Findcate

Your local library may soon start looking a lot more like a bookstore, with walls of best-selling books, big living room-style spaces with comfy couches and chairs, space for readings and classes, and even a coffee kiosk.

A big shift for libraries has popular books coming out from the shelves and showing their faces along with CDs, videos and games  on what some librarians call “power walls.”

In Charlotte County, some patrons are already seeing the kind of service Sarasota wants to offer.

Customers at the new mid-county library are encouraged to order online, pick up and check out by themselves. Common areas are open, inviting and bustling with activity. Quieter areas for study are away from the library’s center.

Last year, the county completed a five-year plan for library services that includes two new regional libraries in Punta Gorda and Englewood. Those libraries will include features like historical archives and museum pieces, said Angie Patteson, library manager for Charlotte.

The willingness to change among librarians came after surveys of patrons found that they rarely raved about the depth of a collection or its organization.

“They tend to come and spend time at a library where there are friendly people, some comfortable seating,” said Sarabeth Kalajian, who heads the library system for Sarasota County. “Maybe some aspect of the collection is important to them, but it’s mainly just their basic need for information.”

In the future, there will be fewer titles on display, but almost any book will be available through inter-library loan from across town or the globe. Sarasota patrons can already browse for books from the local collection online and order them for pickup at any branch.

Gone as well, for the most part, will be the Dewey Decimal System.

“This is a renegade trend in libraries to throw out Dewey and organize the collection in the way that people might logically find things,” Kalajian said.

Much like a bookstore, patrons will find a career development section, exercise, finance and self-help sections and areas full of cookbooks, art books or science books.

This new model for libraries is not new. In 1998, the Richmond Public Library in British Columbia opened its Ironwood Branch in a retail space. Librarian Cate McNeely, a recognized visionary in her field, instituted changes that make it seem more like a high-end bookstore. Overnight, it was the most popular branch and dubbed “The Library of the Future.”

“We are a gathering place with not a lot of rules,” Jeffrey said. “Bring a coffee, have a snack, browse, sit by the fireplace, watch the Beijing Olympics on one of our big-screen TVs, take your kids to our daily story time, fill up your shopping basket with good reads and head home to enjoy them.”

Tags: games, pace

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News that a Dales swimming pool will be closed for repairs until at least October has sparked anger from users.

Derbyshire Dales District Council has said residents will be without the facility while extensive work on the main pool takes place.

Steve Sankey, chairman of Matlock and District Swimming Club, said he feared the Lido would suffer the same fate as Sherwood Hall leisure centre.

Mr Sankey said the club also risked losing swimmers to other clubs and falling competition results.

Matlock Mayor Cate Hopkinson said she also had concerns about the Lido after Sherwood Hall closed.

Tags: cate

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Red carpet camera crews captured the world’s best swimmers out of their cossies and in more glamorous attire at celebrations marking the end of the swimming program in Beijing.

But 16-year-olds Cate Campbell and Emily Seebohm had to sit it out.

“No managers were going so we didn’t have anybody to watch us, keep an eye on us,” Campbell told the Seven Network this morning, still smiling from her bronze medal in yesterday’s 50m freestyle.

The girls said they wanted to join the festivities just “a little bit”.

“We just want to have fun with everyone else,” said Seebohm, who swam the backstroke leg of the women’s 4×100m medley relay which won gold.

Instead, they went along to the Bird’s Nest to check out the athletics.

“It would have been nice just to have fun as a team but it was good to go to the athletics too,” Seebohm said.

“We had a corporate box we got given so it was really good - free drinks and stuff.”

Campbell was quick to add: “Soft drinks!”

“Everyone calls us the babies because I’m the youngest and Cate’s the second youngest so we’re like, we just muck around with each other and everyone leaves us to do our own thing,” Seebohm said.

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As a city heralded for its cowboys and culture, one essential aspect of Fort Worth’s charm is the occasional clip-clop of hooves down Main Street.

Five carriage companies currently are licensed by the city’s Department of Transportation to serve Fort Worth and often can be seen waiting in front of the Worthington Hotel on weekends or weaving around traffic with bridal parties waving to passing cars.

Tracy Pratt is one businesswoman who capitalizes off tourists and local interest in horses, as an owner of Brazos Carriage Co. Pratt’s business is a recent addition to the companies that serve downtown. Brazos  Carriage was established in 2004 and the business has been operating primarily in Granbury.

