On Tuesday, June 24th, Portland Public Library’s Choose Civility Initiative and City of Reader’s Team hosted Dr. Susan Feiner, USM professor of economics and gender and women studies and Garrett Martin, executive director of Maine Center for Economic Policy to help us better understand the work of Thomas Piketty and the book Capital in the 21st Century.
Panelists
More than 40 people attended the event, out of curiosity about the ideas in the book and also curiosity about why this particular book became such a bestseller at this time. Those who couldn’t make it can find some tidbits and links at our dedicated Twitter hastag #pplpiketty.
Anyone who would like to sink teeth into text, please contact Jason who would like to organize a reading group around the book (this is NOT a library sponsored call but a private one).
If you’d like further information or an opportunity to explore the ideas more, please let us know in the comments section or by email. Similarly, if you have ideas for other programs based on current nonfiction, we’d love to know what you’re curious about!
And, for more reading suggestions, check out our book list, updated to include suggestions from the panelists.
by Elizabeth Hartsig
The Portland Public Library is celebrating Pride Month with exciting and informative exhibits, films, and events. Here’s a run-down of what’s going on with Pride at PPL in June, as well as some resources you can access all year round:
Wednesday, June 18, Portland Public Library is partnering with Portland Pride to bring “Pride Maine LGBT History: Life and Activism in the 1970s,” a panel discussion and exhibit. Hear from the early LGBT activists whose efforts to organize polarized Maine and made national news.
Saturday, June 21, look for PPL’s Bookmobile in the Pride Parade! Volunteers from the PPL staff and community will be marching with the Bookmobile and passing out bookmarks with lists of great LGBT-related reads. We’ll have a special display of PPL’s Pride-related materials on the Bookmobile ready to be checked out when the parade stops at Deering Oaks.
If you duck away from the crowds on June 21, the Main Library will be having a Pride Film Festival, showing classic titles all day in the Rines Auditorium.
Pride-related films will also be showing on Thursday nights at the Main Library each week in June.
In addition to our calendar of special events and programming, Pride Month is a great time to explore the library’s historic and up-to-the-minute collections.
In the Portland Room, you can check out “Our Paper: A Voice for Lesbians and Gay Males in Maine,” a publication preserved on microfilm (1983-1990). Or if you just want to hop on our website and are curious about, say, Pride Week in Portland in 1996, take a look at Casco Bay Weekly. (In addition to the bold typography of CBW’s June 13 cover, there’s a thoughtful article called “Pride 1996” on p. 8 with great black-and-white photographs). You can see digital scans of each Casco Bay Weekly issue published from 1988 to 2004 at PPL’s Digital Commons.
Another archive we’re tapping into during Pride Week is the Portland Press Herald Still-Film Negative Collection. A display of photographs from past Pride Weeks (including some shots from Portland’s very first Pride Parade in 1987) will grace the hallways of the Main Library around the Lewis Gallery.
Our staff have created handy catalog lists of Pride-related resources from throughout the library for Children, Teens, and Adults (which you can check out any month of the year!).
● Youth Services offers Rainbow Celebration for kids.
● Teen has a list of excellent Non-Fiction Resources for teens as well as Fiction.
● If you’re interested in memoir, legal advice, politics, art, family, etc, head for the Reference Staff’s Pride at PPL: Great Non-Fiction list.
● For film buffs, we’ve got LGBT issues in non-fiction and a suggested list of films for a Pride Film Festival.
● Our Reader’s Advisory team offers a list that celebrates Pride at PPL: Fiction, including Stonewall Award winners as well as other complex and compelling works that tackle love, gender, sex, identity, and more. Take home a copy of Kim Fu’s just-released 2014 novel, “For Today I am a Boy;” 2013 Stonewall Winner Ellis Avery’s “The Last Nude;” or pick up a classic like Leslie Feinberg’s “Stone Butch Blues.”
Remember, these lists are just a selection of materials at the library! Sleuth our catalog or check in with the librarians and staff at the Main Branch, Burbank, Peaks, Riverton, and on the Bookmobile for more resources and information.
That’s a wrap! As always, we look forward to seeing you at PPL.
In 2010, a highly regarded group of physicians, brain scientists, social scientists, and other experts went on record with their expert opinion that public libraries likely promote health. Now, one Maine physician, working with Portland Public Library, has just completed the first-ever direct and broad research on the topic – and proved their instincts were on the right track.
Maine physician Dr. Sam Zager was the driving force behind the Health and Libraries of Public Use Retrospective Study (HeLPURS), the first broad investigation of health and public libraries. The study investigated whether a link between library use and health could be quantifiably established. Dr. Zager’s interest in the intersection of health and public library use grew out of his involvement in library advocacy efforts in Boston several years ago. He noticed that the prior research into health and libraries was sparse and narrowly focused on health literacy. No studies existed to determine the relationship between library use and individuals’ health profiles.
Individuals who used the library moderately were nearly three times more likely to successfully quit smoking
The project results provide evidence that public library use has quantifiable associations with health, particularly in the areas of substance abuse and depression-anxiety disorders. The most dramatic finding is that moderate or higher use of public libraries is associated with tobacco cessation. Individuals who have ever been smokers and who used the library at least moderately – seven or more items checked out per active year – were more than two times more likely to have successfully quit smoking, compared with smokers who used the library less.
“HeLPURS offers the first direct evidence that public libraries could be health-promoting spaces,” Dr. Zager says. “This was out-of-the-box thinking, but now these results beg for further research. The current findings also have important implications when estimating return on investment in public libraries in Maine and across the country.”
Dr. Zager’s sentiments are echoed by PPL Executive Director Steve Podgajny. “What the HeLPURS study doesis to clinically isolate a specific and very important health relationship that public libraries have with individuals and the community as a whole. The study has many ramifications one of which is how public libraries might serve more effectively as a vehicle for public health funding and goals.”
The HeLPURS project allied Dr. Zager with the Library’s Health and Institutional Research Teams, starting in 2012. The study, conducted in Fall 2013, was funded by a generous grant from the Anne Randolph Henry Charitable Foundation. The study recruited participants from adult Maine Medical Center Family Medicine patients. Participants who were also PPL card holders granted permission for the Library to release information on frequency of their library use for correlation by Dr. Zager and his colleagues with their medical histories. Throughout the study, all privacy laws and human research ethics protocols as well as PPL privacy policies were strictly observed, and no personal borrowing history was ever queried.
About Dr. Zager
Dr. Sam Zager is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, who holds an MD from Harvard University and an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from Oxford University. His presentation on HeLPURS won top prize at the Maine Academy of Family Physicians Annual Conference in April 2014. Dr. Zager was trained in Family Medicine at Maine Medical Center. He practices at Martin’s Point Healthcare in Portland and volunteers at a Portland Public Health Department school-based clinic.
updated: November 26, 2014
