Summer in the Library

It's been far too long since the last post! What has happened in the time since we've been quiet? Fiona left the library; she is currently on her way to teach English in South Korea. Yay for her, definitely a loss for the library.

Here in the library, we've been talking about what's going to happen while we are down one person, and no real decisions have been made yet, but as soon as they are, I'll post something about it. In the meantime, this may be old news, but have you seen the news release about the Codex Sinaiticus?

The Codex Sinaiticus lived at the Monastery of St. Catherine in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula until 1859, when it was divided up between its home, Britain, Germany, and Russia. Basically, the Codex is the surviving pieces of a 1,600 year old Christian Bible written in Greek. Scholars from all four of the countries have agreed to collaborate and make the text of the Codex available online.

In preparation for the summer...

Here at the Cardinal Stafford Library, we are already thinking about summer! Hard to believe, but with only two weeks left of classes and finals, the library is preparing to move into "summer mode." So, without further ado, the library's academic year hours will remain in place until Thursday, May 14th, which means it'll look like this:

Mon-Thu 8AM-10PM
Fri 8AM-6PM
Sat 10AM-4PM
Sun CLOSED

Beginning Friday, May 15th, the library will go to reduced summer hours, which you can see at the top of the blog, on the right-side column of the blog, on the library's website, or the library's Facebook page, or you can read it here:

Mon-Fri 10AM-6PM
Sat-Sun CLOSED

Enjoy your break, you've worked hard for it!

¡Viva Cristo Rey!

This year, the SJVTS seminarians (with the help of a few others, notably our own Fiona!) staged a production of ¡Viva Cristo Rey! written by Cathal Gallagher and Fred Martinez. According to the Quo Vadis Theater Company,

This play takes place in Mexico during the mid-1920's. It was the administration (1924-1928) of Plutarco Elias Calles, a ruthless anti-clerical and anti-religious individual who decided to put teeth into the anti-clerical laws that had been passed over a decade before. The era marked one of the most horrific chapters in Mexico's history. It was into this hellish environment that the fun-loving jokester and troubadour Fr. Miguel Augustin Pro was thrust. Fr. Miguel was the "secret agent" of Christ. While wearing different disguises (see right, as an auto mechanic when delivering a conference to a group of chauffeurs) he managed to bring the Sacraments, hope and Christ's loving mercy to many in Mexico City and other parts of Mexico.

Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) denounced Plutarco Calles and others in his 1926 encyclical, Iniquis Afflictisque (On the Persecution of the Church in Mexico) On September 25, 1988, Fr. Pro was elevated by Pope John Paul II to blessed.

Now because we're representing the library, there's a great bibliography of Fr. Pro on Fr. Raymond Bucko's website. You could also use the search terms "miguel" and "pro" in the Cardinal Stafford Library's catalog, to determine what we have locally, in addition to the links in this posting.

Learning a foreign language?

Are you interested in learning Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French, or Russian? Online courses in these languages and many others are available to you to free! All you need is a library card. The Denver Public Library offers this service through a product called Mango Languages. Many other libraries offer similar services, ask your friendly librarian to show you how to determine if your home library offers this product.

For example, though, if you go to the homepage of the Denver Public Library, click on Reference Resources, then click on Databases A-Z, you can scroll down to Mango Languages, and learn away!

Holy Week, Easter, and Library Hours

As we spend time this week reflecting on the time we've had this Lenten season, we have the opportunity now to look ahead to Easter. This is Holy Week, next week is Easter week, and that'll bring some changes to the library's hours. So, for this week and next week, the Cardinal Stafford Library will be open:

Holy Week
8am-10pm Monday-Wednesday
8am-4pm Thursday
CLOSED GOOD FRIDAY
CLOSED HOLY SATURDAY
CLOSED EASTER SUNDAY

Easter Week
8am-6pm Monday-Friday
10am-4pm Saturday
CLOSED SUNDAY

Regular Academic Year Hours for the Library will resume Monday, April 20th, and you can find all of this information on the Library's website. Have a blessed Easter!

Keeping up with the Library

Have you ever wondered who the first Vatican Librarian was? Or why he was chosen? You (or someone you know) may have had a conversation with Fiona or myself on how to find books, either for purchase or to borrow from the library. There are many places you can look to find this information. Or lastly, if you aren't already using a feed reader to keep up with the news you like to follow, you can go to one place to find out how to do this. This month's library newsletter, Scriptoria, has the answer to those questions as well as many others.

Passing of an era

Somehow, all of February escaped us! I also noticed that it's been a while since I've last posted here. Well, the Rocky Mountain News has left us, just a few months shy of turning 150 years old. The library still subscribes to the Denver Post, but you may be left wondering where else you might turn for daily news.

Well, if you're reading this blog, you might be reading others as well. You may also have been referring to the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News online. There are many of these websites that use RSS feeds to publish their pages. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is really just a tool that allows the creators of these pages to make available their frequently updated information. If a website, blog, or YouTube page updates frequently, they probably use an RSS feed to publish their information.

So what, you might be asking? How does this affect me? If you are already looking in various locations for news, you have the ability to condense all that into one location. A feed aggregator brings all this published information into one conveniently packaged place. The aggregator that I use (and Fiona too) is Bloglines. No more remembering to look at 20, 30, even 40 news sources daily, a service like Bloglines brings it all together for you.

Stop by the library anytime, and Fiona or I can show you how this technology works. This is a way of having information come to you, rather than remembering to go out and find it. For example, you could subscribe to "Saint of the Day" via Catholic.org, the Vatican's YouTube feed, the Catholic News Agency news reports, the Zenit News Agency, and even this blog. This is one stop shopping at its finest!

CPSIA and books

In case you haven't been following the news lately, there is a new law going into effect on February 10th that was passed in reaction to the lead in children's toys scare. Basically this law requires anyone selling or distributing items intending for children under 12 to have them certified to be lead free. Sounds good on the surface until those of us in the book and library world found out that this legislation has been determined to include books. The testing must be done by only select laboratories and even though books do not have lead in them, the publishers have been unable to get an exemption from this law. The American Library Association has also been unable to get a determination if libraries are exempt from the law either and if it goes into effect as written, will instruct libraries to either remove all childrens books or make libraries off-limits to children.

To read more about how this might affect you I recommend reading the blog, Musings from a Catholic Bookstore.

The law goes into effect on February 10th and if you have any kid’s products that haven’t been certified, you are required to destroy them. We have created this site to keep track of Catholic and other Christian vendor certifications so that you don’t have to contact everyone yourselves. If you do contact a vendor, please send us the information so we can update this site and save the vendors from having to answer the same question hundreds of times.

I could go on and on (and I do on my personal blog) but I thought it might be a good idea to give our faithful readers a heads up here too