During Pratt’s previous experiences riding through Downtown for scheduled events, such as weddings or funerals, her interest was piqued as she saw the existing companies blossom off Downtown clientele.

“We’re not in a nasty competition by any means – there’s enough business to go around,” Pratt said. “The thing with Downtown is that we all have to distinguish ourselves as being the elite service next to the other guy.”

The Ground Transportation Coordinator for Fort Worth’s Department of Transportation, Jerald Taylor, said there is no limit to the number of companies that may operate in the area between Lancaster Avenue and Weatherford Street and between Henderson Street and Interstate 35W.

When Billie Cate, owner of Classic Carriages, started operating Downtown in 1987, Fort Worth was a one-horse – or carriage company – town. She applied to the city to create a parking spot in front of the Worthington Hotel where she and her horses could wait for customers without being hassled by traffic.

Now, Cate said the city deemed this spot a parking area for all carriage companies, which, she said, causes a crowded confusion for customers who can’t tell which buggy belongs to which company now that there are several companies.

Though some customers who hop into a carriage on a whim might not have a preference for a certain carriage company, Cate emphasized the importance of knowing who a client is riding with.

“This is not like choosing ice cream,” Cate said. “This is putting your family in a vehicle in high traffic with a live animal.”

While the city requires drivers to take a defensive driving course as well as a drug test and carriages to meet with inspection standards, Cate said customers should do some homework before going for a ride.

Taylor said he hasn’t heard any reports of accidents or customer complaints since he started in the Fort Worth transportation department in 2000.

“Carriages are required to be inspected annually and horses are required to have vaccinations, plus every so often a random carriage inspection might pop up,” Taylor said.

Still, Pratt said she looks forward to joining the carriage business Downtown and working the job she loves.

Tags: cars, cate, ford, job

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The company on Wednesday added two enhancements to its Sun Partner Advantage Program, including a social networking platform and new tools to help partners demonstrate the value of their solutions to their customers.

The first, ExecConnect by Sun, is a social networking environment aimed at helping partners collaborate for new ideas and find opportunities to work with each other, said Bill Cate, the vendor’s vice president of global sales.

ExecConnect came about from a meeting in January between Sun executives, including CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz and about 150 partners from 27 countries. Solution providers asked how to keep up spirit of collaboration developed at the meeting, which lead Sun to develop the program, Cate said.

ExecConnect is an invite-only forum which allows partners to communicate with each other and connect to Sun executives, including Schwartz; Peter Ryan, vice president of global sales and executive sponsor of the forum; and Anil Gadre, executive vice president and CMO.

The forum lets them start and follow discussion threads and open folders specific to certain geographies, share articles and other materials, and poll other partners on things like what applications work best in certain situation, Cate said.

Partners could use other social networks, such as FaceBook, but Sun offers a secure environment where they can communicate with their peers, Cate said.

That’s an important prerequisite to using such a social networking forum, said John Murphy, executive vice president at Advanced Systems Group, a Denver-based Sun partner and former head of Sun’s partner council.

“As far as getting feedback from changes to programs, Sun hopes that partners will contribute,” he said. “If they don’t, it doesn’t matter, but it is a way for them to discuss the changes. There’s a lot of value in that. The bi-annual partner meetings are kind of spotty for getting such feedback.”

However, Murphy said Sun cannot expect its solution partners to start working together just because they have a new social networking tool.

Sun on Wednesday also unveiled the Sun Value Platform, a Web-based sales tool for helping solution providers show customers their expected return on investment using Sun solutions.

Cate said Sun Value Platform helps solution providers justify customers’ investments by looking at Sun and competitive platforms to see how a new solution compares to existing solutions, and to model expected future costs.

The Sun Value Platform, which came out of Sun’s StorageTek business, currently is available for storage solutions, but in the future is expected to be expanded to other specializations like virtualization, SOA (services-oriented architecture), high-performance computing, MySQL, ID management, and open storage, Cate said.

In theory, Sun Value Platform can be a significant tool, but only if Sun can keep the important content up-to-date, Murphy said.

Tags: cate, endor

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The condition of a 4-year-old girl severely injured in a tornado that struck Hugo two weeks ago has improved.

Annika Prindle was upgraded to fair condition Monday afternoon at Gillette Children’s Hospital in St. Paul, spokeswoman Cate Dobyns said.

Contributions to help Annika and her parents, Jerry and Christina Prindle, can be made to the Gerard Prindle Family fund at any US Bank.

