Registration is now open for “Introduction to Digital Audio” on March 11, 2010 in Columbia at the Stoney Creek Inn from 9am – 4pm.
Participants are introduced to the range of issues associated with converting analog recordings (particularly oral history collections) into digital audio. CDP Digital Audio Best Practices and current audio metadata standards are deciphered and reviewed. Participants will discuss digital audio recording, file formats, storage, playback and delivery.

This session is offered at no charge and is funded through the Missouri State Library as part of the Missouri Digital Heritage Initiative (http://www.sos.mo.gov/mdh/). Event details and online registration are available at http://mkbweb.mlnc.org/EventDetail.aspx?EventId=00000299. Questions? Email MLNC at support@mlnc.org

The ALA Public Programs Office is still accepting nominations for the 2009 Sara Jaffarian School Library Program Award for Exemplary Humanities Programming. School libraries, public or private, that serve children in any combination of grades K-8 and conducted humanities programs during the 2008-2009 school year are eligible. Applications and award guidelines are available at www.ala.org/jaffarianaward. To be considered, nominations must be received by the ALA Public Programs Office by December 15.

The award consists of:

• a $4,000 honorarium
• recognition at the 2010 ALA Annual Conference in Washington, DC
• promotion of the program as a model for other school libraries.

The Sara Jaffarian Award was established to recognize and promote excellence in humanities programming in elementary and middle school (K-8) libraries. It is presented annually by the ALA Public Programs Office, in cooperation with the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), and named for Sara Jaffarian, whose donation to ALA’s Cultural Communities Fund established the award. Jaffarian, a retired school librarian and long-time ALA member, spent her career passionately advocating for school libraries in every school. For more information on the Sara Jaffarian award, visit www.ala.org/jaffarianaward.

With questions, please contact the ALA Public Programs Office, publicprograms@ala.org.

The account of June 15 includes a picture of the mound and the house that goes with it. There’s a lot of reader commentary at the bottom of the article.

The update of August 1, reporting the sale had gone through, already had 24 reader comments by August 3.

The web site is the result of a year-long review of current literature by a panel of museum experts. My counterpart in CT, Bruce Fraser, says, “this very diligent crew waded through a remarkable amount of current museum literature assessing the challenges currently facing heritage organizations and identified the “best thinking” and “best practices” that experts in the field recommended as solutions to them.

“We’ve spent the last two years developing this online resource center to contain essential readings and other necessary background materials in the eight areas the Committee felt essential to museum stabilization and growth. If you give it a peek, you’ll find each category populated by reviews of the best four or five current “must reads” in the field on that topic provided us by a panel of national and state museum stars. Those folks will serve as a standing committee to continue to identify and help us post the best in emerging museum literature and relegate stuff no longer on the cutting edge to the site archives.

“Readers are invited to post comments on articles and posts they found particularly helpful (or not). Also on the site down the line will be reports, surveys, white papers from successful stabilization projects.

“Some of these resources are available online: all are available to CT institutions in hard copy on request to HRC staff. Visitors to the site who drop down a level will find the “Community Center” where visitors can suggest additional readings they found useful, alert their colleagues to upcoming professional development opportunities and cite conference papers that they particularly found useful, etc.”

You never know what you will see when you travel in Missouri. The visit to the library wasn’t on my agenda for this trip to Kansas City. However, I learned about “Singular Beauty” while attending a meeting for the Council’s expansion of Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Healthcare. What good fortune that April Austin, one of the Council’s new facilitators for this program, recommended it. April will be working with the VA Hospital in Kansas City this fall in partnership with MHC to put together a program there. The Council will also begin a new partnership with the VA Hospital in St. Louis offering Literature & Medicine at this site. Visit the Council’s website for more information about this program.

The program notes are always superb at Powell Symphony Hall. You can read them, too, on the SLSO web site.

Beethoven was at the height of his powers when he composed this breakthrough piece of music. There had never before been a choral movement in a symphony, never a passage of “recitative” for the orchestral basses, and never the sound of cymbals and triangle. I remember when I used to listen to a recording of this final movement during breakfast in my senior year in high school. I was always charmed by the sound of what I took to be a little town band, with its cymbal and triangle, as they tooted away on the little tune that would later turn out to be a majestic melody for Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.”

I feel so privileged to be a part of the symphony chorus! I always feel as if I have the best seat in the house because I’m right there with all the other musicians and I can see Maestro David Robertson’s expressions as he shapes the performance.

Someone wrote once that “great music is about great ideas.” I don’t agree with that as it stands. I think the greatness of music is in the exceptional deployment of musical ideas. A composer of Beethoven’s intelligence works at the atomic level; he fashions ideas from atoms…a couple of notes or intervals, or a few notes with a distinctive rhythm. Then he puts those atoms together in different contexts, and you hardly realize the unity of the mind behind the whole work.

The same idea of composing several related things from a single theme is present in The Music Man by Meredith Wilson. If you slow down “Seventy Six Trombones” and give it a different background and different lyrics, you have “Goodnight, My Someone.” It’s not the same idea as symphonic writing, but it has the same principle of unity.

Beethoven did not invent the technique of building grand designs from atomic ideas; and the technique did not come easily to him His notebooks show how much he labored with those atoms to make their embodiment sound “just right.” We think of him as a man of weighty ideas. We should ponder his exquisite sense of lightness as well. His sense of balance seems flawless. He knew when to continue polishing an idea and just when to stop. He takes us to the breathtaking brink of breakdown and holds us harmless, and we are changed people when we open ourselves to his thought.

–Michael Bouman