Altamont Library Notes for Monday, May 4, 2015

In some ways, a library is like a garden and, just as every good garden requires care and maintenance, so does a library. One of the most important aspects of maintaining a library, also like a garden, is weeding, which is what we call it when we remove items that no longer are in heavy demand from our collection.

The difference between weeding a garden and a library is that you wouldn’t want to keep weeds in your garden under any circumstances. On the other hand, if we had an infinite amount of shelf space, we’d have no reason to remove books from our collection whether there was interest in those titles or not.

But we don’t have infinite space or anything remotely close to it. Once a year, therefore, the Altamont Free Library identifies items that haven’t been checked out in the past three years and we remove many of them from the collection.

So, our shelves may look a bit more bare for a little while, but rest assured that we’ll be bringing in new titles to fill those shelves up again.

The good news is that you’ll have an opportunity to peruse the titles that we’re letting go of at our annual book sale this Saturday. We’re also gladly accepting donations of good condition books, audio books, CDs, and DVDs for the sale.

If we can add them to our collection, we surely will. If not, we’ll sell them to raise money for the library.

We will also be holding a garage sale in conjunction with the book sale and will be glad to accept donations of any household items in good condition that you might be willing to part with for a good cause. We could also use a few volunteers to help us run the book and garage sales on Saturday. We hope to see you all on Saturday.

Book discussion

The first Monday book group will meet at noon on Monday, May 4, to discuss “The Children Act” by Ian McEwan. This new novel touches on several issues that have been widely debated recently, including the intersection of religious faith and modern medicine and the ability of young adults to make their own health care decisions. Please join us for what will undoubtedly be a fascinating conversation.

Spring bird walk take 2

On Thursday, May 7, our own Dan Capuano will once again lead a bird watching expedition along Brandle Road. Our April excursion was a hoot, but a bit on the chilly side.

We hope that the weather will be nicer for our next outing, when Dan tells us that the orioles will be back from their winter down south. Please join us as we meet up at the library at 9 a.m. for this fun and educational hour-long walk.

Art and collections

Over the next few weeks, the library will be unveiling a new art display system in our community room. The new system will allow us to professionally and securely display art and we’d love to display yours.

If you are an artist and would like to display your work at the library, please get in touch with Joe Burke at 861-7239 to discuss scheduling a showing. Likewise, if you’ve got a cool collection you’d like to show off, please consider letting us show it in our display case. Thanks!