WINTER SPORTS — The Spokane Downtown Library's Northwest Room is featuring a timely display celebrating winter in the Northwest, including a lot of snowy outdoor recreation.

Winter weather conditions have long created both challenges and opportunities for Northwest residents. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw greater hazards than the present, with less than ideal equipment and poor roads.

Winter recreation then and now included skiing, sledding, ice skating, hockey, snowshoeing, hunting, and outdoor work.

This exhibit combines photos of fun in the snow with disasters such as avalanches on railroad tracks. Come and see these images from winters past—you might be surprised at how familiar they look.

The Northwest Room is on the second floor of the Downtown Library.

WHEN: January 11-March 31

TIME: Northwest Room Hours

LOCATION: Downtown

Call 444-5338.

I logged onto the Spokane Public Library's new free music download service, Freegal, yesterday — and it lived up to expectations.

It contains 500,000 songs from the Sony music archives. City library card holders can download — and keep — three songs per week.

It will take me months to thoroughly browse the offerings, but it contains just about the entire Bruce Springsteen catalog, the entire Simon and Garfunkel catalog and lots of the Frank Sinatra catalog.

And those are just the S's.

A quick rule of thumb: Artists on a Sony label or any of its affiliates (including the mighty Columbia Records label), will probably be there.

To access it, you must have a Spokane Public Library card and the PIN number that you already use to log onto the library's website. If you don't have a PIN number, you'll have to go to any branch and get one.

Classical music fans might be particularly pleased. The site contains lots of outstanding classical selections. But you might have to download them movement by movement.

See the original post below for more details.

Good morning all…

[Here is a message from Chef John Olsen forwarded to me in e-mail. It is of particular importance because the City Council in absolute slash and save mode may close the East Branch of Spokane’s library which is wrong.

[Chef Gus eloquently writes:]

St Ann’s Roman Catholic Parish in East Central Spokane is an intentional
Parish.  People attend there from all over the County. We are deeply
concerned about the City Council’s choice to reduce the budget for Library
Services resulting designating the East Branch of the Library being axed.  The
children using this resource do not have Blackberries and home computers.  Nor
do they have funds for transportation to other branches.  The sensitivity of
the Board and City Council to put this forward as the resolution to a
$150,000 budget need is unconscionable.  The political constituents of that
area are least able to object, and are most in need of good library service.
Speak up, and advocate for the weak and lowly if you are a Christian. Chef Gus

Dave

All right, I’ve finally figured out how the city’s budget works. The city gets in trouble, looks around for an easy target, spies the Spokane Public Library and hacks it to death. Really? This is the best way to dig out of a budget hole? Maybe I’ll go to the library and study this some more. So here I am at the library, and the place is buzzing. It’s jammed with people reading, working on school projects, writing notes on index cards, checking out romance novels, applying for jobs on computers and just generally coming in out of the rain/Jim Kershner, SR. More here. (SR Photo)

Question: Are you using your local library more/less/the same as you used to do?

A United Way official will join the Spokane Public Library Board of Trustees in time to decide how to deal with major budget cuts proposed by Mayor Mary Verner.

The Spokane City Council on Tuesday unanimously appointed Janice Marich, the vice president of community relations for Spokane County United Way, to the city’s library board for a five-year term.

Marich, 62, said in an interview Tuesday evening that she is open to “all the options” for solving the budget problem.

“What’s really important to me is keeping the resources available to as many people as possible,” said Marich, whose mother worked as a librarian in McKinleyville, Calif.

The five-member board sets library policy and determines how to spend money set aside for libraries by the City Council. Marich was nominated for the job by Verner.

Although use of the city’s libraries continues to increase, Verner announced last month her intention to cut the library budget twice as much as the 2.85 percent cut she proposed in most city departments.