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Sonoma County, a diverse county of over one million acres is famed for its agriculture industry and recreation boasting a booming economy and a unique lifestyle for its citizens described by the theme Luther Burbank as the chosen spot of all the earth. Sonoma County is the place

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to live, work and play as we move into the 21st century. Led by the forward looking philosophy of its governing bodies. Sonoma County's 340,000 residents are a harmonious, successful blend of ethnic and economic backgrounds. We invite you to take a closer look at Sonoma County in

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the nineties with your host Rich McGlinchey, How you doing everybody Welcome to Sonoma County in the nineties. We're gonna be talking about an institution that I'm very, very fond of and I imagine many of you are too. It's our Sonoma County Library we're gonna be talking

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to to administrative people from our Sonoma County Library on the left. Your screen is Jim Rose Aci and he's Sonoma County Line, Very technical services division or in charge of that. And in the middle between us here is Winford Swanson and she's the coordinator of adult

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services and first of all you need to have you visited before and it's really nice to have you here. Jim, nice to see you again and I might add to the public in general that Jim and I worked in photography together at the August Courier about

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21 or two years ago. Way back when Winifred, the lady of group here will start with you. Uh, how has Sonoma County's library mission changed with the new technology that's available now. I'd say the mission hasn't changed. But the technology has made some of our services

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and what people are asking for. And the way we deliver those services. That's really what has changed the most has it? Has it has I know how has technology changed the library's approach to service to Children? Well the service has not changed that much. We still

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have our Children's librarians work very closely with the Children. They go out to school, school's classes come in and visit. But the way the Children are approaching computers, even preschoolers, we've had an apple computer at the central library for almost 10 years and it's amazing to

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see those little preschoolers, small Children come and start working with the programs. It's not amazing. It's embarrassing. I sit there and can't figure anything out. You know someone said to me recently if you get a computer it's really so simple. An eight year old child can

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operate it. But the trouble was when I got the computer, I didn't have an eight year old child operated. But they are utterly amazing, isn't it? How are the changes in society reflected in the kind of services that are available through the public library? Well the

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library sees people coming in when unemployment is high. We see people coming in. They have need for you to write a resume to know how to go and apply for a job so that we have books on resume writing. We have typewriters, we have a copy

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machine. We have uh on the adult side an Apple computer with a software program for doing resumes. That's only a few of the things the homeless find the library a nice place warm dry in the winter time. And just the whole needs, we have a literacy

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program as part of the library program uh to teach people to read so that they can get better jobs. Uh We have uh we distributed the G. E. D. On tv workbooks. It would help people prepare for taking the G. E. D. And then in turn

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better jobs. So as the nation goes, the libraries have to be able to respond to the needs of the library. I wasn't being facetious when I said it's one of my a fond place in my heart library. I've gone to library most of my life and

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I find that it is, it's a unique part of the fabric of american society. It's it's a totally unique. It's a place where you say all these things happen and all this knowledge and all this information is all this assistance is available there. And and anyone

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in the public viewing our program right now that's not aware of your own library or doesn't visit it often doesn't take advantage of it. You're being very foolish because it's an amazing resource. I'm I'm flabbergasted every time I go in. There are things that are available

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there. Um, you know, one thing I was thinking of recently as in serving in the public information office in the county, I would get a little uh press releases I guess you'd call them from the Department of the Children's program, the little things that were going

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and you have a tremendous number of those, something that seems like it's going on every month. Right, right. That is that is that aimed really now occupying the youngsters are education, it's education, it's recreation, getting them to enjoy literature with stories that and we have those

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programs in all of our regional branches. Well, you know, we were talking earlier with Winifred and Jim, Winifred said that or jim one of them said that Winifred job pretty much deals with the outside area. The public area of the library and gym cinema kind of

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technical services. You said I'm kind of in the background and this thing, I'm sure the importance of what you're doing now in the background. But what is the library service area? Well, the service area for the library is pretty much the library users of Sonoma County,

