A new novel about the music recording industry is called "A & R," but you'll have trouble finding its record by title in the database unless you remember to enclose the initial "A" in quotation marks.

The same goes for other recent titles like "A is for--?," "A is for Amos," "A is for aarrgh!," and "A is for salad" (see for yourself!).

Regardless of the nonfiling characters indicator on the record in question, the Galaxy system ignores "a", "an", or "the" at the beginning of a title search unless they're in quotes.

Forty-two public libraries missed the March 15 deadline for submitting their 1999 annual reports.

That is approximately 18% of all public libraries in the state. As of June 8, twenty-four, or 57%, of those libraries remained delinquent.

The State Librarian sent an official letter dated May 19, 2000, to all delinquent libraries, urging their cooperation.

Data from the annual reports is used in the report the State Library is required to send to the Institute of Museum and Library Services/IMLS and to publish the NH Public Library Statistics and Personnel Data Survey.

Without this information, both federal and state data on public libraries is incomplete and in many categories incorrect.

A June 15 deadline was set for the submission of all annual reports before going to press.

It is the State Library's goal to release the print version of compiled data to the New Hampshire library community by late September/early October.

An online version should be ready earlier.

Three years ago, when the State Library began to purchase a statewide license to a full text periodical index for access by libraries in the state, the requests for copies of articles through Article Express began to greatly decrease. Last year, in an attempt to supplement the Ebscohost periodical index, the State Library subscribed to General Reference Center Gold. The number of Article Express requests and the use of this full text database did not justify the renewal of Gale's General Reference Center Gold, and the subscription was discontinued in June 2000. When ProQuest replaced Ebscohost earlier this year as the full text periodical database available to libraries and the general public in the state, the Reference and Information Services Section evaluated Article Express and decided to try a new method of supporting full text articles not available on ProQuest.

The State Library has placed deposit accounts with various document delivery providers including Carl's Uncover, Infotrieve, and Northern Light. Libraries may request copies of articles that are cited in ProQuest but for which the full text of the article is not provided. The request will be made by sending a copy of the citation in ProQuest to the State Library via e-mail. Once received, the sources listed above and the State Library's collection will be used to fill the request. There may be instances when the resources available to the State Library are not able to provide the requested article. In those instances, locations of libraries that own the periodical will be provided. Because of the different vendors that will be used, it will not be possible to guarantee same day delivery as was the case in the past. In most cases, the maximum time will be five business days. Instructions on how to use this new version of Article Express will be sent to all libraries this fall.

The Fall 2000 Course Catalog from the State Library's Electronic and Government Information Section is out. The catalog has been mailed to anyone who has taken a course in the past, and in addition, each library should receive one copy addressed to the reference librarian. Classes start September 12 and run through mid-December. The Catalog and Registration Form are available online at: http://www.state.nh.us/nhsl/training/course.html.

The Reference and Information Services Section of the State Library will be introducing electronic reading devices (eBooks) to public libraries this fall. Workshops will be offered on the eBook, and a quantity of three different handheld eBooks will be purchased.

These will be made available for loan to public libraries that wish to try out this new technology.

Libraries will be able to loan the eBooks to their patrons.

To keep libraries informed about this demonstration project, a web page will be developed.

Libraries will be kept informed of the progress of this project, the availability of the web page, and the dates of the workshops through the NHAIS listserv and a brochure that will be distributed to libraries.

Around the beginning of September, a Rocket eBook will begin circulating at the Richards Free Library in Newport.

Right now, library director Andrea Thorpe is taking it around to various community groups to demonstrate it.

She purchased the Rocket eBook from Powells, one of the four online stores that sell the eBook.

So far she has loaded twelve free titles from the web. They include The Arabian Nights, Tao Teh King, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Riders of the Purple Sage, and Diary of Dixie.

The library trustees approved the following:

The Richards Free Library Electronic Book Policy

To borrow an eBook, the patron must:

Present a photo ID and a valid library card and have held that card for a least six months with no current fines or blocks.

Sign the user agreement, and if under age 18, get a parental signature on the user agreement.

Be responsible for any damage or loss.

eBooks:

Circulate for two weeks with no renewal.

Have a daily fine rate of $2.00.

Must be returned to the desk. No after hours returns to book deposit bin.

Will have a replacement cost of $350.00 if lost or damaged beyond repair.

Must be returned with all items loaned: reader, carrying case, stylus, instruction booklet, and A/C adapter.

Electronic Book Acceptable Use Policy

"I understand that electronic book equipment is expensive. I understand that the fine rate is $2.00 a day. I acknowledge that I am responsible for careful use of the eBook reader and its peripherals that I borrow. I understand that I am responsible for replacement costs of the eBook reader and its peripherals if I fail to return all parts in the condition I received them. I promise to not delete or add any titles to the reader I borrow. "

Signature: ______________________________________________________________

Patrons under 18 must have a parental or guardian signature:

"I have read the acceptable use policy above and give permission for my son or daughter to borrow the electronic book reader."

