If you would like me to add a website, maybe your favorite. Let me know I will see what I can do for you.

Everyone have a great weekend and check back next week for more additions.

 - Brad

Went to a Library Conference yesterday

So yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a conference in Indianapolis to discuss the future of libraries. We all know that OCPL has changed over the years, even more then the move we made from the old Carnegie building on the corner to the remodeled former bank building that we are in now. We've seen so many changes in just the last five years. Look at the way we think about computers and cell phones for instance. Who knew that so many of us would have laptops with wireless internet? Who knew that most of us would be carrying some kind of cell phone, from the simple flip phones to the Iphone. We can now check our email, surf the web, things like that on the move. First did you all know that the library offers wireless internet? Anywhere in the building you can use your laptop to get onto the internet and as some of you have disvovered you can get on outside the building as well. That's ok too. No one is going to say anything if you use our internet connection from your car, the sidewalk, your bike, camel whatever. You don't need to sign in, you don't need a password. Don't have a laptop? We now even have some available to "checkout" for use here in the building. We've added areas around the building where you can sit and use your computer for as long as you like. Some of these spots even include electrical outlets for you to plug into. Space is a hard thing to come by here at the library sometimes, but know that we are doing our best to carve out spaces where you can sit comfortably and hopefully quietly, to do what you need to do.
 - Brad

First post

Hi everyone.


This is the first post. We will see how this goes. Im hoping this will be where staff can contribute things. Share thoughts on things involving the library. Library users can leave comments.

 - Brad