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WOLFNER NEWS

Library for the Blind & Physically Handicapped

Published by Robin Carnahan, Secretary of State
Winter 2005

Notes from the Director

Wolfner Library is a member of the oldest network of cooperating libraries in America. Established in 1931 by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) of the Library of Congress, regional libraries continue to share books in alternative formats for those unable to read standard printed materials.

Many regional libraries supplement the NLS collection with locally recorded material of provincial content that is rich in its depth and variety. Local collections reflect a diverse audience whose reading appetite is not sated by the NLS basic collection; furthermore, librarians encourage that audience to explore and make use of, by collaborative interlibrary loan, member libraries' holdings.

The Best Locally Produced Books is a select recommended reading list that exemplifies network libraries' local recordings that enhance the national collection.

For example, Kentucky Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped's selection of From Red Hot to Monkey's Eyebrow: Unusual Kentucky Place Names by Robert M. Rennick, may be of interest to Missouri readers who have listened to Wolfner's volunteer recording of Margot Ford McMillen's book, Paris, Tightwad, and Peculiar: Missouri Place Names .

Many libraries selected books describing nationally known events. Louisiana's selection of Elvis, Hank, and Me: Making Musical History on the Louisiana Hayride, by Horace Logan with Bill Sloan, is a case in point.

Personalities were not overlooked by Perkins Library. They selected Massachusetts' renown sports figure: Yaz: Baseball, the Wall, and Me, by Carl Yastrzemski; Wolfner submitted That's a Winner by Jack Buck; while the Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Regional Library went with The Good Provider: H.J. Heinz and His 57 Varieties, by Carl C. Alberts.

Narrators might be the reason for listening to several of the selections. Michigan's Governor Jennifer Granholm narrated the preschool book, Barnyard Song by Rhonda Gowler Greene, while Senator John McCain narrated his section in the book Arizona Goes to War.

Of course, we are all enriched because states' selected titles heighten our awareness of regional diversity and uniqueness. Among them are: Hawaii's The Polynesian Family System in Ka'u, Hawaii, by E.S. Craighill Handy and Mary Kawena Pukui; Minnesota's Canoeing with the Cree, by Eric Sevareid; Maryland's Finding the Charm in Charm City: Affectionate Views of Baltimore, by Anthea Smith; and South Carolina's A Short History of Charleston, by Robert Rosen. Many others on the list allow us to leave our confines to explore different places and cultures through reading.

Regional recordings comprise an important collection of unique and rare materials for our patrons. It is a service not likely to be duplicated by the commercial e-book community. Please call the library at 1-800-392-2614 to receive a bibliography of locally produced books so that you can enjoy a selection of readings from around the country. You may search for additional readings of locally recorded materials by exploring the NLS Online Catalog at www.loc.gov/nls/.

Friends Annual Meeting

The Friends of Wolfner Library annual meeting will be on April 23, 2005, from noon until 4 p.m. Keynote speaker will be talking book narrator Martha Harmon Pardee. Martha has recorded over 500 NLS book titles and hundreds of magazines; furthermore, she won the 2004 Alexander Scourby Award for Fiction. Luncheon speaker will be Christine Parsons, a junior at Northwest High School in House Springs, Missouri, and the grand prize winner of the Fourth Annual National Braille Challenge Invitational. The meeting will conclude on the second floor with an open house and demonstration of Wolfner's new digital recording equipment and booth.

The meeting will take place in the Interpretive Center of the James C. Kirkpatrick Building, 600 West Main, in Jefferson City. The luncheon will consist of a box lunch for $7.50. Please RSVP to Rita Lynch at
573-634-3865 by April 13. We hope you will be able to join us.

Read MOre Book Selected

The Read MOre program is a statewide initiative of local libraries to involve Missouri citizens in reading and discussing the same book. This year's selection is Betsey Brown by Ntozake Shange (RC 23651). It is a poetic novel set in 1950s Saint Louis, when the civil rights movement began to form. It tells the story of precocious 13-year-old Betsey Brown, who yearns for adulthood and beauty and explores the initial fears of the family when the Brown children become the first blacks to be bused to white schools. The book contains some strong language and some explicit descriptions of sex. Contact your public library for local book discussion opportunities.

