There are new books on the shelves again this week...

Below are the titles of just a few of the books recently donated to the Silver City Volunteer Library:

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1998) The story of the tragic decline of an Indian family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love, The God of Small Things is set in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India

Man From Beijing by Henning Mankell (2010) this thriller by the author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries is set in the Swedish hamlet of Hesjövallen. A resident of the town soon learns that not only have members of her family in Sweden been among the victims, but that some of her relatives living in Nevada have also been murdered. She then discovers the nineteenth-century diary of an ancestor—a gang master on the American transcontinental railway—that describes brutal treatment of Chinese slave workers.

In Memory of David’s Buick by Bob Saar (2011) If you've followed Bob Saar's work at the Burlington Hawkeye Newspaper over the last ten years, or read any of his other work online, you'll be glad he wrote a novel. This is classic Bob Saar.

New mysteries by George Pelecanos, C.J. Box, Jonathan Kellerman, and Lee Childs, including Echo Burning

Devil’s Exile by Chuck Hogan (2010) When Neal Maven and a crew of fellow Iraq War veterans begin ripping off Boston-area drug dealers for profit, their lives are quickly put into jeopardy

Third Rail by Michael Harvey (2010) The city of Chicago is under siege, and Michael Kelly, cynical cop turned private investigator, just happens to be on the scene when all hell breaks loose

Degrees of Freedom and Theories of Flight by Simon Morden (2011) Featuring the character Samuil Petrovitch

Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy (2010) by Carlos Eire: in this memoir, Carolos Eire takes up where he left off in Waiting for Snow in Havana: as an eleven-year-old, Carlos and his older brother leave Havana on an airplane—along with thousands of other children—to begin their new life in Miami in 1962.

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain (2010) Tracking his own strange and unexpected voyage from journeyman cook to globe-traveling professional eater and drinker, Bourdain pulls back the curtain—but never pulls his punches—on the modern gastronomical revolution, as only he can. And always he returns to the question "Why cook?" Or the more difficult "Why cook well?"

M.I.T. Game-Changer: Free Online Education

Free, interactive, online education opens whole new worlds for libraries and other public spaces. Ideas?

From Forbes 12/21/2011 in

Here’s a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.

The program will not allow students to earn an M.I.T. degree. Instead, those who are able to exhibit a mastery of the subjects taught on the platform will receive an official certificate of completion. The certificate will obviously not carry the weight of a traditional M.I.T. diploma, but it will provide an incentive to finish the online material. According to the New York Times, in order to prevent confusion, the certificate will be a credential bearing the distinct name of a new not-for-profit body that will be created within M.I.T.

The new online platform will look to build upon the decade-long success of the university’s original free online platform, OpenCourseWare (OCW), which has been used by over 100 million students and contains course material for roughly 2,100 classes. The new M.I.T.x online program will not compete with OCW in the number of courses that it offers. However, the program will offer students a greater interactive experience.

Students using the program will be able to communicate with their peers through student-to-student discussions, allowing them an opportunity to ask questions or simply brainstorm with others, while also being able to access online laboratories and self-assessments. In the future, students and faculty will be able to control which classes will be available on the system based on their interests, creating a personalized education setting.

M.I.T.x represents the next logical evolution in the mushrooming business of free online education by giving students an interactive experience as opposed to a simple videotaped lecture. Academic Earth (picked by Time Magazine as one of the 50 best websites of 2009) has cornered the market on free online education by making a smorgasbord of online course content – from prestigious universities such as Stanford and Princeton – accessible and free to anyone in the world. Users on Academic Earth can watch lectures from some of the brightest minds our universities have to offer from the comfort of their own computer screen. However, that is all they can do: watch. Khan Academy, another notable online education site, offers a largely free interactive experience to its users through assessments and exercises, but it limits itself to K-12 education. By contrast, M.I.T.x will combine the interactivity of the Khan Academy with the collegiate focus of Academic Earth, while drawing primarily from M.I.T.’s advanced course material.

