Access to Valueline.com has been restored! Thank you for your patience. Let us know if you have any trouble logging in to the service.
X

Life of the Library

What’s new?


Welcome to the new PPL website

posted: , by Sarah Campbell
tags: Director's Updates | Exhibits & Displays | Library Collections | Online Services | Programs & Events | Recommended Reads | Adults | Teens | Kids & Families | Seniors | Science & Technology

Welcome to the new PPL website. We like to think of it as a Virtual Branch!

It used to be that websites were just layers of pages under a header of some sort that over time became more and more dense. For an information organization like the library, the more pages meant the better the site.  What has become much clearer for PPL over the last 18 months is that the website is our virtual branch — complete with its own unique opportunities and challenges, like a physical library location. It is also a unique opportunity to create a way to recognize our users as being many kinds of people  and needing to be served in many different ways.

We hope that this new online library environment and experience is exciting and productive for you and just maybe you’ll find what you seek and be exposed to the unexpected!

Please tell us how we can make it better by dropping us a note at web@portland.lib.me.us.

We thank our friends at Vont Web Marketing, our partner in conceiving and creating this site, and the Sam L. Cohen Foundation without whose support we could not have completed this effort.

Enjoy your explorations!


Ray guns in the library!

posted: , by Linda Putnam
tags: Adults | Seniors | Science & Technology

Are you trying to button up the house this fall to save on your heating or energy bills?   We have two devices that could help you.

The first one is called a Minitemp.

Pull the trigger, aim the beam at walls, ceilings, floors, and foundations (but not people nor at reflective surfaces such as windows) and find where the cold spots are, where insulation is missing, where outside air is penetrating.   This point and shoot gadget can be found in our catalog under “Minitemp” and can be reserved or borrowed just like a book.

The second is the Kill-A-Watt – an electricity usage monitor that you can plug in between your electrical outlet and any appliance to measure exactly how much electricity each device is using.  Provided by EfficiencyMaine  http://www.efficiencymaine.com/  it, too, is available for checkout.

Kill-A-Watt

Buried Musical Treasures from the PPL Archives

posted: , by Sarah Campbell
tags: Exhibits & Displays | Library Collections | Adults | Teens | Kids & Families | Seniors | Art & Culture | Portland History

When not being used in the Lewis Gallery, our nineteenth-century vitrines (glass display cases) are hosting displays from our collection in the Main Library Lower Level – Information Desk area.  Our first display, on view now through November, is a selection of sheet music from the Portland Room Archives.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century musical life revolved around the family piano, and sheet music was provided for home performing mostly from publishers in New York’s Tin Pan Alley.  But most large cities had their own small music publishers (who were usually instrument and sheet music sellers) and many songwriters would publish with local firms or simply publish their own works.

Portland could boast several such publishers, including the Paine family, whose most distinguished member, John Knowles Paine, was Harvard’s first Professor of Music. J.K.’s father Jacob and uncle William sold instruments and music at 113 Middle Street. The Paines published many of the compositions of Hermann Kotzschmar, the leading Portland musician of the period.  Cressey and Allen had a music shop at 566 Congress Street; Cressey was also a composer and published many of his own pieces.

Many of the compositions featured in our exhibit were on local subjects: dance pieces named for Portland landmarks: the Forest City Polka, the Diamond Cove Waltz, and others in that vein.  Others were hymns to local pride: Somewhere in Maine, Down in Maine.  Patriotic compositions were standbys of the home music collection, and we have several from the Civil War to World War II.

We’ve included two items published “away”.  The first, Kathleen Mavourneen, was a sentimental pseudo-Irish ballad popularized by tenor John McCormick.  It was written by Frederick Nicholls Crouch, an English musician who lived and taught in Portland until his secessionist leanings made him unpopular in 1861; he joined a Virginia regiment as a trumpeter.  The other New York publication is perhaps the most familiar college song of the 1920s, Rudy Vallee’s Maine Stein Song.

We hope that local music lovers, local history buffs, and everybody else will stop by the lower level and see this exhibit!

View Posts by Date:
Filter Posts:
Connect with the Library:
http://www.portlandlibrary.com/life-of-the-library/page/9/?research_audience=Seniors
www.portlandlibrary.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-23
50542
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:OU2JILDB35NAAI2YV5IADYCVJH256SJI
<urn:uuid:75db6277-082b-4759-af0b-5bb1da85d9fb>
2014-07-31T05:22:03Z
72.47.224.92
sha1:TXMWFO7HO66EBS3EK4RRQURISEWZWUVI
<urn:uuid:8c08ca52-a032-4fee-bab0-85bffc121e78>
http://www.portlandlibrary.com/life-of-the-library/page/9/?research_audience=Seniors
response
<urn:uuid:2dbdfc90-4bc7-4cd5-8b03-740e837ad625>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-146-231-18.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-23
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for July 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf