While setting up Elsie Quirk’s library-wide January exhibit, exploring themes of liberation, resistance, and courageous cooperation, I got to thinking about the banjo. Well, I was thinking about how the sharing of culture and tradition can help people humanize…
We at Elsie Quirk wish one and all a 2020 full of joy, curiosity, uplift, good health, and good reads! This January, the Elsie Quirk Library is hosting a poster series—part of an initiative sponsored by the Jewish Federation…
Since writing about it in this column last month, I am still percolating Carlo Rovelli’s perspective-shifting book, The Order of Time, and subsequently have had several conversations about the haphazardness of designating time and days and months. Here we…
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A conversation with a community member this week, regarding surreptitiously reading Dear Abby, has me thinking about advice. Of all of the things I learned, or didn’t learn, in junior high school, what stuck with me the most was…
In the winter season, what I celebrate as a librarian, with joyful exuberance, is the commonality of the many, many winter holiday traditions, here in Florida and around the world. The use of light to represent the seeking of…
This time of year allows us to pause for gratitude and reflection, to savor pumpkin and nutmeg, and perhaps to curl up with a stack of books or a pile of DVDs. The Elsie Quirk Library can help you…
Libraries often emphasize the myriad resources available to patrons, proving the notion of a library as just a bunch of books and a shusshy librarian to be wildly inaccurate. We have a lot of ground to stand on there,…
As you may have read in this very newspaper, our library colleagues in Citrus County recently made national news when their efforts to provide a digital subscription to the New York Times was rejected by their Board of County…
Sarasota County’s popular One Book, One Community initiative is back for 2020. The coming One Book selection is Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore, detailing the history of radium used in watchmaking, and…