Power Up 2005

On April 18 and 19, Missouri Adaptive Technology will host a conference and expo called Power Up 2005 at the Tan-Tar-A resort in Osage Beach, Missouri. The conference is designed to strengthen the abilities and freedom of people with disabilities as well as professionals who provide services to people with disabilities. The conference will include a series of presentations on assistive technology devices and disability policies. Wolfner Library staff will be presenting three of these sessions this year:

Digital Books: Future Shock and Present Reality will review the history of digital books, as well as the different types of digital books, purchasing digital books, and an overview of digital book readers. Presenters are Deborah Stroup and Elizabeth Lang.

The Basics of Finding & Accessing Information on the Internet will focus on performing searches on the Internet using search engines and assessing the usefulness of Web sites. Presenters are Debbie Musselman and Brandon Kempf.

Kurzweil 1000: The Basics will introduce the Kurzweil 1000 optical character recognition computer software program. It will review how to scan a document, read it using Kurzweil 1000, and save it as a text, braille, or audio file, as well as how to read e-mail and Web sites with the program. Presenters are Elizabeth Lang and Diann Stark.

The mission of the Missouri Assistive Technology program is to increase access to assistive technology for all Missourians with disabilities. If you would like more information about the Power Up 2005 Conference or the other programs provided by Missouri Assistive Technology, please call 1-800-647-8557 (in Missouri only) or 1-816-373-5193 (outside Missouri) or send an e-mail to matpmo@swbell.net.

New Recommended Reading Lists Available

The following mini-bibliographies have been produced since the last newsletter was released. If you would like to receive a copy of any of these recommended readings, please call the library at 1-800-392-2614, write us a note, or join Wolfner's electronic distribution list by sending an e-mail to Wolfner@sos.mo.gov. The lists can also be viewed at www.sos.mo.gov/wolfner/readings.asp.

Fiction Lists

Nonfiction Lists

Fiction and Nonfiction Combined

NFB-Newsline® News

NFB-Newsline, a toll-free, touchtone telephone service, has added AARP Magazine to the list of magazines it provides. AARP Magazine, an official publication from AARP, contains subjects of interest to senior citizens, including money, health, travel, entertainers, and much more. (This title is also available in cassette format from Wolfner Library.) Current subscribers to NFB-Newsline will be able to access AARP Magazine with their user identification and security codes. If you would like to subscribe to NFB-Newsline, or if you would like to order AARP Magazine on cassette, contact your Reader Advisor at 1-800-392-2614.

Magazine Corner

There are four magazines in cassette format we are spotlighting with this issue of Wolfner News. If you would like to start a subscription to any of these magazines, call your Reader Advisor at 1-800-392-2614.

Choice Magazine Listening – An anthology of unabridged articles, poetry, and fiction from 100 magazines, such as the Atlantic Monthly , The New Yorker and Smithsonian; occasionally includes material from other media sources.

Report on Disability Programs – Significant developments from federal agencies, Congress, and the courts as they relate to persons with disabilities.

Retirement Life (NARFE) – Subjects of interest to retired federal workers. Official journal of the National Federation of Retired Federal Workers.

Southern Living – Gardening, history, travel, and recipes. Focuses on the Southern style of life.

If you recently subscribed to Vital Speeches of the Day, please be aware that there are production delays due to the hurricanes in Florida last fall. We will send the issues to you as soon as we receive them. Thank you for your patience.

Missouri Web-Braille

Most people have heard of Braille – the tactile writing system used by the blind for reading and writing – even if they have never seen it or used it. Few, however, are aware of Web-Braille, which is a type of computer file, usually called a.brf file, which can be read as Braille with the appropriate equipment, such as a refreshable Braille display.

Wolfner has been conducting a pilot test of providing Web-Braille to our patrons through our Web site. We recently expanded the available offerings and would like to describe the Web-Braille opportunities available through our Web site at www.sos.mo.gov/wolfner/.

Opening the Web-Braille link on the Wolfner Library home page will direct you to a page providing basic information about Web-Braille, as well as three links you can choose for further information. These links are "Missouri Web-Braille," "National Library Service Web-Braille," and "Additional Braille Resources."

The Missouri Web-Braille page contains links to Missouri-related information, including:

Selecting a particular topic will take you to even more subtopics. For example, choosing the Missouri University Sports link takes you to a list of Missouri universities with schedule links for each school's sports. At that point, selecting the link to a sport schedule will either open the.brf file or allow you to download the file to your computer, depending on the way your computer is set to download files.