Signature of parent/guardian for minor signing above:

______________________________________________________________

Date: ________________          Reader number: ____________

Librarian: _____________________________________________________

This policy as approved by the board was written using other policies on the web. Andrea reports that the eBook listserv and the Electronic Book Evaluation Project website at http://www.rrlc.org/ebook/ebookhome.html were particularly helpful. To subscribe to the eBook listserv, go to http://www.egroups.com, search for ebook-talk, and follow the directions.

Hopefully, everyone has successfully migrated to the new FirstSearch service, but if not, here are some helpful hints and feature highlights.

FirstSearch Service URLs as of August 20 -

Searching: http://firstsearch.oclc.org;

Administration: http://firstsearch.oclc.org/admin.

Some of the *New* Search Features -

local holdings are tagged with icons that display on the results list;

more links to full text display on the results list;

and truncation and wild card characters.

Some of the *New* Administration Features -

choose your default search form: basic, advanced, or expert;

allow users to search multiple databases simultaneously (you will be charged for each database searched!);

and turn on/off full text by database.

Technical issues -

libraries taking advantage of IP address recognition should update the URLs (see http://www.oclc.org/oclc/fs_new/ip_changes.htm);

libraries using CGI web scripts need to verify the version of the script that they are using (see http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/documentation/auto_logon.htm).

Questions? Contact Betsy Like, Reference Technology Consultant, NELINET, 1-800-635-4638 x315 or blike@nelinet.net.

State Librarian Michael York announced in May that there was $135,000 in Library Services and Technology Act/LSTA funds available for competitive grants to assist NH libraries in fulfilling their role to provide information access and enhanced services to their communities.

Eleven multi-type libraries submitted grant applications to support developing creative ideas, testing new services, and planning for future library service needs.

A grants review committee of librarians from the State Library met during August to score and evaluate proposals.

Grant awards will be announced by the State Librarian in September.

The Trustees of the Richards Free Library in Newport are pleased to announce that Robert B. Parker is the Sarah Josepha Hale Award winner for 2000. Renowned mystery writer Robert B. Parker is the author of over two dozen mysteries featuring the private eye Spenser. Anne Ponder of the "Armchair Detective" has called the Spenser series "the best American hard-boiled detective fiction since Ross MacDonald and Raymond Chandler." In addition, he has written over a dozen other books, including finishing Raymond Chandler's 30-page manuscript "Poodle Springs" at the request of the Chandler estate. Robert Parker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and now lives in Cambridge with his wife Joan. He received his BA at Colby College and his MA and PhD from Boston University. He taught at several Massachusetts colleges. Parker retired from Northeastern University, where he was a professor of English, in 1979 to write full time.

The Sarah Josepha Hale Award, presented annually since 1956, goes to a writer who, through his or her life work, maintains a connection to New England. Selection is made by a panel of twelve judges. Named for Sarah Josepha Hale, the award honors the contribution of one of nineteenth century America's most powerful women. The Newport author of several books and hundreds of poems, Hale shaped the opinion of American women for forty years through her editorials in Godey's "Lady's Magazine."

The presentation will take place on October 14th at the Newport Opera House. For more information please contact Andrea Thorpe at 603-863-3430 or rfl@sugar-river.net.

The State Library's Talking Book Service, which circulates large print items as well as talking books to public libraries around the state, has received 10 copies of the Health Care Financing Administration's large print edition of the "2000 Guide to Health Insurance for People with Medicare," a guide for buying and using a "Medigap" insurance policy, with some information on other kinds of health insurance that may be available to Medicare-eligible people.

If you think your library's large print readers might be interested, you can arrange to borrow a copy (3-month loan) by contacting Pam Ober at pober@library.state.nh.us.

Following its 110-year tradition of publishing useful materials for library professionals and researchers, the American Library Association's ALA Editions has posted the full text of "Adaptive Technology for the Internet: Making Electronic Resources Accessible to All" on its web site: http://www.ala.org/editions/openstacks/insidethecovers/mates/mates_toc.html.

Author Barbara Mates is director of the Talking Book Regional Library in Cleveland, OH.

Barbara, with contributions from Judith Dixon of the Library of Congress, provides a guide to establishing Internet access for patrons who use large print, voice output, and braille. She includes chapters on basic document design, large print and braille access to the Internet, screen readers, voice recognition systems, hearing-assistance devices, funding sources for adaptive technology, and websites helpful for information on accessibility.

You may wish to bookmark the site or purchase a print copy for $36.00 from ALA Order Fulfillment, 155 North Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL 60606-1717.

