Upgrading the library

In our con­tin­u­ing efforts to ful­fill the cam­paign promises made in 2009, the Delaware County Dis­trict Library is cur­rently upgrad­ing its Inte­grated Library Sys­tem (ILS) to serve you bet­ter. You’re no doubt ask­ing your­self, “What the heck is an ILS?” It is the soft­ware and hard­ware that allows us to com­bine the infor­ma­tion about all of the books, DVDs and other library mate­r­ial with the cir­cu­la­tion of those items.

You prob­a­bly remem­ber the old card cat­a­logs (they were won­der­ful, weren’t they?) But they were not online, and updat­ing the infor­ma­tion on the cards was time-consuming and not done in “real time.” With the intro­duc­tion of the online cat­a­log, we were able to add infor­ma­tion about library items quickly and accu­rately, allow­ing us to keep the cat­a­log up to date.

But a more impor­tant func­tion of an ILS is to inte­grate the infor­ma­tion about the items in the library with their cir­cu­la­tion infor­ma­tion. While the card cat­a­log pro­vided infor­ma­tion about a book that the library owned, it did not link that infor­ma­tion to tell us who had the book checked out, when it was due, or if it were sit­ting on the shelf. The inte­gra­tion of the book records with the cus­tomer records makes the ILS a pow­er­ful and indis­pens­able tool for library staff.

DCDL’s ILS is being upgraded to pro­vide all of us, cus­tomers and library staff alike, with bet­ter, quicker and more eas­ily acces­si­ble infor­ma­tion, but as with any tech­nol­ogy upgrade, we have expe­ri­enced a few glitches along the way. Please don’t hes­i­tate to call the library at 740–362-3861 if you’re hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ties get­ting into your account or other problems.

As the old adage goes: You have to break some eggs to make an omelet. We’re break­ing the eggs right now, and I am con­fi­dent that we will have a won­der­ful omelet when all is said and done. I thank you in advance for your patience! 

Who wrote “Heart and Soul?”

Accord­ing to The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Amer­i­can Music, the melody to “Heart and Soul” was writ­ten by Hoagy Carmichael, who’d penned such clas­sics as “Star­dust” and “Geor­gia on My Mind.” Two years later, first-time col­lab­o­ra­tor Frank Loesser added the lyrics to the song they’d decided to call “Heart and Soul.” The song lan­guished around Para­mount stu­dios for a time, and at first was only used as a prac­tice tape for then-hopeful actor Anthony Quinn. In 1939, three ver­sions charted: Larry Clin­ton (reach­ing No. 1 on the chart), Eddy Duchin (reach­ing No. 12), and Al Don­ahue (reach­ing No. 16). The song later charted as No. 11 in 1952 by The Four Aces, as No. 57 in 1956 by Johnny Mad­dox, as No. 18 in 1961 by The Cleft­ones, and as No. 25 in 1961 by Jan and Dean. The song has been used in many adver­tise­ments, includ­ing a recent one for the iPad Mini.

Can CDs be recycled?

Yes, accord­ing to cdrecyclingcenter.org, CDs can be recy­cled for use in new prod­ucts. Spe­cial­ized elec­tronic recy­cling com­pa­nies clean, grind, blend, and com­pound the discs into a high-quality plas­tic for a vari­ety of uses, includ­ing auto­mo­tive indus­try parts, raw mate­ri­als to make plas­tics, office equip­ment, alarm boxes and pan­els, street lights, and elec­tri­cal cable insu­la­tion and jewel cases.

Why is that lit­tle car called a Smart Car?

Smart Auto­mo­bile is an auto­mo­tive branch of Daim­ler AG that spe­cial­izes in man­u­fac­tur­ing micro­cars. The design con­cept for smart cars began in the late 1980s, when SMH (mak­ers of the Swatch brand of watches) CEO Nico­las Hayek began devel­op­ing an idea for a new car using the same type of man­u­fac­tur­ing strate­gies and per­son­al­iza­tion fea­tures used to pop­u­lar­ize Swatch watches. He believed that the auto­mo­tive indus­try had ignored a sec­tor of poten­tial cus­tomers who wanted a small and styl­ish city car. This idea soon became known as the “Swatch­mo­bile.” After a period of back­ing by Volk­swa­gen, the first model was finally launched by Daimler-Benz in Octo­ber 1998. Sev­eral vari­ants on the design have been intro­duced, but the orig­i­nal design is the most endur­ing. The final name set­tled upon was Smart, an acronym that had been pre­vi­ously used inter­nally by MCC for Swatch Mer­cedes Art. The infor­ma­tion is from Inven­tions and Inventors.

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 740–362-3861. You can also email your ques­tions by vis­it­ing 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 Feb 8 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.