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that's the basic service area. But beyond that, our central library is very strong in reference and is the reference center for the six North Bay counties. So these, when these libraries in other counties have questions, they can't answer, the questions will often be answered through our

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collection one way or another as it happens and you're well aware. Sonoma County is a shopping and medical center for a large area in northern California. People come here and for this reason, people are here for a lot of, a lot of personal reasons and we

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don't have any kinds of restrictions. Uh, some areas you go to in the country will have a nonresident fee and you won't be able to use the library if you live out of the area unless you pay a fee to the library to use it. We

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don't have this. We have a universal borrowing privilege where anybody who comes into the Sonoma County can use our library if they have an identification library card. How long is your library? You must Get a library card to partake of the use of these things. How

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old you get one and how long are they good for? I'm sure you've got some people viewing the program right now who got their card 15 years ago and it's still good. The library card is updated every every year. So it's good forever. But it's, the

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information has to be kept current. Where are the the library service outlets located? Well, the concept for service in this county is that we have strong regional libraries uh that we don't have a lot of real small libraries spread out. So we've got a real good,

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good sized library in each of the population centers in the county. This includes all of the incorporated cities and Grenville. Each of these has a center that is intended to be a service area for that region. Additionally, we have four very small rural outlets. Forrest ville

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Monterrubio, Occident in Geyserville. These are more like recreational reading collections, but the main service outlets, the regional libraries are intended to be a full service outlets. So a person who comes into the library in heels, burger in Cloverdale or in Sonoma is able to get the

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same kind of service that a person would get. Were they to walk in the library in downtown santa rosa. The library system in Sonoma County. And a lot of the credit I guess you'd say that for David saps, your head librarian who certainly dedicated person in

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that respect and has worked hard to to to help bring about this library system. But we have, I think a one of the premier library systems in our general area, don't you feel? I really do. I think we can prove that or any day the library

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for many years has been automating and computerizing now. How has that affected library services in general? Well, I think it's pretty much affected how we manage our book collection and it's helped people be able to get the information they want. That's the whole purpose of library

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is to get information to people who need the information and in 1978 the library installed, its automated circulation system. So no more. Did you check out a book on a card and have the card be filed. But it was kept up by a computer. The computer

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would track who had the book and how long it was due for. Uh shortly after that we got involved in a catalog project where all of our books were the information on the book was maintained on the microfiche type catalog, the title, the subject and this

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sort of thing. So if a person came in wanting to know what books do you have on auto repair, what books do you have on jukebox collecting or what books do you have on water resources in California? They'd be able to use the catalog to get

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that information but the two weren't connected recently. We've installed an integrated system that brings it all together. That's something brand new isn't it? The integrated system was installed late last year and I think what most people would notice about it is that when you go into

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the library there's a terminal that you you use yourself, you don't have to go up to the librarian and ask for information. You walk right up to the terminal and you can get the subject or title or author information yourself. And you can find out where

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the books are owned if they're owned in Healdsburg or Petaluma or Sebastiao pool. You can also see whether the copies are in or checked out right now. I have never used that. I want to come in. You can show me how to use it. We'll show

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you here in just a second if you'd like to. Okay, um let's see, let's stop back here to win for for a minute. How does the computer we're talking about help the library user? Well, we tried to make it as user friendly as possible so that

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you didn't have to read a big thick book to know how to find what you're looking for in the computer terminal. And people, it empowers them really because they can do so much themselves and only when they get stuck then they need to have help from

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the librarians. But otherwise they can if they know an author, they know the title or they know a subject. They can look up under any of those. If they don't know those, they maybe know a word of the title. They can check that that word of

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the title or or part of the subject heading. Look it up that way. Or maybe they're looking up a play. Well, is this how people find out what's available in the library collection? Right. If they know what they're looking for. Oh yeah. Jim You have something

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there. Now right now, go ahead. Somebody, either one of you explain this in general. Okay. This is what you would see on the screen of the terminal. And the various ways of finding information by title by author by subject or if you just know a few

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words of the title, a key word of the title or keyword of the subject heading. Those are ways you can find it or by a series or by contents defined plays. And maybe you want to know if you owe any fines or did you really put

