The results are in! Our first ever Teen Video Contest brought us six funny and informative videos, all made by our super-talented local teens. The theme was, “Why My Library is Important to Me.” From dogs who know best to fireside chats, each video was unique and enjoyable. We applaud all the great work! What was most heart-warming was seeing how many ways our teens use and appreciate the Central Rappahannock Regional Library. Some pointed out that it’s a safe place to hang out with friends or work on group projects. Many admired the free Internet access, computer use, databases and online searching. They see their library as a quiet study retreat, a place to get professional research help, and most of all, a treasure trove of free books, music, and movies.
So, without further ado, here are the winners.
In first place, receiving the prize of a Flip digital video camera is Erik Martinsen, creator of the video, “Libraries are Doggone Fun!”
On Tuesday, April 6, 2010, Paul Israel of Rugters University and author of Edison: A Life of Invention will give a talk on the inventor. This lecture, part of the university's Great Lives series, is free and open to the public. For more information on "The Wizard of Menlo Park," check out this list of materials recommended by the reference staff of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library.
I shouldn't have to tell you the music CD is dead, as is every audio format that came before it, with the possible exception of vinyl, the fax machine of the music world. Music is digital, end of story. Digital music differs from any of its progenitors in its lack of physicality; there is no disc that you can put on your shelves, no album liner notes that you can flip through unless of course you create all of that yourself, but doesn't that defeat the point? If you have a digital music collection of over 6000 tracks, you're not going to take the time, spend the money, or use the space to create physical CDs for each of those albums. Still, we need to be able to keep track of our music and that's sometimes easier said than done.
Teen Tech Week may be officially over, but our Teen Video Contest is only at its halfway point. While it's been widely advertised that winners’ videos will be featured on our library website, we just found out that Best Buy has also generously donated some incredible prizes. The first place winner will receive an Ultra Flip video camera, second place a $100 gift card to Best Buy, and third place an official library t-shirt.
If you're not on the Internet with your mobile phone, chance are you soon will be. With the adoption rate for smartphones and other cellular Internet devices skyrocketing, these devices are stealing the spotlight from laptop computers and vying for the position as our dominant mobile computing solutions. With this transition has come a plethora of mobile applications to meet our every need and then some (and some more). We want to be able to do everything our regular computers can do on our smartphones. For many of us, that includes using the library. We're in luck.
Most computer users these days use laptops as their portable computing solution and take them almost everywhere they go. There are those situations, however, when you need access to your programs and your files, but of course, you forgot your laptop when you needed it most. Fortunately there’s easy access to a computer nearby, but it doesn’t have anything you need on it. What to do?
William Kamkwamba first encountered the magic that ruled Malawi when he was six. Herd boys found a sack in the road; it was filled with bubblegum! What a treasure! "Should we give any to this little boy with leaves in his hair?", they asked. Of course they did, a double handful of gumballs: so many colors. William ate them all.
Today's libraries are not just for books, computers and magazines – the Salem Church library now has its own geocache! In geocaching, participants obtain the location of a geocache from a geocaching Web site www.geocaching.com, use a GPS to arrive in the area of the cache, and then follow clues or simply hunt for the cache. There are over 1000 caches waiting to be found within a 25 mile radius of the Fredericksburg area!
She’s only four feet tall and 110 pounds, but little “Ardi” is causing a sensation among paleoanthropologists. Earlier this month, after fifteen years of research, scientists reported that they had identified Ardi’s skeleton as the oldest hominid known to modern humans. Ardipithecus ramidus, as she is formally known, lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. She’s remarkable not just for her age, but for what she tells us about human evolution. Scientists are re-arranging the human family tree in light of this new research.
Up until Ardi’s discovery, Lucy was the most famous hominid skeleton, and she is still important to an understanding of human evolution. Catherine Thimmesh tells her story for readers ten and up in her new book, “Lucy Long Ago, Uncovering the Mystery of Where We Came From.”
