May 19, 2005 - Will Durant

Sometimes I think I should learn Latin.

After three years of high school French, I could read it reasonably well. Over time, that skill faded. C'est dommage.

Many years later, when I was the director of the Greeley Public Library, I took a Spanish class. But it did little more than ALMOST revive some of my French.

In fact, French and Spanish (and Italian, and Portugese, and others) are "corruptions" of Latin. That is, they are what happened to Latin after lots of people, over great distances, started applying their local variations of speech. Sometime, I'd like to follow the Romance languages back to their source.

I'm thinking about this because I just finished reading a recently discovered last manuscript of Pulitzer-prize-winning historian and former Latin professor, Will Durant.

Durant, author (with his beloved wife, Ariel) of "The Story of Civilization," died at the age of 96. His plan, for this final book of historical essays, was to write 23 chapters. He finished 21.

After his death, the manuscript "would survive three moves and a major flood" until John Little "happened upon it in the winter of 2001 -- twenty years after Will Durant had finished it."

The book is called "Heroes of History: A Brief History of Civilization from Ancient Times to the Dawn of the Modern Age." The prose is magnificent, stately, and wise.

Here's a favorite example: "We cannot know what God is, nor understand a universe so mingled of apparent evil and good, of suffering and loveliness, destruction and sublimity; but in the presence of a mother tending her child, or of an informed will giving order to chaos, meaning to matter, nobility to form or thought, we feel as close as we shall ever be to the life and law that constitute the incomprehensible intelligence of the world."

As always, the magic of literacy is that we can still, five years after the author's death, and 119 years after his birth, sit with Professor Durant, listen enthralled to his stories, and try to absorb some of his lessons.

And what are those lessons?

Foremost is that civilization is largely the accomplishment of women, who first invented agriculture, and then have sought -- with enormous difficulty and only partial success -- to domesticate man.

To Durant, civilization is a harnessing of the biological drives of our species -- to fight, to acquire, to know pleasure, to procreate. The harnessing influences include the family, religion, the state.

Durant observes that history oscillates between excess and puritanism, from concentration of wealth to often violent revolution.

But it is more than that. It is also, he writes, "a veritable City of God, in which the creative spirits of the past, by the miracles of memory and tradition, still live and work, carve and build and sing."

Durant's measured, balanced prose, modeled on the writings of ancient Romans, is a fine tonic for our times. One does not find in his writing the pea-brained and petty partisanship of so many of our leading lights today. One does not find screed and contumely.

Instead, there is illumination, a steady, penetrating light that looks upon the parade of the ages, and finds it rich, and beautiful, and good.

May 12, 2005 - One Step at a Time

When I was in 5th grade, my family moved from our blue collar, working class neighborhood to an older, established area. The next day we were visited by one of our neighbors, welcoming us.

She gave us something I had never seen before: lox and bagels.

In retrospect, I suppose Mrs. Shklair was the first Jew I'd ever met. I had no particular preconceptions. I just classified her as nice, funny, and bearing the most extraordinary food.

By two years later, lox and bagels had become our basic Sunday breakfast. And we played with the Shklair children.

In college, I traded my first roommate for another, more congenial and interesting. My new roommate was a Jew, also, and through him I learned that the web of parental guilt woven by Jewish mothers more than equaled the work of their Catholic sisters, whom until then, I thought were the champs.

But I don't think it was until the late 1980's that I ran across people who flat out denied the Holocaust. These were the Aryan nation folks, filled with such obvious sputtering hatred and ignorance that it was impossible to take them seriously.

Apparently, many people did, however, some even claiming to be scholars.

The deniers are wrong, of course. Even as the direct eye-witnesses to the truth begin to fade away, the evidence -- photographs, manuscripts, the simple disappearance of over 12 million people (at least 6 million Jews, and another 6 million of various other groups) -- is overwhelming. An excellent response to the deniers' absurdities is the website www.holocaust-history.org.

Or if you still prefer the tangible weight of a book, typing "holocaust" into the library catalog will deliver over 755 matches.

There are time, when reading human history, I despair. It seems we have barely to scratch the civilized creature to unleash the savage. There are those who believe the Holocaust could never happen again, and certainly not here. I think it could.

I fear the cycles of history, the societal surge, just as the memory of one horror dies, to play it all through again.

But the endurance of the human race rests, as always, with the young. And that's my more hopeful topic for this week: a play, written, developed, designed, and produced by a group of Douglas County teenagers. They were gently but masterfully facilitated by Susan Littman -- but she underscores that this original work is the sole product of the young people.