“M.I.T. has long believed that anyone in the world with the motivation and ability to engage M.I.T. coursework should have the opportunity to attain the best M.I.T.-based educational experience that Internet technology enables,” said M.I.T. President Susan Hockfield in the university’s press release.

According to the university, residential M.I.T. students can expect to use M.I.T.x in a different way than online-only students. For instance, the program will be used to augment on-campus course work by expanding upon what students learn in class (faculty and students will determine how to incorporate the program into their courses). The university intends to run the two programs simultaneously with no reduction in OCW offerings.

According to the New York Times, access to the software will be free. However, there will most likely be an “affordable” charge, not yet determined, for a credential. The program will also save individuals from the rigors of the cutthroat M.I.T. admissions process, as online-only students will not have to be enrolled in the prestigious, yet expensive, university to access its online teaching resources.

Those chomping at the bit to dive into M.I.T.x will have to wait, as the university doesn’t plan to launch a prototype of the platform until the spring of 2012. According to M.I.T. Provost L. Rafael Reif and Anant Agarwal, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, the prototype might include only one course, but it would quickly expand to include many more courses.

Once launched, M.I.T. officials expect the M.I.T.x platform to be a giant hit amongst other universities looking to create or expand upon their online course materials. “Creating an open learning infrastructure will enable other communities of developers to contribute to it, thereby making it self-sustaining,” said Agarwal in the M.I.T. press release.

Whether M.I.T.x will directly threaten the margins at for-profit online universities, such as the University of Phoenix, APUS, or DeVry remains to be seen. But as M.I.T.x starts to provide many of the salient virtues of for-profit online colleges, such as a robust learning management systems and real-time virtual interaction, these publicly traded education companies might have to lower fees in order to compete with M.I.T.x’s compelling free price. In addition, the success of M.I.T.x, OCW, and Academic Earth may push dramatic technological innovation at for-profits, so that they can maintain a unique selling proposition versus their free competitors. Moreover, as the rapidly growing number of what are termed “self educators” choose free college education, a cottage industry of social media support services might evolve to bring them together for free in-person study and help sessions

Which is all to say that, against this country’s sizable need for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) graduates, M.I.T.x is nothing short of revolutionary. This is especially true if you aren’t a credential freak and, like me, just want to improve your chops in a marketable subject area. Heck, maybe Gene Marks’ (“If I Were a Black Kid”) tech-based view of education can become a reality after all.

Similar Concepts:

KhanAcademy: Learn almost anything for free: largely free, interactive education online with assessments and exercises K-12. http://www.khanacademy.org/

Academic Earth: free Online courses from the world’s top scholars: http://academicearth.org/

TED Talks (lectures):

“Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity”

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Looking forward to 2012 Library Events

The Silver City Volunteer Library continues to organize diverse community events and programs.The library collection includes thousands of books in storage, with hundreds of new titles being rotated to the accessible selection in the School House library area on a quarterly basis. Residents are invited to borrow from hundreds of new books (many thanks to recent contributors Darlene and John Cobbey, Christy McGill, and Lyon County Libraries). For more information on the library, please contact Quest Lakes at 847-0742.

Vastly Expanded Science Fiction and Fantasy Section: Those who have been asking for science fiction and fantasy novels will be happy to hear that the library has added hundreds of new titles in that category, including series from Marion Zimmer Bradley, David Eddings, Zenna Henderson, Raymond E. Feist, Andre Norton, Jennifer Roberson, Anne McCaffrey, Elizabeth Moon, and Mercedes Lackey, among many others.

New Fiction: In other new adult fiction, the library has had a recent donations of hundreds of mysteries by dozens of authors, including Raymond Chandler,Tony Hillerman,Walter Mosley,Nevada Barr, Haruki Murakami, Steg Larsson,Carl Hiassen,Ruth Rendell, Ngai Marsh, Patricia Highsmith,Elmore Leonard, Dorothy Sayers,etc.

New Section on Jobs and Careers: if you’re hunting for a new job or changing careers, check out half a dozen new titles in this category.

