A Trip to Fruitlands

The Friends of the Wadleigh Library invite you to join us for a trip to the beautiful Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts on Wednesday, May 28. Fruitlands is one of the first outdoor museums in America. This was the home of Bronson Alcott's experimental utopian farm community of the nineteenth century. There is also a Shaker farmhouse with exhibits of early Shaker settlement, and a very large, modern museum of Native American art collections. There are nature trails throughout the 200 acre property with breathtaking views of Mount Wachusett.

We will form carpools at the library parking lot at 9:30 am. Volunteer drivers are also needed. Admission is $10. for adults and $8.00 for seniors 65+. There is an extensive lunch menu in the Tea Room and beautiful picnic grounds if you prefer to bring your lunch.

Call the library at 673-2408 for more information or sign up online on our library calendar.

Posted by: Susan Amann, Reference Librarian

New! Online Requests from All GMILCS Libraries

Perhaps you have heard, the Wadleigh Memorial Library (WML) along with the 11 other local libraries belonging to the GMILCS consortium recently "opened their collections" to online requests from patrons. What does this mean to you?

As a patron of the Wadleigh Memorial Library, in addition to searching the WML catalog for items, you can now search all GMILCS Library catalogs. It will then be delivered to whichever library you choose; for example Wadleigh Memorial Library patrons would choose WML.

This of course can be done from the library computers, but most importantly this can be done from the convenience of your own home!!

How do I do this you ask? It is quite easy if you have an active library card and pin on your account.

1. Login in to the WML website, www.wadleigh.lib.nh.us, and click on the catalog tab.
2. Click on the "all GMILCS libraries" link, top right.
3. After locating an item, select "request item"
4. Login using your barcode and pin
5. Indicate your pickup location, for WML patrons the default is WML
6. We'll notify you when the item comes in.

There are a few exceptions, items that can not be requested this way, so if a notice appears that says "must be requested from your library" stop by WML and we would be happy to make that request for you.

We hope you enjoy this expanded service.

Cindy Mazza, Reference Librarian

Mother's Day, Miss Jarvis and Carnations

It seems like a "no-brainer" that there should always have been a holiday celebrating mothers (this said by the harried mother of four boys) but actually it took a lot of work on the part of Anna Jarvis of West Virginia in the early 2oth century to get the second Sunday of May established as the day we honor our most significant female family members. She campaigned her whole life to make this the official holiday with carnations as a floral symbol of our love for our mothers (it was her mother's favorite). Early on she realized this holiday's potential to become lost in commercialism and fought a long, bitter battle to protect the day with, not surprisedly, little success in our society. You can learn more about Miss Jarvis and her quest by visiting the West Virginia archives. If you'd like to know more about the carnation, the online flower encyclopedia The Flower Expert brings together a whole "bouquet" of interesting facts. Happy Mother's Day!

Diana LeBlanc, Reference

Mysteries, Anyone?

We welcome everyone to join us at these neighboring libraries to participate in
the New Hampshire Humanities Council Book Discussion Series: Mysteries on Both Sides of the Pond this summer. This is a three-part series of discussions of mystery stories that illustrate the development of the genre in the urban American "hard-boiled" detective novel and the "country house" murder mystery of Great Britain. Join any one or all events this summer. Books will be available for loan at each library one month before the meeting dates.

For the first talk we will meet at the Wadleigh Memorial Library (673-2408) in Milford on Tuesday, June 24 at 7 pm to discuss The Case of the Stuttering Bishop: A Perry Mason mystery by Erle Stanley Gardner. When a wealthy man is murdered, two people appear to lay claim to the inheritance. Not a typical courtroom drama, Perry depends on detective work to solve the crime.
NH Humanities Council scholar Donna Decker, associate professor of English at Franklin Pierce College, will lead the discussion.

Part 2 - will take place at the Daland Memorial Library (673-7888) in Mont Vernon on Wednesday, July 23 at 7 pm. We will meet to discuss William Tapply's and Philip Craig's First Light, with alternating chapters of the mystery related by the two authors who are crime novelists and fishing friends on Martha's Vineyard. NH Humanities Council scholar Marty Boldin, adjunct professor at Granite State College in social and behavioral science, will lead the discussion.