The National Library Service Web-Braille link is a fact sheet about Web-Braille at the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) Web site. This information describes the Web-Braille services provided by NLS through their Web site.

The Additional Braille Resources link leads to a page of Web sites of organizations and companies that provide information and services relating to Braille. These include organizations such as the Braille Authority of North America, which publishes rules to facilitate the standardization of Braille code, and companies such as Freedom Scientific, which sells products for use in reading and writing Braille.

All time sensitive Web-Braille information on our Web site, such as sports scores or new editions of a magazine, is updated monthly. We hope that Wolfner patrons who use Web-Braille will contact us at wolfner@sos.mo.gov with feedback about the accessibility and quality of the Web-Braille on our Web site.

Children's Vision Summit

Rehabilitation Services for the Blind will hold a free seminar for parents, classroom teachers, teachers of the visually impaired, students and others interested in the education of children who are blind or visually impaired.

Children's Vision Summit "Vision for the Future" will be held April 12 & 13, 2005 at the Capitol Plaza Hotel, Jefferson City, MO.

The purpose of this seminar is to provide information to those in daily contact with blind or visually impaired children, identify available resources and equipment to serve them and help parents and teachers understand that their children can live independently and achieve academic and vocational success.

For a registration form or more information, contact: Mike Merrick at (573) 751-4989 or Michael.L.Merrick@dss.mo.gov

Wolfner Circulation Staff

photo of Wolfner circulation staff

Back row: Cheryl Nott, Mike Jaegers, Cheryl Schreiman, Amanda Heimericks

Front row: Stacey Jo Butler, Brandon Lammers, Rhea Dickrader, Ken Gilliam.

Under the management of Ken Gilliam, Wolfner's circulation staff sends and receives over 500,000 books and magazines a year to our patrons.

Circulation staff would appreciate your help

Wolfner Library mails over a half million books a year! Here is how you can help the circulation staff:

Most of our patrons use cassettes, and though we have multiple copies of each cassette book, we have waiting lists for many titles. We have only one copy of most Braille titles and lost Braille is not easy to replace. Although we may have two copies of many large print titles, they are not a part of the NLS collection and must be purchased with money from our book budget. Please return your books within the six week loan period so others may read them and you then will receive a new title in its place.

Circulation problems? Contact us at 1-800-392-2614 or by e-mail at wolfner@sos.mo.gov.

Moving Out of State?

Did you know that you can take your talking book machine with you when you move out of state? Talking book libraries are in all 50 states, and as a Wolfner patron in Missouri, you can move your service with you wherever you go. You do not need to re-register in your new home state and risk getting the same books all over again. Call your Reader Advisor for more details.

Wolfner Library Staff
Richard Smith Director of Wolfner Library richard.smith@sos.mo.gov
Debbie Musselman

Public Services Librarian

 debbie.musselman@sos.mo.gov
Elizabeth Lang Special Services Librarian elizabeth.lang@sos.mo.gov
Nancy Doering Youth Services Librarian nancy.doering@sos.mo.gov
Bonnie O'Donnell Administrative Aide bonnie.odonnell@sos.mo.gov
Archie Andrews Machines Coordinator archie.andrews@sos.mo.gov
Deborah Stroup Volunteer Coordinator

deborah.stroup@sos.mo.gov

 
Paul Mathews Reader Advisor A-Co paul.mathews@sos.mo.gov
Susan Higgins Reader Advisor Cp-G susan.higgins@sos.mo.gov
Ginny Ryan Reader Advisor H-L ginny.ryan@sos.mo.gov
Cheryl Hassler Reader Advisor M-R cheryl.hassler@sos.mo.gov
Carol Mathews Reader Advisor S-Z carol.mathews@sos.mo.gov
Brandon Kempf Reader Advisor Institutions brandon.kempf@sos.mo.gov

Wolfner News is a quarterly publication of the Office of Secretary of State.

Robin Carnahan
Secretary of State		 Sara Parker
State Librarian

WOLFNER LIBRARY IS OPEN MONDAY THROUGH FRIDAY
8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

(CLOSED FOR STATE HOLIDAYS)

Toll-free within Missouri (800) 392-2614
Jefferson City Area (573) 751-8720
Toll-free TDD (573) 347-1379
E-mail address wolfner@sos.mo.gov
WWW Homepage www.sos.mo.gov/wolfner
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