Their name is the Youth Ensemble Series, or YES. They are associated with the Castle Rock Players. Their play, "One Step at a Time," is actually two plays.

It begins with something that I suspect happens in many high schools today: the bullying of one victim by the crowd. One student is assigned to write a report on the Holocaust. And slowly, the students take on the roles of young people in Germany, at the beginning of the Nazi era.

In the next hour and a half, some truly touching stories are told. And finally, it all comes back to today.

The students not only put in a lot of research, they were also visited, and lectured to, by two Holocaust survivors. The play builds on real experiences.

YES already put on one performance. They'll be doing a couple of more. The next public showing will be at the Philip S. Miller on Saturday, May 14, 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.

It happens that Holocaust Awareness Month was in April. But the lessons are still timely -- and timeless.

May 5, 2005 - A Photographic Journey

There are now four excellent introductions to the history of Douglas County. The first, pioneering title was Josephine Marr's "Douglas County : a Historical Journey." The second was Susie Appleby's wonderful and meticulous "Fading Past: the Story of Douglas County, Colorado." The third was the Douglas County Historical Society's collection of family histories: "Our Heritage: the People of Douglas County."

And now, there's "Douglas County, Colorado: A Photographic Journey," by the Castle Rock Writers.

The book was published by our very own Douglas County Libraries Foundation, and was partially underwritten by a grant from Burlington Northern Santa Fe Foundation.

The book has 11 chapters:

* "Castle Rock: County Seat Takes Shape," by Derald Hoffman
* "Franktown: the Gardner Legacy," by Kathleen McCoy and Marjorie Meyerle
* "Greenland, Spring Valley, and Cherry Valley: Ranchers' Paradise," by Susan Koller
* "Highlands Ranch and Daniels Park: Reinventing Itself," by the Castle Rock Writers
* "Larkspur and Perry Park: a Place to Settle and Play," by Susan Koller
* "Lone Tree: From One Small Tree," by Kathleen McCoy
* "Louviers: From Rolling Hills to Du Pont Company Town," by Alice Aldridge-Dennis
* "Parker: the Twenty Mile Landmark," by Kathleen McCoy and Elizabeth Wallace
* "Roxborough Park: a Great Place to Drive Dull Cares Away," by Susan Trumble
* "Sedalia: Town at the Crossroads", by Laura Adema, and
* "Western Region: the Rugged and Beautiful South Platte," by Laura Adema.

The book is packed with pictures, usually two per page. The Castle Rock Writers group supplies a paragraph for each one, setting context, and telling tales.

For instance, as recently as 1870, there were Indians visiting Parker. "Mrs. Young, a homesteader, recalls a band begging for food one day. Since she was just about to discard a batch of biscuits in which she had used too much soda, she decided to offer those to them instead. They thought the biscuits were delicious and continued on their way."

Chief Washington (although we aren't told what he was the chief of, or how he came by the unlikely name of Washington) visited Parker annually -- and once tried to swap as many as 20 ponies for Elizabeth Tallman's 2 year old son. He was, said Mrs. Tallman, "very much disgusted when I would not accept such a good trade."

What I wonder about both these stories is to what extent there was some Native American humor going on here.

I was struck, reading through the book, by just how much we've lost. Gone are the cottonwoods of Castle Rock. Gone is the magnificent courthouse, torched in 1978. Gone is the Castlewood Canyon Dam, built to endure forever in 1890, burst in 1933. Gone is the Carlson Frink Creamery of Larkspur, and the Nanichant Inn of Perry Park. Gone the Manhart Grocery of Sedalia. Gone are churches and schools -- all swept away by fire or flood or what we earnestly assure ourselves must be progress.

Still with us of course is Tweet Kimball's Castle, the Old Stone Church, the Comasonry headquarters, St. Phillip in the Field, Bud's Bar, and much more.

This book, an outgrowth of meetings of local writers, is a wonderful gift for newcomers. (And finally, aren't all of us newcomers?) The book would also make for an excellent companion as you travel around Douglas County.

"Douglas County, Colorado: A Photographic Journey" can be purchased at our libraries and select area bookstores. The money comes straight back to our Foundation. If this is a success, we may be interested in other ventures that help people understand our history.

To the writers, our heartfelt thanks for telling us about our past.

April 28, 2005 - Consultant Report

Recently, we hired some consultants to come in and examine how we "handle materials."

That included everything from how we took requests, to how we ordered them, to how they were delivered, to how the invoices were checked, to how the items were cataloged, to how they were set up for checkout, and to how they made it out to the branches.

As I've mentioned in previous columns, we move a lot of materials.