Tags: brother, cate, christina, gillette children, hugo, monday afternoon, old girl, prindle, s hospital, spokeswoman, tornado, us bank

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Anyone working on a high-profile movie or TV show these days dreads seeing two words in a script: Exterior shot. Filming a hot project at an outdoor location has become a swim in a giant, incredibly public fishbowl. Of all the battlefronts in the spoiler wars, location shoots are the places where filmmakers and show creators feel the most exposed, the most overtly under siege and maybe the most powerless to plug leaks.

Even so, interlopers crashed the party wherever Crystal Skull went. Somebody in a helicopter possibly just a lucky tourist on a joyride, who was passing through airspace the Skull crew couldn’t control snapped shots of a Hawaii-based jungle sequence from above. Plot spoiling amateur videos of a motorcycle-chase scene filmed in New Haven, Conn., also showed up online, thanks to onlookers posting footage.

No matter how distant the location, it seems, those pesky snappers find a way in. A few weeks into the shoot of Iron Man, in March 2007, work was about to start at an extremely remote desert canyon spot in a gated national park near Lone Pine, Calif. More than three hours’ drive outside Los Angeles.

Barren and desolate looking, this spot would stand in for Afghanistan in a sequence where Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr., gets kidnapped by terrorists. Somehow, photographers found the waiting set. They commandeered a vantage point in the hills above, and got telephoto-lens pictures of the faux terrorist encampment, including weapon containers marked Stark Industries. The images showed up on a fansite before any of the sequence had even been filmed.

Tags: amateur videos, battlefronts, chase scene, crystal skull, desert canyon, encampment, filmmakers, fishbowl, helicopter, iron man, joyride, lone pine, motorcycle chase, movie sets, new haven conn, onlookers, outdoor location, pace, robert downey, robert downey jr, stark industries, vantage point

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AGEING gracefully is a difficult art. So, hats off to Harrison Ford and Spielberg for showing that when 20 years pass by unless you live in a soap opera two decades do pass by.

The archaeologist-adventurer made famous by George Lucas, Spielberg and Ford returns as an older, wiser and a little slower Indiana Jones, who remains as fallible and as likable as in his first outing in 1981.

Spielberg insisted that the special effects would be kept to a minimum in keeping with both the spirit of the three previous Indiana Jones films and the period in which The Kingdom of the Skull is set, and this does give the film an old-worldly, hands-on feel missing in similar adventures shot now like, say, National Treasure. This includes a sword-fight between two people balanced on two parallel racing jeeps.

Still, sometimes it’s better to adopt a little change. The Kingdom of the Skull moves at a desultory pace and its storyline has few surprises. And then, suddenly in the end, it takes off in a direction that bears the special touch of Lucas and Spielberg.

What’s also surprising is how many parallels it has with National Treasure 2, released just earlier this year from mythical cities to estranged families. Sure, there is a new character being introduced, in the shape of the young flavour of the season Shia LaBeouf. But even with the Marlon Brando get-up, he looks like he has been plonked in the film from sometime else.

Tags: archaeologist, crystal skull, decades, few surprises, flavour, ford, george lucas, harrison ford, hats, indiana jones, indiana jones films, jeeps, marlon brando, national treasure, national treasure 2, pace, parallels, shia labeouf, soap opera, special effects, spielberg, sword fight

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BILL HENSON has dominated the headlines during the past week for all the wrong reasons but when the hysteria dies down we might find this affair has coughed up a few revelations.

First: the level of public ignorance that exists in relation to the visual arts. In 2005 Bill Henson was the subject of huge retrospectives at the Art Gallery of NSW and the National Gallery of Victoria, which were advertised in the media and even on bus shelters. His work is held by most of the important public collections in Australia and he is every bit as internationally successful in his field as Cate Blanchett or Hugh Jackman are in theirs. He has been making works that use teenagers for almost 30 years, exhibiting and publishing at the highest levels. And yet, when this furore breaks, it seems that his detractors have never heard of him.

This should be a source of concern to art museums, arts funding bodies, art educators and organisations with cultural responsibilities such as the ABC. It seems that most people in Australia could not care less for the visual arts unless they are presented in the form of a page one scandal.

The second eye-opener is the irresponsible way the politicians have responded to this affair. From the Prime Minister to the Premier, to the leaders of federal and state oppositions, every one has blurted out a litany of damning, inflammatory comments, having seen nothing more than a few blurry snapshots.

