SCLENDS Upgrade Tonight and Tomorrow

• SCLENDS will be temporarily out of service 4/20/2014 9:00 pm - 4/21/2014 8:00 pm. 

 

 

The library catalog, SCLENDS, is being upgraded.  During this time, library users will not be able to pay fines, place items on hold, renew materials or access the 3M Cloud Library eBook service. After the upgrade, the library catalog will be smartphone and tablet-friendly and include faster, improved searching features including increased font sizes for vision impaired users. Beaufort County Library branches will be open during normal operating hours while the upgrade takes place.

Heads Up: Catalog Down April 21st

Breaking News: The library catalog, SCLENDS, will undergo a system upgrade. The upgrade will begin on Sunday, April 20^th at 9:00pm, and continue through Monday, April 21^st at 8:00pm. During this time, library users will not be able to pay fines, place items on hold, renew materials or access the 3M Cloud Library eBook service. After the upgrade, the library catalog will be smartphone and tablet-friendly and include faster, improved searching features including increased font sizes for vision impaired users. Beaufort County Library branches will be open during normal operating hours while the upgrade takes place.

• SCLENDS will be temporarily out of service on Monday, April 21, 2014.

The catalog will be down, Monday, April 21st, keep your fingers crossed that everything will be up and running for Tuesday, April 22nd.  On Wednesday April 23rd, the Library system is closed on for Staff In-Service Training.  We project that Thursday, April 24th everything should be back to what passes for relatively normal in the Beaufort County Library system.

SCLENDS Milestone: 8 million and counting....

SC LENDS, the consortium of 14 member public library systems in South Carolina, surpassed the 8 million mark in circulation on August 2nd.

SC LENDS is a consortium of 14 libraries around the state that agreed to share resources, including books, DVDs, CDs, and anything else they have in their collections that circulate among their patrons.

SC LENDS stands for “South Carolina Library Evergreen Network Delivery System.”

SC LENDS benefits patrons by giving them access to more materials than ever before.

Together, SC LENDS libraries serve a population of almost 1 million people in 16 counties and circulates more than 8 million items (as of Aug. 2, 2011).

SC LENDS libraries share a single catalog, which means that patrons can search for items at any of the 14 libraries as easily as they search for items at their home library. Requesting items is as simple as clicking a button. Any available circulating item can be delivered from any SC LENDS library across the state to your home library.

SC LENDS benefits libraries by helping them take advantage of economies of scale and through sharing expertise with other libraries around the state.

SC LENDS libraries are implementing the Evergreen open-source integrated library system (ILS), originally developed for the 270-member Georgia PINES library consortium.

By using open source software, SC LENDS libraries estimate that they will save more than $200,000 a year in software licensing costs.

SC LENDS is the second-largest Evergreen consortium in North America.

The following libraries have joined SC LENDS:

Allendale Hampton Jasper Regional Library;
Anderson County Library;
Beaufort County Library;
Calhoun County Library;
Chesterfield County Library;
Colleton County Library;
Dorchester County Library;
Fairfield County Library;
Florence County Library;
Kershaw County Library;
The State Library;
Union County Library;
Williamsburg County Library; and,
York County Library.

Emancipation Proclamation goes into effect, January 1, 1863

Folks throughout the lowcountry attend watch services to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation 148 years ago today. (The digital image of page 1 of the original Emancipation Proclamation illustrating this entry is from the National Archives).

The 2010 Connections New Year's Day entry gives some background on the Emancipation Proclamation. You can read about the historical significance of Camp Saxton Site in relation to the Emancipation Proclamation here. (A few photographs are included with the National Register nomination form).

Living History, an electronic newsletter from the History Channel, has a "This Day in History" feature which includes an article on the "Emancipation Proclamation goes into effect" for January 1st.

For those who want to dig deeper, the Archivist at Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Mary-Jo Kline, recommends these books and articles about President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation:

Foner, Eric. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. (Available through our Bluffton and St. Helena Branch Libraries)

Blair, William A., and Karen Fisher Younger, eds. Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered. Chapel Hill: Univ. of N.C. Press, 2009. Edition of lectures by respected Civil War scholars, focusing on Lincoln’s views on slavery and his Emancipation Proclamation. (Available in the BDC only)

Gates, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and by Donald Yacovone, eds. Lincoln on Race & Slavery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, c2009. Collection of documents, definitive texts, rich historical notes. (Available through SC LENDS)

McPherson, James M. Abraham Lincoln. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Good short biography of Lincoln by one of the nation’s most eminent Civil War scholars. (Available through our Bluffton Branch Library)

In addition to the links found in the Connections entry about the document last year," I recommend Allen Guelzo’s “Emancipation Proclamation” article in History Now and Kline's additional resources page.

You can search the SC LENDS catalog here for the titles that most interest you from her suggestions.

The Emancipation Proclamation

January 1, 1863 was the Day of Jubilee, the date upon which

"all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."

This, of course, included not only the parts of Beaufort District that had been occupied by Federal troops since the Battle of Port Royal Sound on November 7, 1861 where many contrabands were freed, but also those parts of Beaufort District still held by the Confederates -- where the slaves remained in slavery until the 1865.

Want to see the original Emancipation Proclamation? The National Archives has digitized it. (To see the hand-written pages: Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5)

The Beaufort District Collection has several resources to help you learn more about the local impact of the Emancipation Proclamation.

I recommend the contents of "Emancipation Proclamation" and "Emancipation Proclamation--Commemoration" vertical files as good starting points. We also have a book in the BDC entitled The nomination of the "Emancipation Proclamation Site" to the National Register 1993-1995 at call number SC 975.799 PEN.