The bound volumes of the 1999 New Hampshire Laws have arrived at the State Library.

Free copies will be sent to state agencies, town clerks, and public libraries that requested them.

The purchase price is $25.00, plus shipping and handling.

Requests for copies should be directed to the Technical Services Section at the State Library, 1-800-499-1232 x7.

The State Library is pleased to offer Library Literature Full-Text to the NHAIS community.

Library Literature is a bibliographic database that indexes articles and book reviews of key library and information science periodicals.

Full-text coverage for selected periodicals is also included. Books, chapters in collected works such as conference proceedings, library school theses, and pamphlets are also indexed.

Full-text coverage begins in 1994.

To access the database, visit HW Wilson at http://hwwilsonweb.com. Username: concord; password: stnh126169.

Library Literature is not intended for remote patron access. While the license does not prohibit patron access, the intended audience is librarians.

Because the State Library only contracted for a limited number (8) of simultaneous users, providing patron access causes it to be unavailable to library staff.

If you have any questions, contact Theresa Paré at 603-271-2812 or tepare@library.state.nh.us.

Books, Bytes and Bridges: Libraries and Computer Centers in Academic Institutions. Edited by Larry Hardesty. ALA, 2000.

Gotcha! : Nonfiction Booktalks to Get Kids Excited About Reading. Kathleen Baxter. Libraries Unlimited, 1999.

Guidelines for Library Services for People with Mental Retardation. ALA, 1999.

Managing for Results: Effective Resource Allocation for Public Libraries. Sandra Nelson, et.al. ALA, 2000.

Sizzling Summer Reading Programs for Young Adults. Katharine Kan. ALA, 1998.

Story Programs: A Source Book of Materials. Carolyn Sue Peterson. Scarecrow Press, 2000.

Writing Resumes That Work: A How-to-Do-It Manual for Librarians. Robert Newlen. Neal-Schuman, 1998.

Since 1984, the staff of the Reference and Information Services Section at the State Library has indexed the Union Leader, Concord Monitor and various New Hampshire periodicals for articles on issues of statewide interest. Initially, citations to these articles could be searched and displayed on CAPNET, one of the regional union catalogs that used LS/2000 software.

These regional catalogs and LS/2000 were replaced by our current statewide union catalog using Gaylord's Galaxy system in the early 1990's.

At the time of the change, the New Hampshire Index records that were in abbreviated MARC format were saved.

Inmagic, a DOS-based management software product, was purchased, and the records were transferred to Inmagic format and loaded into a database that was only accessible at the State Library.

Since that time, InMagic has moved their software from DOS to Windows and developed a web publishing product that allows access to an InMagic database via the Internet.

This software has been purchased, and the New Hampshire Index will be made available on the web this fall.

This database is only an index containing citations to articles and does not contain the full text of the articles. However, the State Library intends to support this index by providing copies of articles cited in the database via FAX within 48 hours of the request.

Libraries will be informed via the NHAIS listserv when the New Hampshire Index becomes available through the State Library's website.

If you have been connecting to NHAIS using the Internet address 199.92.250.10, make sure it gets changed to 199.192.9.2.

If you have been directly connecting to NHU-PAC using 199.92.250.12:2000, change that to 199.192.9.4:2000.

If you are using alphabetical addresses such as webster.state.nh.us or lilac.nhsl.lib.nh.us, there is no need to change anything.

The change has been made "behind the scenes."

The State Library's long-sought goal to expand the number of concurrent Internet logins to NHAIS has finally been achieved.

In addition to allowing more concurrent users, the NHAIS Lilac server is now handling mail more expeditiously and is much less prone to the processing logjams that used to slow it down to a crawl.

Some problems took a little longer, but all the identified problems have now been resolved, including the "P" command, the date display in the ILL module, and indexing oddities that appear when searching for a title that's not in the database.

There are a few problems that won't go away: there will always be a few days each month when the system backup requires an extra tape, which delays ILL processing until 9 a.m. or so.

In a typical week, more than 500 new MARC records are added to the NHU-PAC, while one or two dozen duplicate records are deleted, and at least 100 records are updated and/or corrected.

Network Services adds more than 15,000 holdings to the database each month, while many more are added directly by libraries through the Holdings Maintenance feature of the ILL module.

In the past year, Network Services has sped up the loading of new records into the NHU-PAC. It used to be common to wait a week or two for even the most popular titles to show up.

Network Services would like to point out that the record for the 1st American edition of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" was added to the NHU-PAC at 12:17 Thursday afternoon, July 6--early 36 hours ahead of the book's official release. By 12:17 on July 7, there were 4 holding tags added to the record-soon to be joined by many others no doubt.