It is no secret that rank populism is now a fact of life in Australian politics. But in an age when every message is refined and spin-doctored to avoid offending anyone’s delicate sensibilities, it appears to be OK to pronounce judgments on unseen works of art in the name of public morality. The comments of the politicians have provided tremendous support for one-eyed activists such as Hetty Johnston, who claim to be speaking in the name of “the community”.

Directly or indirectly, our leaders have encouraged the police to act in a high-handed manner by confiscating works of art, thereby setting the scene for an ugly and futile battle in the courts. Finally, they have helped create a climate in which self-appointed witch-hunters and vigilantes can ring the Roslyn Oxley gallery with threats of violence.

Tags: activist, art educators, art gallery of nsw, art museums, australian politics, bill henson, bus shelters, cate, cate blanchett, delicate sensibilities, fact of life, hetty johnston, hugh jackman, inflammatory comments, national gallery of victoria, oppositions, oxley, populism, public collections, public ignorance, public morality, retrospectives

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BREAKING through the cobwebs to revisit a classic franchise whose last film was nearly 20 years ago was never going to be an easy challenge, even for intrepid adventurer Indiana Jones, who’s well-known for rediscovering old relics - but director Steven Spielberg has definitely pulled it off.

An ageing Harrison Ford dusts off his character’s fedora as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls takes some daring risks and manages to create a rip-roaring piece of summer entertainment with Ford’s charm, Spielberg’s cinematic magic and the excellent new addition of the surprisingly charismatic Shia LaBeouf.

The movie works as a piece of summer entertainment that can be proudly appended to the previous Indy outings, and the film-making is superb with some stunning visuals and action sequences.

This project was always going to get a mixed response - stick to the original formula and some cry that it’s too tired and dated; make radical changes and you risk people saying it’s no longer Indiana Jones. The finished film is very much in the spirit of the originals, with some additions (LaBeouf and a somewhat out-of-this-world storyline) to take it in new directions.

In the story, Indiana Jones and a new companion, biker Mutt Williams (LaBeouf, above right), battle Soviet agents led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) in a quest to find a crystal skull in Peru which is said to have untold power.

Where it falls short in places is in the writing. Even dismissing the usual Indy cliches (bullets that never hit the target, impossible stunts and death-trap temples), some comic moments feel contrived, some explanations don’t work and the fates of some of the baddies left me totally unsatisfied.

The audience seemed to enjoy the movie and, as I left, one man remarked: “I went in with trepidation but it was excellent” to nodding approval from those around, and that’s exactly how I felt.

I’ll take a look at some of the details of the movie below, so don’t read further if you don’t want to know all the shocks and surprises - instead, come back after you’ve seen the movie and tell me if you agree,

THE DETAILS

This is a genre which has exploded since the first three movies with other quest films such as Tomb Raider, The Mummy and National Treasure, so director Spielberg and co-writer and executive producer George Lucas clearly felt the need to take the story to the next level with Crystal Skull.

Elements of Spielberg’s classic E.T. have now entered the Indiana franchise with this latest movie featuring alien remains, a reference to the Roswell incident and ending with a full-blown flying saucer emerging from an ancient pyramid.

There was a lot of anxiety from some fans before the movie about taking Indy’s archaeological quests into extraterrestrial territory - it does work in the film, though seeing a living alien near the end seemed unnecessary.

And the final explanation of the ‘gold’ of the lost city being the treasure of knowledge didn’t feel right at all, more like a writers’ cop-out. Despite the amazing final scenes at the temple in south America, that explanation seemed phoney and misleading.

The death of Winstone’s treacherous character - who was irritating from the moment he stepped on screen - was largely unsatisfying as was the demise of Blanchett’s eccentric Soviet agent (with bobbed hair, leather boots and a boiler suit). They needed to die - but it should have been more gratifying to the audience and not so rushed. I’m at least relieved that Winstone won’t be annoying me in future Indy movies.

Ford and romantic co star Karen Allen are now decidely advanced in years and one wonders how the franchise can carry on with either of them in physical action roles. Indy’s new sidekick Mutt who turns out to be his son seems to have been there to plant the possibility of him being Jones’ replacement.

Tags: action sequences, baddies, cate, cate blanchett, comic moments, crystal skull, crystal skulls, death trap, director spielberg, director steven spielberg, dusts, finished film, ford, franchise, george lucas, harrison ford, hero, indiana jones, indy, intrepid adventurer, irina, karen allen, last film, mutt, national treasure, new companion, shia labeouf, soviet agents, spielberg, steven spielberg, story indiana, stunning visuals, summer entertainment, target

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