The numbers are in: Your library is valuable

I recently read a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle about the value of librar­i­ans in our coun­try, and some of the infor­ma­tion was quite reveal­ing and, hon­estly, a lit­tle stun­ning. The arti­cle noted that, “Today’s librar­i­ans are no longer mousy book worms; they are high-tech infor­ma­tion sleuths and clever inter­roga­tors, help­ing cus­tomers plumb the oceans of infor­ma­tion avail­able in books and dig­i­tal records.” How true!

Each year in the United States, there are 1,504,851,000 vis­its to the nation’s 122,101 libraries. Last year, there were around 200,000 vis­its to the Delaware County Dis­trict Library. Daily, U.S. libraries cir­cu­late nearly four times more items than Ama­zon han­dles, and library card­hold­ers out­num­ber Ama­zon cus­tomers by 5 to 1! Sixty-five per­cent of Amer­i­cans have vis­ited a pub­lic library in the last year.

Ref­er­ence librar­i­ans answer 7.2 mil­lion ques­tions each week in the U.S. Stand­ing sin­gle file, the line of ques­tion­ers would stretch from New York City to Juneau, Alaska.

The U.S. can boast about 135,000 librar­i­ans (there are 14 librar­i­ans at DCDL), and each week we receive on aver­age 367 emails.

These amaz­ing sta­tis­tics were gath­ered from the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion and the U.S. Government’s Bureau of Sta­tis­tics, and they clearly show that Amer­i­cans value and use their libraries.

So what do librar­i­ans do all day? They work an aver­age of 2,785 min­utes each week, and in next week’s col­umn, I’ll tell you what they do dur­ing those minutes.

And, a reminder: the library will close at 5 p.m. on July 3 and remained closed for the Fourth of July hol­i­day. We will reopen on July 5 with our reg­u­lar hours. Happy 4th of July!

I read some­thing about Pres­i­dent Obama’s “Res­olute Desk.” What is that?

The World Book Ency­clo­pe­dia notes that Res­olute desk is a large, 19th-century part­ners’ desk often cho­sen by pres­i­dents of the United States for use as the Oval Office desk. It was a gift from Queen Vic­to­ria to Pres­i­dent Ruther­ford B. Hayes in 1880 and was built from the tim­bers of the British Arc­tic Explo­ration ship Res­olute. Many pres­i­dents since Hayes have used the desk at var­i­ous loca­tions in the White House, but it was Jackie Kennedy who first brought the desk into the Oval Office in 1961 for Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy. It was removed from the White House only once, after the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy in 1963, when Pres­i­dent John­son allowed the desk to go on a trav­el­ing exhi­bi­tion with the Kennedy Pres­i­den­tial Library. It then was on dis­play in the Smith­son­ian Insti­tu­tion. Pres­i­dent Jimmy Carter brought the desk back to the Oval Office, where Pres­i­dents Ronald Rea­gan, Bill Clin­ton, George W. Bush and now Barack Obama have used it.

What is a Jiggs and Mag­gie book?

Jiggs-and-Maggie books (also known as blue­sies, eight-pagers, gray-backs, jo-jo books, Tillie-and-Mac books, and two-by-fours,) were porno­graphic comic books pro­duced in the United States from the 1920s to the early 1960s. The typ­i­cal book was an 8-panel comic strip in a wallet-size 2.5×4 inch for­mat with black print on cheap white paper and run­ning eight pages in length. In most cases the artists, writ­ers and pub­lish­ers were unknown, and the qual­ity of the art­work var­ied widely. The sub­jects are explicit sex­ual escapades usu­ally fea­tur­ing well known news­pa­per comic strip char­ac­ters, polit­i­cal fig­ures or movie stars, invari­ably used with­out per­mis­sion. I searched the “Lit­er­a­ture Resource Cen­ter” data­base for this information.

Can you really tell how close the thun­der­storm is by count­ing the sec­onds between the light­ning and the thunder?

Yes, using a cal­cu­la­tion called the “Flash to Bang” method. Sound trav­els through air 1,087 feet per sec­ond. For a quick cal­cu­la­tion in your head, the National Severe Storms Lab­o­ra­tory notes you can use one mile per five sec­onds as a good approx­i­ma­tion. The speed of light is much faster than sound, 186,282.397 miles per sec­ond, fast enough that you see the light­ning almost the instant it flashes. When that hap­pens, start count­ing until you hear the thun­der, which is caused by a sonic shock­wave cre­ated from air rapidly expand­ing in the pres­ence of lightning’s extreme heat and pres­sure. Divide the num­ber of sec­onds between the flash of light­ning and the bang of thun­der by five to account for the sound’s slower speed, and you have a rough idea of how many miles away the light­ning struck. If it takes 10 sec­onds for the thun­der to roll in after the flash, the light­ning struck about two miles away.

If you have a ques­tion that you would like to see answered in this col­umn, mail it to Mary Jane San­tos, Delaware County Dis­trict Library, 84 E. Win­ter St., Delaware, OH 43015, or call us at 740–362-3861. You can also email your ques­tions by vis­it­ing the library’s web­site at delawarelibrary.org or directly to Mary Jane at mjsantos@delawarelibrary.org. No mat­ter how you con­tact us, we’re always glad you asked.

Posted by Mary Santos on Jun 22 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.