Choose Privacy Week!

This week the Library is focusing on privacy rights as a part of a national effort to Choose Privacy sponsored by the American Library Association.

Our world is more connected than ever through the use of social media, and because of this use, Americans by and large have become comfortable sharing enormous amounts of personal information.  This information can be accessed by anyone at any time, and this is where the problem lies.   In an age when the government already has questionably wide access to our information, we are giving free access to even more of it.

While the Library hopes you’ll think twice about the information you give out, we want you to know that we never share information about our patrons.  The ALA puts it this way:

“Libraries recognize that privacy is essential to the exercise of free speech, free thought, and free association—all strongly held American values—and protecting user privacy has long been an integral part of libraries’ work and mission.”

In the Library this week there is a poster featuring the many steps we take to ensure our patrons have the privacy they deserve when they use the Library.  The Library will also be hosting a Choose Privacy Film Screening on Wednesday, May 15^th at 7:00 pm in the Library where we will be showing a short documentary about what you can do Choose Privacy for yourself.

Showing your Library Love...

It's National Library Week!  Yes, I know, there are a lot of "National" something-or-others happening this month, but this is one that we can get enthusiastic about. Why, you may wonder?  Well, apart from the obvious, that we are a library, this week is a little different.  For most holidays or times of observance we collectively recognize something such as a culture, a race, a past-time, something that we have appreciation for.  National Library Week is not different for you, but for us, it's about getting the love.  So, if you have any library love, we want to hear about it.  Now, of course, because we are all about giving things away and connecting with you all, there will be rewards and prizes and funness (a completely made up word, we know).
What you have to do...just Share the Love.

Let us know why you love libraries, or especially, why you love our TVCC library.  How?  Any creative way you come up with.  Leave us a comment, write us a poem, draw us a picture, take a photo, write an note, make a video.  Yes, really, anything you dream up in your wonderful creative selves, we want to see! 
If you bring your comments or stories up to the library this week, we do have a goodie basket of fun items that you can choose from.  If you just want to stop by, there will be free chocolate all week as part of our appreciation of you, so come get a book or movie and a piece of chocolate. All Share the Love responses will be entered into a drawing for some awesome prizes including books, movies, t-shirts, and so much more. 

And there's more...this is a busy week for all things library.
Thursday is National Poem in Your Pocket Day...details to come.
You  can participate in National Library Week by posting your Library story here, or share it nationally here.
Explore the rhythm and sound of poetry by trying out the Poetry Beats Studio.
Come up and make your own Book Spine Poetry and share it here.

Ring around the Rosie, a Pocket Full of… Poems!

On April 18^th, we’re celebrating Poem in Your Pocket Day.  This is a day to, well, put a poem in your pocket. 

And don’t tell me you can’t find a poem that suits your pocket.  There are poems about everything (though, as G.K. Chesterton pointed out, “The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese”).

Here, for example, is a poem about a pocket:

Pockets

Are generally over or around

Erogenous zones, they seem to dive

In the direction of those

Dark places, and indeed

It is their nature to be dark

Themselves, keeping a kind

Of thieves' kitchen for the things

Sequestered from the world

For long or little while,

The keys, the handkerchiefs,

The sad and vagrant little coins

That are really only passing through.

For all they locate close to lust,

No pocket ever sees another;

There is in fact a certain sadness

To pockets, going in their lonesome ways

And snuffling up their sifting storms

Of dust, tobacco bits and lint.

A pocket with a hole in it

Drops out; from shame, is that, or pride?

What is a pocket but a hole?

-Howard Nemerov

  After you select the perfect poem to carry in your pocket, share it with everyone you meet!That’s the joy of poetry!  Ask someone if they have a poem in their pocket; Read someone the poem you have in your own. 

As an added incentive to do these things, there will be staff and faculty equipped with raffle tickets wearing buttons which as, "Is that a poem in your pocket?" that they will give you if you read your poem to them.  You will find staff or faculty wearing buttons in most of the campus buildings.  You can also visit the Library and read your poem to one of the staff there for tickets.  Collect as many tickets as you wish, and bring them to the Open Mic Poetry Night in the Library at 6:00 pm.  You can read your pocket poem and other poems, listen to staff and faculty read some of their favorites, eat some yummy treats, and put your tickets in a drawing for what are rumored to be “amazing prizes.”