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in a request for a book two weeks ago you can look up your own files and see that's what I should have done when I went in recently and found out I had a dollar and 30 cents. I don't even know. I didn't. We should probably

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talk about the whole system. Right. Right. Well the whole system is that if you see on the screen a book that you want but it says checked out or if it says that it's in at another branch, all you have to have is your library card

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with that little bar code on it. And it will say do you want to place a hold and you do ph and you put in your library bar code and your address will come up on the screen and press the return button and you've got a

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whole place. And then the next thing you will get a notice in the mail to say come in and pick it up. Well, let me ask you a question, just personal interest. I'm interested in horses as jim knows I've been writing some book on. But if

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I go in and use those computers, am I able to determine everything that's in the library on those on that particular subject, let's say. And whether it's not, it's here or in Healdsburg or elsewhere is that it's just, am I understanding the system correctly? So you

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walk into the library first to find a parking place. Amen. Then you walk into the library and you walk in, you walk about three blocks down. If you can find a vacant terminal because the terminals are, we're seeing pretty heavy use of the terminals. When you

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find a vacant terminal, you start doing your searching and maybe you only know one word in the title and maybe you do a title, keyword search or you do the main words in title search, you find the book you want and you decide that you want

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to have that book to read. So you look to see if there's a copy available in the building and if there is a copy, you can just go get it off the shelf and if there isn't, then you can put the hold on the book by

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looking at the screen, you can see all the holdings of the county. So you can see if the books in Cloverdale or how many copies are in in Sonoma or wherever they are and whether they're checked out or not. So you can see the entire holdings

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of the county. So if there's a book that's available in a branch and that book is not owned in the library that you're using a terminal for. You can still see that book and find it by subject. You don't have to be in the library to

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find the book. So it gives access to the entire collection. In addition, let's say that Mrs Swanson orders a book or somebody in the system decides to order a book as soon as the book is ordered, you, the user can go in and see that the

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library will be getting that book. So the the patrons have almost the same currency of information as the staff do regarding which books were going to be getting where they are and how soon we're gonna be seeing them on the shelf. Doesn't take doesn't take several

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weeks to know that we've ordered something because it's right in there. We're gonna pause right here and let the station bring the audience a public service announcement. We come back, we'll be talking to jim and we will be talking more about the library and these computers

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and everything else that's involved down there is fascinating. First these messages, I was going to take a job with an engineering firm in new york. I got a better offer. I'm building schools overseas with the Peace Corps. The pace is a little slower than New York.

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But here I'm getting grassroots experience. I couldn't get anywhere else. The way I look at it, the world can wait two years for another 40 story smoked glass high rise Peace Corps. The toughest job you'll ever love every year, thousands of people are killed with a

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frying pan, reduce your intake of high fat fried foods and help reduce your risk of cancer and heart disease. For a free booklet on low fat eating call 1 800 eat lean. This edition of Sonoma County in the nineties, we're talking about the library, one of

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my favorite institutions in the county or in the world in general. I'm sure it's probably yours too. But you may not know as much as you'd like to know about your library. So we have two people here at the administrative staff that are trying to tell

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us more about what's happening in the library gym, Rozanski, Sonoma County Library technical services on the lifting screen would have been Swanson coordinated the adult center services, uh, for the library. And we've been talking about the computer and all these things and how they can be

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used out there to find out almost everything that we would want to know or everything we want to know. But jim one of the things I, we're talking about a moment ago, people now use the computer terminals and library to reserve the books. How are they

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responding to this? This is interesting because when we were, when we were first considering putting the terminals out in the public area, it was our choice as to whether or not we would allow people to place reserves for books that they wanted to read but we're

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not in the library. Um up until then people had to go up to the reference desk and have the librarian placed the hold for them. We decided to go ahead and let this, let this happen. So allow a person to place their own hold on a

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book at the terminal. We count almost everything we do and we counted a lot of different ways. We have to justify our existence like any public agency. So we do count the number of holes that are placed on books. And we compared this last three months

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with the same three months a year ago and we found that the number of holds placed have doubled over the same period last year. So that means twice as many books going around on our daily delivery route because we carry books from one branch to another.