There are items in a variety of formats and at various reading levels on the topic in the SCLENDS catalog. Some of these resources discuss the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation in our area; others discuss the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation on a wider scope.

If you prefer online resources, here are a few recommendations.

You can read more about the effects of the on a more national scale in the Emancipation Proclamation article on wikipedia.

The Library of Congress has a special presentation within the American Memory database about the creation of the Emancipation Proclamation. The presentation provides an essay, timeline and Lincoln’s first and final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as the final version issued on January 1, 1863. Links to other online resources recommended by the Library of Congress about the Emancipation Proclamation are found at http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/EmanProc.html.

If you are an aural learner, I recommend a podcast available through the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. (Gilder Lehrman Institute posts very thought provoking podcasts). Registration is required, but it's free.

Allen Guelzo, Henry L. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Professor of History at Gettysburg College (PA), "contends that the proclamation is among the most misunderstood of the Civil War era, a necessary and even desperate attempt by Lincoln to enact a form of emancipation that would pass legal muster." Guelzo delivered this lecture on April 21, 2004 at the New-York Historical Society. Running Time is 39 minutes, 46 seconds.

On a serious note, for those of you who haven't eaten your Hoppin' John and Greens yet, local cook and newspaper columnist, Ervena Faulkner, isn't whistling "Dixie" when she says "Don't
risk bad luck by skippin hoppin'john". Recipes are available in Mrs. Faulkner's Beaufort Gazette column, Pat Branning's feature on the Beaufort Tribune and on the our own Library website.

SCLENDS Catalog Update and the BDC

The re-inventory process has been done. Still, we have problems. We have reported the situation to the SCLENDS consortium. Unfortunately, we have not received a timeline from the consortium regarding their plan to fix the on-going issues we are having. Therefore, 4 months after the "Go Live" date for SCLENDS (May 28th), we must continue with Plan "B":

If you can't find what you are looking for on topics of local history, culture, and environment within the SCLENDS catalog (i.e., those topics that fall within the responsibilities of this department), just give us a call at 470-6525 or e-mail us at gracec@bcgov.net with your specific questions regarding BDC and local history holdings.

We'll do our best to try to help you in spite of our continuing database problems.

BDC Schedule Change, Sept. 7 -11

All Beaufort County offices will be closed on Monday, September 7th in observance of Labor Day. This means that all the parts of the Beaufort County Library will be closed on Monday, Sept. 7th, including the Beaufort District Collection.

The rest of the week the BDC will be open only 1/2 days while staff tries to unravel the mess that the migration from SIRSI to SCLENDS has left in its wake with regard to the library's special collection, the BDC.

If you've been following Connections, you will know that the migration between automated library systems has not gone well for the Library as a whole -- and particularly badly for the BDC. With the hurricane high season rapidly approaching, we need to verify our BDC holdings within the new database -- in case we get struck by a devastating storm. (Insurance carriers like to have documentation for losses before they write the check you know.)

The inventory process requires intense concentration and a back-and-forth human eyes and brain comparison of what is on our shelves against what is in the SCLENDS database. We'll be looking for and documenting anomalies. Unfortunately, we cannot do the inventory process and serve on-site customers at the same time. (We're good, but we aren't that good.) Therefore, in the interest of continuing to provide the best local history reference service possible to our customers, we will inventory the BDC in the mornings and open to customers at 1 pm. We will continue to close as customary at 5 pm, Tuesday - Friday.

If it should turn out that the 4 days of 1/2 days isn't enough to get the job done properly, we will let you know as soon as we know.

We know that this will inconvenience some of you. I am sincerely sorry that we have to close the research room 1/2 days for 4 days. I just don't see any other way to ameliorate the migration problems.

Update #3: SCLENDS and the BDC

Alas, we have as yet been unable to resolve on-going problems with SCLENDS records for Beaufort District Collection materials. We are still measuring the depth and scope of the problems, searching for patterns behind what has gone awry, reporting any errors we find to the SCLENDS consortium, and devising a plan to mount the attack to fix the issues as efficiently as possible.

Therefore, 2 months after the "Go Live" date (May 28th), we must continue with Plan "B":

If you can't find what you are looking for on topics of local history, culture, and environment within the SCLENDS catalog (i.e., those topics that fall within the responsibilities of this department), just give us a call at 470-6525 or e-mail me at gracec@bcgov.net with your specific questions regarding BDC and local history holdings.

We'll do our best to try to help you in spite of our continuing database problems.

BCL Going Live on SC LENDS Today!

Things are changing at Beaufort County Library -- and we hope that you like the new look and feel of our web presence.

Today BCL joins with the SC State Library and Union County Library, (recently named the "Best Small Library in America") in a combined online catalog. We are the beta test for the SC LENDS consortium. By creating a combined online catalog to share resources, we hope to be able to stretch your tax dollar. We hope to have all the wrinkles we discover in SC LENDS ironed out before adding new consortium members in October.

Keep your fingers crossed that the catalog will come up without any hitches. Library staff has put a great deal of work into improving your access to library resources but we won't know for sure how it turns out until after we go live. So, please, we ask for your patience and forbearance as we learn the ins-and-outs of the new system software.

Marketing and Development Coordinator, Sandra Saad, wrote an article about SC LENDS for the Island Packet that will give you further information about how things will be changing. The South Carolina State Library has posted "Fast Facts" if you want to learn more about how this consortium will benefit you.