Enlarged Section on Art History and Classics: The library now has an enlarged section on art history, including works on Picasso, Wahhol, Escher, Goya, Gaughin, Klimt, van Gogh, O’Keeffe, Judy Chicago, and Aubrey Beardsley, as well as an enlarged collection of classics by authors such as Edith Wharton, Dickens, Steinbeck, Joyce, Faulkner, Jules Verne, E.M. Forster, and Charlotte Bronte.

The library is also fortunate to have a timely addition of new titles on Latino-American history and issues, including:

Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwestern United States by Carols Velez-Ibanez

On the Line: Life on the U.S. Mexican Border by Augustra Dwyer

Transformations: Migration, Family Life, and Achievement Motivation Among Latino Adolescents by Carola Suarez-Orozco

In the Barrios: Latinos and The Underclass Debate by Joan Moore

Patrons may also choose from current periodicals, films, and other nonfiction

Kids’ Books: In juvenile fiction, there are lots of new titles as well. The library also carries a large reference selection for young readers on science, animals, religions of the world, and history thanks to donations by Lyon County Libraries and other donors, including the Crawford family.

Please feel free to borrow books during any Silver City Community Events, including the monthly soup dinners, town council meetings,community garden meetings, weekly Tai Chi classes, Silver City Community Partner events, summer program, etc.

Silver City Community Partners and volunteer library are partners of Healthy Communities Coalition of Lyon and Storey. For more information about the Coalition, please see www.healthycomm.org or www.facebook.com/healthycommunitiescoalition

Silver City: A Community of Book Lovers

"Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time."- Edwin P. Whipple

Silver City Librarian Wins Award

By Karen Woodmansee, Virginia City News

(January 15, 2008) - Recreating the Silver City Volunteer Library after the fire at the Silver City Schoolhouse community center in 2004 destroyed the original has earned a local activist some recognition.

Quest Lakes, of Silver City, who worked to restore the library in the tiny office of the Silver City Volunteer Fire Station, was recently given a plaque and special citation award by the Nevada Library Association in recognition of her efforts.

She said now the library is bigger and better than it was in the Schoolhouse.

“There was really wasn’t a library before the fire,” she said. “What we had were 3 bookshelves, and it was mainly things people donated.”

She said the town used to have Coffeehouse Fridays, where there would be soup to eat and books to discuss, along with musicians and occasional board games.

But Lakes said people in the small historic town loved to read so much that the loss of the books was among the first things lamented after the fire.

Those books were destroyed, mostly from smoke and water damage, save one children’s art book that had been inside a metal cabinet, Lakes said.

Though she didn’t have any library training, Lakes said her mom was a librarian and books were important enough for her to start a new collection to be housed in the fire station that serves as a temporary community center.

“Now we have a really wide range, a lot of best sellers, a complete set of Nevada Revised Statutes that Joe Dini donated and encyclopedias donated by Lyon County Libraries,” she said.

The children’s offerings range from preschool picture books to the latest in the Harry Potter series. The library even had two Harry Potter Parties that were attended by every kid in town.

“We also have a lot of other fantasy series, like the Golden Compass series and the Hobbit series,” she said.

For adults, there are journals, Civil War history books and the latest mysteries.

There are also periodicals for adults and children. Lakes said there are two older computers at the library, which is only open on Sundays at least until the Schoolhouse reopens.

“We already have volunteers to help us move things and we’ll get some other computers,” she said.

Books and materials are donated from all over, she said.

“We’ve gotten a lot from local residents and Lyon County Libraries,” she said. Other places that donated books were Community Chest in Virginia City, Community Threads and Things in Dayton, Soroptimists and even Barnard College in New York.

She said the volunteer library has received some funding through Healthy Communities Coalition of Lyon and Storey Counties, and that funding has helped the library’s programs, all of which are free.

“As small as we are, we have all these programs, art and cultural programs and book signings,” she said.

Even Sue Fawn Chung, an expert on Chinese-American history, flew up from Las Vegas to give a lecture last summer, she said.

Lakes, who was nominated for her award by Lyon County Library Director Diane Brigham and is quick to credit others for the library’s success, in particular the local fire department, the Silver City Task Force and local residents.

“Silver City is a town of book lovers, and it seems as if we’ve had donations of books from just about every household,” she said.