NYPL Blogs

The American Library Association National Preservation Week is taking place between April 21–27, 2013. As part of this annual effort, NYPL is joining institutions across the country in highlighting the work of its own program as well as helping to inform the public about how to care for personal collections.

Here is a selection of books new to The New York Times list of Business Best Sellers published in the Business Section print edition Sunday, April 7, as well as two books reviewed in the Mutual Funds Reports special section that day. Plus, a quick look at the Nielsen BookScan listing in the April 5th edition of the Wall Street Journal shows some titles new to this column. Enjoy!

When Baryshnikov founded the White Oak Dance Project with choreographer Mark Morris in 1990 the focus was to give choreographers a venue for developing new works, as well as creating a touring arm to present them. The project also revisited modern works from previous decades, presenting them to new audiences throughout the United States.

Carrere & Hastings, architects of the Central Library on 42nd Street (now the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building) designed room 316 as a 19th century picture gallery. On May 22, 1986, the 75th anniversary of the opening of the building, the room was formally dedicated to Edna Barnes Salomon, the wife of Mr. Richard Salomon, Chairman of the Board of the Library from July 1977 to May 1981. In addition to the oil portaits of various Astors, members of the Lenox family, some of the Shelley & Wollstonecraft clan, some landscapes and scenes of New York, there two matching life size portraits of Charles Coburn and Ivah Wills (Mrs. Coburn) as  from As You Like It.

April is Immigrant Heritage Month. In New York City, April 17th to 24th is Immigrant Heritage Week. In honor of both celebrations of Immigrant Heritage, this blog will focus on the multiculturalism of the 7 train.

If you live in Queens, New York, and you work in midtown like me, there might be a possibility that you often take the MTA train to work, particularly the 7 line which runs from Main Street, Queens to Times Square, New York.

One of the most interesting things about this line is that it runs into various ethnic pockets of Queens. The train brings and transports a multicultural group of people from all over the world from Queens to Manhattan on a daily basis. Here 

President Barack Obama officially declared Tuesday, April 9, 2013 as National Equal Pay Day. In a statement issued Monday, April 8, Obama said, "Women, who make up nearly half of our nation's workforce, face a pay gap that means they earn 23 percent less on average than men do. This disparity is even greater for African-American women and Latinas. On National Equal Pay Day, we recognize this injustice by marking how far into the new year women have to work just to make what men did in the previous one."

March 20, 2013 would have been Mr. Roger's 85th birthday. At the Webster Library we celebrated by having our very own Won't You Be My Neighbor Day. The premise was simple (but as Mr. Rogers says, "Deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex"). Won't You Be My Neighbor Day encourages everyone to do one neighborly act—and of course, wear a sweater!

April contains National Library Week (April 14-20, 2013). According to the American Library Association website, this event was “first sponsored in 1958… to celebrate the contributions of our nation's libraries and librarians and to promote library use and support."

While many of the services and features of our nation’s libraries have remained the same over the ensuing fifty-five years since the inception of National Library Week, a literal myriad of changes have been effectuated in libraries commensurate with the changes in the world. One change in particular causes people to (correctly) exclaim, "The library is going to the dogs!"

Visit NYPL's BiblioCommons for these lists and many more. See below for some interesting staff picks from the past couple months, on topics both timely and timeless:

Shel Silverstein's poems are humorous; no one can deny this.

In "How Not to Have to Dry the Dishes," kids learn how to avoid this onerous chore. Silverstein's advice? Drop one onto the floor. The illustration includes a huge dish that is covering a girl's entire body.

This entry is formatted as a creative, non-fiction essay synthesized from notes taken during my first day volunteering at Rikers Island on January 22nd, 2013. None of the included events are fabricated; all the inmates and guards are currently working or serving time on Rikers Island, therefore no names have been included. The material is drawn from my own sensory experience, conversations with inmates, and outside research. The final product is my blow-by-blow recollection and reflection on a day of first impressions.

Last year I wrote a popular blog post entitled "OMG! I Love That Song!: A Guilty Pleasure Playlist" where I confessed my song shame only to find out that many of you shared the exact same musical taste. Than this past February, several of my choices also ended up winning Grammys. I should have named that blog "A Not-so-Guilty Pleasure Playlist" instead. This year this post is once again a "no judgment zone" and I am declaring my love for the songs that I have on constant replay and can't get out of my head. Chances are they're on your player too and if they're not they should be. Okay, now I'm judging you.

As the nation is going through an education reform to Race to the Top and Educate to Innovate, Mayor Bloomberg of the Big Apple is following suit in developing education programs inline with the national policy in general and meeting the education and employment needs of the New Yorkers in particular.

I love the cat breed illustrations on the inside of the front and back covers of this book. All of the cats look so happy! The book is full of poems that indicate the nature of cats, and anyone who has experience with cats or who has lived with cats knows exactly what Crawley is talking about in these cat poems.

For the week of March 31, 2013 we have hardcover fiction, hardcover non-fiction, and paperback non-fiction.

The sixth season of AMC’s hit show Mad Men premieres on Sunday, April 7. If you’re interested in throwing a historically accurate premiere party, or you just want to learn more about the 1960s, NYPL offers plenty of groovy resources.

Where in the world are you reading about? Fiction finds its settings in all corners of the world (and some places only imagined in our minds) but there's something special about fiction set in a familiar city or neighborhood. This week I thought I'd tackle another famous neighborhood of Manhattan, but now we're traveling uptown to Harlem.

Hello readers. This month the Reader's Den is reading A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

Titles and cover images often give readers a clue as to what lies within a book but I admit I was baffled about this one. 

A guitar and a goon squad? It didn't make sense. On the other hand, A Visit from the Good Squad was awarded a Pulitzer Prize (2011) and a National Book Critics Circle Award (2010). Plus, it was always checked out. I thought maybe I should give it a chance.

Here are scans of the color plates of U.S. Plant Patents received at SIBL for the weeks of March 5, 12, 19 and 26, 2013.

Plant Patent plates for 2012 and 2013 have been listed, with links, in the table posted here.

As before, please be careful in using these — they're really not appropriate to use for prior art or other similar searches. Otherwise, please enjoy!