Part 3 - We will meet at the Wilton & Gregg Free Library (654-2581) in Wilton on Thursday, August 14 at 7 pm to discuss A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George. Though George lives in California her Inspector Lynley stories are set in England and typify the Scotland Yard mystery style we have come to know through the PBS Mystery!Series on TV. Part detective story and part psychological thriller, this is her first novel which represents mismatched detectives representing the upper and lower classes of society.
NH Humanities Council scholar Kathleen Shine Cain, Professor of English at Merrimack College, will lead the discussion.

To expand your list of mysteries to read this summer check out ALA Booklist's Year's Best Crime Novels.

Posted by:
Susan Amann, Reference Librarian

Books to Help You Become Greener

In Line with the program presented here at the library last week on Buy Green, Be Green, I started listening to Barbara Kingsolver's new audiobook Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, which she has written with her husband Stephen Hopp and her daughter, Camille. I had always loved her fiction, and though a friend has been urging me to read An Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan so I could understand about high fructose corn syrup and overproduction and consumption of corn and soy beans in this country, it wasn't until this month when I was planning for our program that I started to pull all our books together on the subject of the environment that I took the time to learn anything about conservation and recycling. Don't get me wrong, I've been recycling since the '70's and remember well the gas crisis, but I haven't really been paying much attention to the food we eat and buy. Her book tells the story of the year her family attempted to only eat what they could grow on their farm in Virgina or buy from local sources. She is an entertaining storyteller and I think that it may be easier to listen to some of what she has to say, rather than read through some parts of it which can be a bit dry. It is interspersed with more academic information supplied by her husband, an environmental studies professor, and meal plans and recipes supplied by her teen-age daughter. After listening to this book, it really seems so logical to try to eat what is produced locally, and forego the terrible, tasteless tomatoes and strawberries in February, and just wait til the harvest. Also, I am convinced I need to buy organic produce when I can, since it is becoming easier to find it and not much more expensive.

Another handy little book I came across was Go Green, Live Rich by David Bach. His point is that it is also cheaper to take steps to conserve, and if you invest the money you save, you'll be rich. Well, I am not sure I buy that particular scenario, but it did find lost of helpful websites that help you to measure the impact of small changes you can make to conserve and reduce your carbon footprint.

Check out the many other books we have at the library on the subject of conservation and the environment.

Posted By:
Susan Amann, Reference Librarian

National Library Week

Come celebrate National Library Week (April 13 - 19) with us here at the Wadleigh Library in Milford. There is something for everyone. Besides the usual books and media to borrow, you can bring the children to storytimes, learn how to reduce your own carbon footprint by buying greener products, attend a Friends of the Library meeting, join the Friends for a trip to Boston to tour the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and finish up with an evening visit to our Acoustic Cafe with Matt Brown and Flynn Cohen.

Don't miss this reference desk video produced by the American Library Association in which we learn what a typical day at the reference desk can be.

Posted by: Susan Amann, Reference Librarian

Don't Be Mis-informed

A few days ago, someone came to me expressing concern about the re-use of water bottles that they had "heard" about. Since I usually wash out and refill my plastic bottles for water (I'm horrified by the millions of these bottles that are being thrown away every day around the world) I decided to further investigate this cautionary tale. It turns out that this rumor is a result of mis-information circulating around, you guessed it, the Internet. One particular e-mail hoax was a result of a student's college paper based on unscientific analysis of trace elements in water in re-used bottles. Actually, the element detected is not harmful in any way to humans and may have come from the plastic lab equipment used in the analysis. The only real concern for re-using any type of beverage container is poor hygiene practices that allow bacteria or viruses to cultivate and can be passed from person to person by accidentally sharing bottles that look alike. If you would like to find out more about the rigorous testing used on plastic bottles that come in contact with food or water, visit PlasticsInfo.org for links to documents from the FDA, International Life Sciences Institute, and more.
Finally, with all the "information," good & bad, out there in cyberspace, we all need to take the time to become good consumers of information, not accepting each rumor that we encounter at face value, but really expanding our knowledge by checking the facts and the authorship of information in more than one place. It's hard work, but well worth the peace of mind.

Diana LeBlanc, Reference