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That means twice as many books um twice as many notices going out in the mail, twice as many books being handled by the system and the books being worn out twice as fast. The point is that that is a very successful, very successful. We suspect the

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reason it's so successful is that people are able now to get in, see what we've got and if they've got an interest go ahead and make that reserve place that hold on their own and not have to wait in line for a reference librarian to be

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available. They can take care of it themselves. That's great. That's really a big, big, big step forward. Wilfried are there, are there those I'm trying to say who still would rather not use the computer terminals? There are some, some we have worked with very carefully several

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times around and now they just feel that they're just so powerful, they can do it themselves and I think it's the elderly who have not had much opportunity to use computer terminals and uh all of the teenagers because they're getting this in classes and that uh

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there doesn't seem to have a problem those who haven't been in libraries for some years. Uh they're the ones that we sort of coach through and we do at the central library alone. We have uh twice a day at 11 o'clock and four o'clock. We have

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many workshops. So if anyone is interested come down to central library or on a one on one basis, we're very happy to show people as they come in. You know, a lot of people older, they're older, like I am have been resistant to computers and I

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got my own computer to find little house home computer to write with. And I found out I could use words, I don't know too much else about it, but I can get into it, I can write, correct, I can print out and do what I need

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there to any of you out there who are not able to use computers are reluctant to forget it, go in and and learn to use the library computer and learn to use these things are very much part of our lives now and they really do simplify

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things something amazingly, don't they? All right. Jim. Supposing I'm looking at a terminal in the Petaluma bridge. I'm not sure I got this for sure a while ago. Am I able to see what titles are available in all the other county branches? So let's say you

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pick a subject and maybe there's something just horse racing. Then the books that are listed on the screen will be books throughout the county and you won't have to page through Petaluma is books and then page through the other branches. Books they're all mixed up together.

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So when you're looking at the screen, you're seeing all the titles that are held throughout the county. And if you select a title to look at further, then then you can see where the copies are. So maybe you're going to Sebastopol for some reason and you

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see that there is a copy in Sebastopol right now on the shelf, you could stop by and pick it up because your card is good anywhere in the county. If you, if you live in Petaluma and have a library card that isn't just good in the

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Petaluma library, that's good, anywhere in the county. So it's a Countywide system and when you're looking at the screen, you're looking at the books throughout the county. Now I think I understood you to say talk about this earlier but I want to restate it. What if

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I see your listing for the book? I want to let's say on horse racing but it's checked out by somebody else at the time. What do I do? Well I think you touched on that earlier but what do I do? Let's say that you want to

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read that book and it's checked out you. One of the options on the menu is to is to place a hold when you get to the point we're looking at the book and you just go ahead and tell the computer you want to place a hold

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and then asks you for your library barcode number and then you have to type in the numbers off your barcode and then that will link your request to that particular title and then when a copy becomes available it will be trapped at the point of check

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in or if there's a copy on the shelf in one of the other branches the following day. Uh The branch will be told please send this book because rich wants to wants to read it. This is amazing. This is new to me. This is amazing. And

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you know what I like I say I visited the library but I'm really not abreast of what you've been doing down here. You talk touched on this earlier too or what your gym did mention. But how do I go about borrowing reading a book that hasn't

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been purchased yet by the library. But maybe. But you mentioned that sometimes you can determine or you can tell people which ones will be purchased in the future. How do you go about checking that out? What hasn't been? We always respond like to respond to public

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interest public demand. So we have in our acquisitions module which is our ordering module of this computer system. Uh what we call daisy Terata. And so titles can be placed in there and then we make decisions on how many copies to purchase. So if you don't

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see the title that you're interested in in the terminal you can go to the reference desk. Ask a librarian and then the librarian will check in this design Terata file. And if the title is in there she can place your hold on it if it's not

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in there and you have all the information about the book like the author the title, the publisher international standard book number that then that title can be placed in there and it's as a suggestion for purchase and we consider it then all right. Now if you

