James LaRue - myliblog

When my grandfather died, I inherited his collection of “The Story of Civilization” by Will and Ariel Durant. This 11-volume series, 50 years in the making, stretches from “Our Oriental Heritage” (volume 1) to “The Age of Napoleon.” The prose is magisterial. The Durants were shrewd, probing, superbly balanced in diction and idea. They did more than sum up the past. They sought wisdom. I confess I have not read the whole thing. But I have flipped through the thousands of pages to consider what my grandfather underlined or commented on. And I did read the companion volume: “The Lessons of History.” (It only has 118 pages.) Two big lessons stick with me. One of them is the wry observation that human beings are reliably violent and crazy. To try to rein in our more destructive influences, we create institutions. The family. Religion. Work. Nations. But institutions, founded by human beings, take on human flaws. One in three women and one in four men have been physically abused by an intima...

 I think very highly of the publisher of my On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the US.  They just sent out this link  to put together a little holiday bundle of books. Support your Colorado publishers!

The Garfield County Public Library District is seeking trustees (our word for library board members) to fill three vacancies. (For more information, visit www.bit.ly/GCPLD-wanted ). Applicants do have to live in Rifle, New Castle or Parachute. By the end of the year, the Rifle position will have been vacant for six months, due to delays in the county’s management of the appointment process. In New Castle, Brit McLin will be up for reappointment after his first year, as he completes the term of Crystal Mariscal. The Board of County Commissioners are requiring even the trustees they interviewed and appointed themselves to reapply. Michelle Foster is termed out in Parachute. Her great depth of community insight and experience will be sorely missed. Thank you, Michelle. Congratulations, you lucky folks at the western edge of the county for the gift of her time. The Commissioners have never really said what they’re looking for in trustees. Nor have they said how the commissioners evaluate t...

On Jan. 4, 2026, The Garfield County Public Library District (GCPLD) will be making some changes to the operating hours of our six branches. All our libraries will open earlier. Larger branches will be open a bit longer, and smaller ones will focus on their busiest, core service times. While it’s true that we anticipate an over $830,000 drop in revenue due to declining oil and gas receipts, this isn’t a budgetary issue. It’s about the focused allocation of staff. Our goal is to better match our staffing to local community demand. The total hours of operation remains the same. And to be clear: No staff are losing their jobs. How did we get here? Over the past year, the library district analyzed door counter data to understand when and how often our libraries are used. We found that visits are highest mid-morning and early afternoon, and lowest after 6 p.m. Not all branches have the same level of traffic—larger libraries like Glenwood, Carbondale, and Rifle serve more patrons (have a hig...

My personal laptop is a Chromebook. I've been using it for 5 years. I throw it in my backpack and rarely turn it off. It has terrific battery life and does most of what I need it to. But it's begun to show its age. First the internal mic went out. OK, I could plug in my phone's headphones. Then the camera went out. OK, I could buy a camera--but this starts to look like a trend.  I realized I might need to have a backup computer, so dug up my 2011 MacBook Pro. It was running elementary OS 5.1, Hera, based on Ubuntu. (See my earlier post on this combo.) elementary is a good match for a Mac. Its use of the Pantheon desktop environment gives it a sleek, light, colorful look.  But Hera has been superseded, meaning it no longer has security updates. I didn't want to mess around on the internet with a vulnerable machine. And unlike some operating systems, upgrading meant more than issuing some commands. I would have to reinstall it. So I downloaded the latest elementary--versi...

The past week, Oct. 5-11, was Banned Books Week. This event, the offshoot of a book expo in 1982, celebrates the Freedom to Read. It does so, paradoxically, by recounting the many ways people try to remove or restrict access to books, movies, magazines, databases, exhibits, programs and virtually anything else a library provides. The point of the First Amendment, and the deep purpose of the public library, is based on a simple idea. We have the right to speak and the right to access the speech of others. It used to be that these attempts to censor (by hiding or removing) ideas and books was just a small fraction of library use. Most of them were one-offs, usually parents upset that their children (often between the ages of 4-6 or 14-16) were growing up a little faster than the parents wanted them to. But since about 2021, book challenges tend to be coordinated by a few recurrent groups and cluster around a pre-identified set of books. Most of those books feature LGBTQ+ or people of col...