Recently released from the Association of Research Libraries/ARL Office of Leadership and Management Services/OLMS are the results of two survey studies of ARL member libraries. The titles are:

SPEC Kit 256 Changing Roles of Library Professionals New technologies in the library and developments in library administration demand different types of professionals. The survey for this Kit gathered data on the new types of positions posted, and included in the Kit are extensive job postings as well. Janice Simmons-Welburn. May 2000. 151 pp. http://www.arl.org/spec/256sum.html

SPEC Kit 257 The M.L.S. Hiring Requirement
How important is the M.L.S. degree for employment in research libraries? This SPEC survey discovered some contradiction between professed policies and actual practice. The supporting documentation covers university librarian appointments, ranks, and promotion and tenure criteria. Julia C. Blixrud. June 2000. 129 pp. http://www.arl.org/spec/257sum.html

Designed to examine current research library practices and policies and serve as resource guides for libraries as they face ever-changing management problems, each SPEC Kit contains a summary analysis and suggestions, survey questions with tallies, pertinent documentation from participating libraries, and a reading list or references for further information.

Individual SPEC Kits (ISSN 0160-3582): $30 member, $40 nonmember. A complete list is available at http://www.arl.org/spec/complete.html. SPEC Kit subscription, 6 issues per year, shipping included, US and Canada: $180 member, $240 nonmember, $330 international. To order a SPEC Kit or place a subscription, please call 301-362-8196, 301-206-9789 (fax), or email pubs@arl.org. Payment by check, money order, or credit card accepted. Make check or money order payable in US funds to the Association of Research Libraries, federal ID #52-0784198-N.

For more information, please contact: Lee Anne George, Program Planning Officer, Association of Research Libraries, 202-296-2296, leeanne@arl.org.

The State Library's Talking Book Service opened in 1970, with 525 readers transferred up from Massachusetts and some 2,000 books on 16 rpm records.

In the year 2000, there are more than 2,000 readers and 40,000 books on cassette. Talking Books is celebrating 30 years of service with an afternoon Open House October 11, 12, and 13, and extends a cordial invitation to all!

The program is housed in the Dolloff Building, State Office Park South, in Concord.

For more information, contact Eileen Keim at 1-800-491-4200 or ekeim@library.state.nh.us.

The State Library's Talking Book Service - officially the Library Services to Persons with Disabilities Section - will be receiving and distributing a set of professionally produced television PSAs (public service announcements) done by the Library of Congress.

These will be "localized" - each will say and show, "for more information, contact your own public library or, in New Hampshire, call 1-800-491-4200."

Since this may bring potential talking book applicants into your libraries for information, the section would appreciate invitations to co-op and ALF meetings to distribute materials and explain the program - who is eligible, who may certify eligibility, etc.

They hope to have and release the PSAs in late summer.

Please contact Eileen Keim at 1-800-491-4200 or ekeim@library.state.nh.us for further information.

The Richards Free Library in Newport recently started using a wireless connection to the Internet.

They are a test site for their ISP. So far, they are thrilled with the speed and the cost.

They no longer have that $150 frame relay monthly charge. They are still waiting for one piece of equipment and will have to rewire a part of the building to eliminate an extension cord.

Applications Available for the Young Adult Library Services Association's Great Book Giveaway Competition

Deadline: December 1, 2000

The Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association, seeks to advocate, promote, and strengthen service to young adults ages 12 through 18 as part of the continuum of total library services. In an effort to make room for new review materials, each year, YALSA gives away approximately 1200 newly published books, videos, CD's, audiocassettes, and materials that have been targeted primarily toward young adults to a library in need of a new collection. Interested libraries must be members of YALSA and ALA in order to be eligible to apply. Applications are available.

Contact: RFP Link: http://www.ala.org/yalsa/awards/gbgV.pdf

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American Library Association to Award the Econo-Clad Award for a Young Adult Reading or Literature Program

Deadline: December 1, 2000

The American Library Association's Econo-Clad Award is designed to honor a member of the Young Adult Library Services Association who has developed an outstanding reading or literature program for young adults. The award, which is made possible through an annual grant from the Econo-Clad Book Company, provides a grant of $1,000 to support the winning member's attendance at ALA's annual conference.

To be considered, programs must be specifically designed for and targeted at young adults. In addition, all or part of the program must have taken place between December 1, 1999, and November 30, 2000, and the applicant must work directly with young adults and be a member of the Young Adult Library Services Association. Program details and application information available at the ALA Web site (http://www.ala.org/).

Contact: Econo-Clad Award for Reading or Literature Program for

Young Adults
YALSA Office
American Library Association
50 Huron Street
Chicago, IL 60611
Tel: (800) 545-2433 ext. 4390
Fax: (312) 664-7459
E-mail: yalsa@ala.org