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want to add anything to any of these things. Either of you hop right in the thing I had to follow up that was can I put my name on the waiting list for a title which has been ordered by your folks but not yet received. That

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goes, you can do that yourself or you can do the terminal because as soon as it's ordered, it appears right there in the terminal in the public access catalog. This computerization is amazing that, isn't it? Is it? Let's just progress at the moment. It will save

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a lot of time and money, won't it? And the time of librarians, I'd like to address that because it's already saved us a lot of time and a lot of money. We used to have to maintain several different databases. All of our titles were kept in

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one database. All of our patrons and the books they had checked out were kept in a different database. All the ordering information was kept in yet a different database are cereals, are periodical subscriptions were all kept in a different database. Now they're all in 11 big

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database. So we don't have to type in the title, wants to order it and then wants to put it in the circulation system. And once for all these different purposes. It's all in a single computer. So we are able to save a lot of money by

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having a single large computer system handle all the functions. People can do most of these things. As you're saying you both mentioned for themselves. Uh It's also going to give a respite to the poor person behind the desk. That's well, it means that reference librarian then

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has more time to help people who really need her help in finding information or reference question in that. All right. Let me ask you something specific here. Maybe a little off the beaten track. Does the library have any special collections? And if it does, how could

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those materials be used in the public use terminals? How could they be found? All right. One of the most exciting special collection is our wine library, which is in our Healdsburg, Healdsburg Regional branch Library. Both Simon's both Simmons is our wine library in up there and

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it's for reference, historical, statistical. Anything you needed to know about wine is in that collection. Boy, that's a popular subject. And the subject many, many, many people are trying to learn more about. So that collection that's available. And that is. And yes. And our other is

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our local history collection. And the book material is all available in the terminal. Our genealogy collection is in the is accessible. And those books are available to go out to other branches. And we've just put on a very successful beginner's workshop with the genealogical society. Last

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saturday we had over 100 people there. So there is a tremendous interest in genealogy in the county and our business collection keeps growing and growing with the interest in small business in the county. We work very closely with the Economic development board. Uh Ben Stone. And

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uh that material is available. That's great. That's really great because there are many, many people sticking that out. We got about 2.5 minutes left to us here. Jim. Everybody's using fax machines now. Just go for you as well done. Uh Yes, technology hasn't escaped the library.

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We've got a fax machine at the central library that's used pretty heavily. And then Sonoma, Sebastopol, petaluma and Healdsburg each have fax machines so that if a person has a question in one of those branches, the information can often be located at central and facts to

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the branch and the person can have the information almost instantly. Um One of the questions if I live in Sonoma, how does a large collection, a reference collection in santa rosa helped me? Well, the librarian there can can look in her collection. If information is not

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available there. A simple phone call to the central library. The fax machine. Jim just talked about uh books can be sent to that library on our delivery truck. So that it's just a phone call away literally. We're almost out of time. What what what final thoughts

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we want to offer the library to the public in general? Well, final thoughts always look to the future. It seems like. And one of the things that we're working on right now is allowing a person who has a computer at home with a modem to be

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able to have a terminal in their home that functions the same way as the terminal in the branch library does. This is not that far off. We're probably talking weeks and months rather than years. We want to have our our organizations and our clubs directory which

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we produce annually available in the computer. We want to have the listings of periodicals we subscribe to in the computer and the indexing for those articles in the computer as well. Our time has gone. Winifred, thank you very much for taking the time. Jim. It's a

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pleasure to see you again and hear what you're doing down here. And I think it's very fascinating. Ladies and gentlemen, we've been talking about our Sonoma County Library Library system and I sincerely hope you've been with us and been listening because it's really amazing. My name

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is Richard McGlinchey, the program in Sonoma County in the nineties. My guests have been Jim Rosati and uh Winifred Swanson. Winifred is the coordinator of the adult services and Jim Sonoma County elaborate technical services. Thank you both for being here. I'll be back with you next

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week with another member of county government family on a related agency till then. Good night. Good luck, good health to each and every one of you