Marianne Silver's blog

The New City Library Board will have a special meeting tonight, Wednesday, Feb. 13, at 5:30pm in the conference room.  The public is invited to attend.

Thanks to the support of our patrons, the combined New City and West Nyack library budgets were approved 654 yeas to 284 nays.  It was an impressive and encouraging turnout.

The New City Library welcomes new board members Victor Berger and George Jacobson.  Incumbent Ed Kallen was elected for a second term.  Thank you to all the candidates who endeavoured to serve on the board - Cecily Cohen, Christian Cortelli, and Terence Mulgrew.

We would also like to thank Terri Thal for her years of dedication to this library and community as she finishes her term this month.  Her insight, expertise, and diligence were valuable assets to the board.

Enterprise, the public library catalog, has been upgraded.  Some of the improvements you will notice:  a pickup by date for holds will be displayed; holds can now be easily unsuspended; active holds (meaning they are already on the shelf waiting to be picked up) can be cancelled online; and, with a switch to a server with more resources, greater stability with less crashes.   If you use the Firefox browser and the catalog is not displaying correctly, please clear your cache by going to Tools->Options and click on the Privacy tab. Clink on the link that says "Clear your recent history" and only have Cache checked. Set Time range to Everything and click OK.

As always, if you need assistance, please stop by the adult reference desk or give us a call at 634-4997 x 125 or x126.  Or text us at 265-010; type newcityref: and your question.  We're here to help!

eBooks and eReaders are exciting technologies that enable you to get your hands on that new bestseller at the speed of light.  You can enlarge the typeface, bookmark your favorite parts, take notes, and also store or access from the cloud thousands of other titles with just one small, portable device.  That’s great!!  And now you’ve found out that your public library has free e-books!  Life doesn’t get any better, does it?

Well, unfortunately, there’s going to be a little rain on this parade.  You see, of the Big Six publishers, only Random House is currently allowing unrestricted sales of their e-titles to public libraries.   And they just raised their prices significantly.  Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan will not sell to public libraries at all.  Penguin recently ceased sales to libraries (and is even considering cutting off access to titles already purchased), and Harper Collins sells their titles with a 26-use licensing restriction. 

The new catalog is throwing us all (staff and customers) a few curves, but as with any large data migration and change in software, these "hiccups" can be expected.   The Ramapo Catskill Library System administrator is updating us frequently on the changes and updates they need to perform in order to make things run smoothly.  You may notice temporary loss of access when they make such changes.

DVD title searching can be done by first searching the title.  On the results page, under Media Type in the left-hand column entitled Limit Search Results, check off Physical Video Media and click on Include.  Give it a moment, and the DVD results will be culled out of the original results.  Using the Advanced Search to do this is a bit problematic right now, so we don't suggest that route. For new releases, use a keyword search such as "debt dvd" for the new release "The Debt."  See comments below for further explanation.