Take Part in the Kick Off Event for Glendale's History Drive at the Glendale Central Library, March 14th!

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Be a part of Glendale’s history at the Kick Off of the Glendale History Drive. Help us add chapters to Glendale’s past by sharing or donating your photos and documents.

The Glendale Public Library is interested in collecting and/or scanning items to add to its collection of:

• photos and documents relating to Glendale’s cultural and civic events,
• images of landmark family celebrations in Glendale, and
• photos and documents pertaining to buildings, houses and places of interest in Glendale.

Selected items will be scanned at the Kick Off event or at a later date. Walk ins are welcome, but appointments are encouraged.

The Glendale History Drive will continue by appointment through the end of June.

The Glendale History Drive is in partnership with The Glendale Historical Society and the Historical Society of Crescenta Valley. For more information or to make an appointment call (818) 548-3752, go to the Glendale History Drive website, or download a copy of the History Drive flyer.

Participants will receive a 2009 Historic Glendale calendar courtesy of Glendale Printing Center.

Ed Begley, Jr. Lecture 2/26 at 7pm

Living Like Ed provides a wide array of practical options for anyone who wants to make his life a little-or a lot-greener. Ed Begley, Jr.'s book is a comprehensive yet accessible guide to becoming more environmentally savvy. From recycling more materials than you ever thought possible to composting without raising a stink to buying an electric car, Living Like Ed will help you live green.

Ed Begley, Jr., has been considered an environmental leader in the Hollywood community for many years. He has served as chairman of the Environmental Media Association, and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. He still serves on those boards, as well as the Thoreau Institute, the Earth Communications Office, Tree People and Friends of the Earth.

His recent movie and television appearances include Pineapple Express, Boston Legal, Veronica Mars, CSI: Miami and Gary Unmarried on CBS. He just finished his 48th movie, a biography of artist Georgia O'Keefe, with Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons.

This free lecture is sponsored by the Friends of the Glendale Public Library.

Thursday, February 26, 7 pm
Glendale Public Library Auditorium
222 East Harvard Street, Glendale
(818) 548-2042

Glendale History: Back to School Edition!

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This postcard, one of many documenting the history of Glendale's area schools in the Glendale Public Library's Special Collections Room, features one of Glendale's earliest school buildings, Union High School. Built in 1908, the school occupied the land bounded by Colorado Street, Louise Street, Maryland Avenue, and Harvard Street (although the street names were different at the time).

After operating as a high school until 1923, the building would serve as the site of Glendale Junior College (now known as Glendale Community College) from 1929 until the building was damaged by the Long Beach earthquake of 1933. Following the earthquake, the College continued to hold classes on the same Harvard Street campus, using tents and bungalows in lieu of the actual school building, until it moved to the current location in 1937.

Today, the Glendale Central Library now stands on the land where the Union High School building once stood.

The Special Collections Room in the Glendale Central Library contains news clippings, books, maps, and other materials that cover the history of Glendale, neighboring cities, and California in general. The collection is particularly useful for local history and genealogy research projects. Special Collections also houses the Cat Collection, one of the largest collections of feline-related materials in the world.

The Special Collections Room is currently open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m and 1 to 3 p.m., and by appointment. Please call (818) 548-2037 for additional information.

This Week in Reading August 3 - 9

This is a week which many of us would rather forget but there were events which must be remembered so that some of them may not happen again. In this week the United States dropped atomic bombs on civillians twice, in this week years later another war which was not supposed to be a war got extended from dubious actions; in this week one president resigned and another made union members resign; in this week the concept of freedom of the press was engrained on the early American character but also in this week over two hundred years later the fairness doctrine was cancelled by the FCC. It was also the week of some of the most notorious Manson murders.

There are, however, a few literary names to note this week. English poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Alfred, Lord Tennyson top the list. Crime fans celebrate the birthdays of P. D. James and Jonathan Kellerman. And somewhere there may be a connection between the short stories of Guy de Maupassant and the radio sketches of Garrison Keillor but it may only be the length of each's chosen medium.

This Week's Question: All is not bad this week. The Sistine Chapel opened, the NBA was formed, the World Wide Web was begun, and several fascinating people had birthdays. Yet still, the Glendale Central Library has had to change hours due to city budget restrictions. What are the new hours for the Central Library and your favorite branch?

Answer to last week's question: And as bad as all that was that happened this week, we also put up the wrong information for the weeks of August 1 -7 on our Books and Reading page so you couldn't have answered last week's question if you tried. It will be fixed, however, by the time you read this. We sincerely apologize for the error, (But in fairness it was the perversity of the commercial programming that blew out our local style guide.) Hoping to trick you into thinking Baldwin Park was named after James Baldwin, (it wasn't), the city in California actually named for a writer born last week is Orange County's Dana Point which was specifically named for the nineteenth century writer Richard Henry Dana who wrote about landing there as a sailor in Two Years Before the Mast.

Are We Open? - Overheard at the Grandview Library

It was about five minutes to closing at the Grandview branch library the other day. Everything was in motion as library users and staff scrambled to finish last minute tasks. A mom and her son rushed in the door but seemed confused by all the activity.

Mom asked "When do you close?"

The reply came back "In 5 minutes ma'am."

Looking defeated as they walked out the door, we overheard the son say "Mom, I told you we should have gone to a 24 hour library!"

Did you know that while our buildings have day and evening hours the Library's online branch is available 24 hours a day? At any hour of night or day you can access our WWWeb Branch to:

• find something to read, to listen to, or to view,
• place holds on books or videos to pick up later, (now with email notification),
• use over $100,000 of deep web databases of verified information that are not just out there on the net but are accessible with your Glendale Public Library library card,
• download audio books and ebooks,
• listen to music, or watch a play through the literature and arts databases,
• View local digital photographs of historic interest
• read our blogs and find reader's advice
• check into your library account and get information on how to borrow items.
• and even chat with a professional reference librarian in a nationwide network to get guidance on which web resources might best answer your information query.

The Glendale Public library is far more than our buildings filled with great books and wonderful people. It is also your round-the-clock, round-the-worldwide-web access point for the best in information and entertainment. Come to any of our branches, including our library branch on WWWeb Street. You can even create an account online.

Bart Edelman - Sunday, April 29, 2 pm

Award winning poet and Glendale College professor Bart Edelman reads from his newest collection of poems, The Last Mojito.

"Weaving passionate portraits into a cohesive enthralling collection these poems represent an astonishing range of vision and connect to the tradition of American literature." -- Ryan Van Cleave, editor, The Longman Anthology of Poetry

"Bart Edelman is one of my favorite poets--spare and smart, lyrical but never sentimental about the mechanics of love. In this new collection, The Last Mojito, he invokes figures both public and private to get at the long drawn out sorrow of our silent hearts. Edelman is an elegist, writing laments for our daily losses and capitulations, yet seeing hope where, by all rights, it should not exist. In the process, he continually exposes the difficult dynamics of what it means to be human." -- David L. Ulin, Book Editor, Los Angeles Times

Bart Edelman is a professor of English at Glendale College where he edits Eclipse, a literary journal. He is the author of five volumes of poetry and his poems have appeared in many anthologies. He has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships, and has been published in newspapers and literary journals. Edelman frequently appears at many Los Angeles-area poetry venues and at conferences across the country.