But as I hope I've also made clear, we have grown incredibly over the past 15 years. That's when I got here, and, coincidentally, that's when Douglas County became the fastest growing county in the nation.

Well, our consultants didn't pull any punches. We heard some hard truths.

They told us that some of the things we do were, to be blunt, crazy for an operation our size. Those practices weren't crazy when we adopted them, as a smaller library district. But now, today, they were almost criminally inefficient.

I have to say I recognized that some (OK, many) of the things we do I was myself responsible for. I had set standards of service, or rules of operation, that just didn't grow well with our system.

The director is responsible, no matter how many people he (or she) delegates to. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

The consultants did just what they paid them to do: they turned over some rocks and found some unpleasant truths. And they spoke them, to all our assembled managers. No secrets.

I sat in the front row. And had to listen to a whole laundry list of things these outside experts identified as poison in the heart of the library I love.

Ouch.

Here's what's worse: I agreed.

When they finished, I realized there was only one thing to do.

We gave them a round of applause.

Why? Because if you don't know that the poison is there, you can't draw it out. If you don't know that you've made mistakes, you can't fix them. If you don't see that you need to change, you won't.

Many organizations teach their newcomers NOT to see the inefficiencies in the system. It's called training.

The Douglas County Libraries have changed so rapidly that some of the things we taught our people to do just don't work anymore. That's a disservice to our patrons -- and to our staff.

It wasn't all bad news, of course. Our consultants also trotted out a raft of statistics. Compared to other libraries around the state and the country, we are in the very top percentages for almost all areas of service.

That's a good thing for staff to know. Their decisions, their conscientious labors, have made us a very good library.

We are not yet a great library. To be that, we'll need the courage to confront the way our libraries need to operate TODAY, even if that means a significant shift in our attitudes and our back room practices.

And I have every confidence in our staff that we can, and will, do just that.

April 20, 2005 - blogs and websites

The Douglas County Libraries had the first website in Douglas County -- and one of the first library websites in the country.

One fairly recent addition is our branch-specific "blogs." From our website (www.douglascountylibraries.org) you'll see "Branch pages" on the leftmost column. These pages allow our staff to quickly post what's hot at the library that week.

Blogs -- or "web logs" -- have gotten a lot of press lately. Most of the social apparatus of publishing is actually designed to filter or reduce content. More book manuscripts are submitted than printed. More articles are emailed than make it to paper. More news stories are drafted than circulated.

Often, that's a good thing, even a very good thing. Not every aspiring writer deserves to be published. There's a lot of badly formulated, ill-informed, willfully ignorant, and even malicious opinion in the world. The hurdles to mass media save us from a lot of it, and some might argue, not enough.

But there's a downside to this filtering, too. Sometimes, decisions about what does or does not get published reflect the strong interests of entrenched power. Here, technology can provide alternatives.

One example would be Tienamen Square -- which the western world found out about only because of an unsupervised fax machine.

In the news world, many journalists feel threatened and or challenged by bloggers, some of whom do seem to have wonderful insights or contacts, and can publish their words direct to the web. By itself, that poses no more of a threat to the media than a self-published cookbook does to Random House.

But sometimes, writers are good enough that they find their own markets. And because they have "outsider" status, because their writings are less cautious than mainstream media, bloggers are sometimes, to some people, more believable.

Well, I don't fancy myself a threat to syndicated columnists Garry Wills, Cal Thomas, or Molly Ivins, but I did spend some time last weekend (after that powerful snow pounding we took on Sunday) reworking my personal website, and experimenting with some blogging of my own.

Here's one observation: there is something reassuring about print. When you go back to it, the same words are there that were there the last time. When you go to a website, it's gone, or changed, or buried so deep that it is irretrievable.

Cyberspace is disturbingly similar to my own memory. It is unreliable.

And there's something a little pathetic about some blogs, possibly including mine. These people don't have friends? For whom are they recording their trivia and random thoughts?

On the other hand, I got to explore a bunch of new software tools (Freemind and vym, which are Open Source mind mapping tools) as well as Nvu, a web editor. My old website was looking a little dated. The new one is less so.

I also found a place to store the things I sometimes refer people to (presentations or articles I've done in the past).

My main lesson in all this is that we are still trying to understand all the ways that the World Wide Web is changing things.

Meanwhile, if you want to look over my new design, surf over to www.jlarue.com.

April 13, 2005 - teens and the library

I can't remember if I was 13 or 14. I do remember that I was playing a lot of chess.

Back then, a lad could wander downtown, stroll into the old library (the new library was a couple of blocks away) and face a series of old guys over a chessboard.

It was timed chess. When you made a move, you slapped the clock.

I fought my way to "expert" status. One of the people I played was a charming, near-bald, older gent with the uncharming name of Bevier Butts.

It turned out that Mr. Butts, before his retirement, had been something of a civic tour de force. And one day, when I talked with him over a game about the need for a place for teens to gather, he suggested that I try to do something about it.

So I did. I scouted out an abandoned lunch dive on Sheridan Road, overlooking Lake Michigan. (Well, not really. Its BACK was to Lake Michigan.)

I put together a team of teens willing to clean it up. I talked to the owner, and figured out what it would take to make rent. I got close to a 20% discount.

I talked to a local soft drink distributor willing to cut a deal on supplying teen beverages. He would set us up for free the first time, then charge us just his cost for replacing the inventory. I thought we might even make some money.

Then I started to line up some bands. I was thinking: dance club.

I reported on all this at the next chess tournament.

Then Mr. Butts invited me to a City Council meeting to make a pitch for some subsidy. But he didn't just set me up. He stood before Council and made the case for me.

"Here," he said, "we have a teenager who isn't just complaining about things. He's trying to do something to make this community better. Let's support that effort!"

I got a glimpse about how civic things got decided. You figured out what you wanted. You put together a plan and a proposal. You presented it to the people whose money you needed to set you up.

And sometimes, you lost. I was, truly, very impressed with Mr. Butts. He made a good case, with passion, with eloquence, and with a sound business analysis.

They didn't buy it. I never got to open, as a teenager, a downtown business. I never became a big name music promoter.

But that may have been the first time someone of an older generation reached down his hand to me, as a teenager, because he subscribed to the belief that I lived in a town that belonged not just to everybody else, but to me, too.

Readers, this is a call to you to talk to your teens. And if you're a teen reading this, it's a call to YOU.

The library wants to serve Douglas County teenagers as well as we serve pre-schoolers, elementary students, and as well as we serve adults.

To do that, we need teens to answer some questions for us.

They can find an online survey at http://fs8.formsite.com/douglaslibraries/form215842611/index.html.

You have to respond by April 15, 2005.

Slap.

Your move.

April 7, 2005 - Douglas County and the state

I've come to realize that there are four dimensions to a librarian's job. The first is departmental -- working in the local branch, or administrative unit. Here the primary task is immediate, point-of-contact service to the public.

The second is district-wide. Here the task is making that first dimension both effective and sustainable. This is the arena of meetings: working to ensure consistency, coordination, efficiency, productivity, sufficient resources, planning.

The third dimension of librarianship is community. And in this sphere, the task is involvement. What's going on in the local area? What issues do people face? How can we help?

The fourth is the profession. Librarians need to share what they've learned from their experiments and experiences. In the process, they learn that local issues may not be local at all, but part of broad societal trends. They also learn strategies and best practices for responding to a changing environment.

Last week, I was invited to a statewide library planning summit. Thirty-six people were invited, representing a host of constituencies. We had school librarians, or teacher librarians, as they now call themselves.

We had university librarians. We had folks who work for the last remaining library system in the state -- a group charged with maintaining courier services and providing continuing education for librarians.

We had members of the State Library staff. We also had a lot of Douglas County Libraries folks.

Justine Shaffner, Adult Services Department Head at Philip S. Miller, is the chair of the statewide Ask Colorado committee. Ask Colorado provides 24/7 online access to real reference librarians.

Claudine Perrault, Manager of the Lone Tree Library, is the chair of the Colorado Library Card Committee. This is the group that set up and promotes a program unique in the United States, through which library cards from one institution are honored by others. This remarkable service is free.

While some states do have programs that permit borrowing among one type of library, CLC involves public, school, university, and even some special libraries (institutional or corporate).

Rochelle Logan, Associate Director for Support Services, has a strong background in surveys and statistical analysis. She had helped craft and analyze some information-gathering around the state for this planning effort.

I represented the Front Range Public Library Directors, a regional committee I have the honor to chair this year.

After the State Library itself, and the new statewide system, the Douglas County Libraries has emerged as one of the key, active contributors to statewide library planning. Our staff -- based on their activities as managers, district employees, and respected professionals -- have been recognized as the sort of people you want to have around when you're talking about big issues.

Ultimately, our reputation radiates from that first dimension -- the direct service to our patrons. Many of the state programs do just that.

Yet libraries, like librarians, have a responsibility to participate in various levels of activity.

I'm proud to see our institution so well represented, and very proud of our people.