Fall events

The LiBerry Music Festival & Pie Throwdown was our best ever! We earned around $4,100 and had 41 pies on the table at the throwdown. We got plenty of press coverage, too, with Tim Ellis of KUAC doing a few interviews and, of course, a big story in The Ester Republic.

The Ester Library Lecture series started its fall season off with a look at Ester history by Matt Reckard. Here's one of the photos he showed, taken by Pat Garner in the late 1940s of Main Street and Moody's Mercantile.

Coming up in the lecture series on September 21, 7 pm at Hartung Hall, is Neil Davis on ACES and oil royalties in Alaska. He'll be providing an update to his article series on the subject. (Here's part one.)

Then comes the fourth annual Readers on the Run footrace on October 9, and Sandy Jamieson for October's lecture on the 19. After that is the 2011 Annual Membership Meeting! It's going to be a busy fall!

LiBerry Music Festival & Pie Throwdown 2011

"If anyone knows how to throw a family fun music festival in the name of books, berries, and a building, it's the radical librarians of Ester." —Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

Berry season, folks, and it's time for pie and some great local music!

Date & Time: Saturday, August 20, 2 to midnight
Location: Golden Eagle Saloon, 3630 Main Street, Ester, Alaska
Cost: $15 donation requested at the door, $5 donation requested per slice of delicious, homemade pie!
Reason: good fun, good music, good pie—and raising funds to build a library!

Here's the scoop:

• PIE THROWDOWN: anybody can enter. Bring your homemade pie with berries in it (berries as in the botanical and/or common definition thereof) to the Golden Eagle Saloon between 2 and 3 pm, pay your $2 entry fee and register your pie (and bring your recipe for publication in the Throwdown Cookbook!). Winning pie makers receive FABULOUS prizes, and the top pies are auctioned off to the audience. Awards are presented between 3:30 and 4:30 pm (we hope the judges can finish that fast!) and then the other pies are sold by the slice ($5 donation requested per slice). And if you'd rather just eat pie, one of the judge's seats is up for auction, too, so get there early to have a chance at tasting every pie entered!
• MUSIC FESTIVAL: music starts at 2 pm and goes until midnight, with some really incredibly good local bands and performers, including Jass Pharm, Steve Brown & the Bailers, Zingaro Roots, Jesse Hobbs, Almost A Minyan, and many, many more. 
• BOOK SALE: tables with used and new books will be set up on the porch of the Golden Eagle for sale during the festival. We'll have donation jars on the tables, so just take a book or two and put whatever amount you want into the jar. The sale helps us clear out duplicate titles and raise money for our masonry heater.
• T-SHIRT & FASHION ITEMS SALE: another table will be set up with library t-shirts and extra items remaining from the Lallapalooza. Items are priced as marked. T-shirts & tank tops: $15, sweatshirts: $35, skirts & aprons & jackets: $35-$45. Some shirts have been donated by Nomadic Stars screen printers, too. All proceeds benefit the library!

Volunteers at the John Trigg Ester Library have been working hard for several years to raise funds for a new, spacious, energy-conserving library building in Ester that will serve the west end of town, and you can help! The LiBerry Music festivals started in 2006, becoming steadily more popular and featuring the best of live local music. Come hear rock, folk, jazz, world, blues, bluegrass, and much more, and celebrate and support your local musicians, culinary artists, and neighborhood library all in one great festival!

The nonprofit JTEL: a 501(c)(3) public charity

The John Trigg Ester Library, Inc., is now officially a public charity!

The JTEL received its official letter of determination from the IRS today:

Dear Applicant:

We are pleased to inform you that upon review of your application for tax exempt status we have determined that you are exempt from Federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to you are deductible under section 170 of the Code. You are also qualified to receive tax deductible bequests, devises, transfers or gifts under section 2055, 2106 or 2522 of the Code.

Furthermore, the effective date of the exemption is our incorporation recognition date with the State of Alaska: November 19, 2009.

This is a huge step in our organizational work, and will enable us to qualify for many grants that we could not previously apply for. If you would like to assist the JTEL in working on grant applications or other fundraising efforts, please consider volunteering for our Capital Campaign Committee, or, if that seems daunting, we also have a Fundraising Group and temporary committees for our community fundraisers.

Library lecture on Passive House design by Thorsten Chlupp

A packed audience listened to Thorsten Chlupp's lecture on superinsulated building construction and passive solar heating for homes and communities on April 20, and peppered Chlupp with questions about technical details, energy and building costs and savings, and the water systems for heat storage. The Passive House Performance Standard results in energy savings that far surpasses LEEDs and 5-star energy rated homes. Some of the details were surprising to audience members; for example, the walls in passive structures breathe, using not vapor barriers but vapor-permeable membranes. "You have to forget everything you know about building," Chlupp said. He described how Passive House construction can result in a 90% savings on heating costs compared to conventional building, even in Alaska. This design is now standard for new public buildings throughout Germany, where it has been used since the 1990s, and is spreading elsewhere in Europe also. More about Passive House building techniques, Fairbanks-area Passive Houses, and Chlupp's experience with this method can be found at the Library Lecture Series page on Chlupp's talk.

 

Thorsten Chlupp, local builder experienced in
Passive House Construction. Photo by Monique Musick.

An attentive audience of builders, architects, and otherwise interested listeners at the April 20 lecture by Thorsten Chlupp at Hartung Hall. Chlupp is explaining the solar heating capacity for a planned community in Okotoks, Alberta, Canada, the Drake Landing Solar Community. Drake Landing's community heating system currently serves 52 homes, all from stored solar energy. Photo by Monique Musick.

New title: IBM and the Holocaust

One of the newer titles in the John Trigg Ester Library is IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi German and America's Most Powerful Corporation, by Edwin Black. This book is about how IBM created pre-computer technology that enabled the Nazis to identify, locate, and catalog European Jews—and thus round them up and murder them.

IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich's needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.

From Richard Pachter's review of the book in the Miami Herald:

The result is an exhaustively researched, highly detailed look at IBM, its history and business dealings. …IBM technology, Black asserts, also enabled the German war machine's mighty manufacturing and distribution prowess. …The question is raised how Watson and other IBM employees managed to get away with this murderous collaboration, how they escaped the notice of the press and the government. The answer, naturally, is complicated. Though much of the firm's activities at home and abroad were reported in newspapers (television news reporting was virtually nonexistent, and radio hardly a credible news medium) there was little effort made to "connect the dots''-with one significant exception. In 1942, an investigation by a minor U.S. government bureaucrat did, indeed, make the necessary connections, but IBM, by then the world's biggest corporation, was also an integral part of the Allied war effort, and had been careful to create an unimpeachable image of patriotism. The investigation was abandoned.

Black's book is, in many ways, like Spielberg's movie, Schindler's List; …More than just another Holocaust tale, the author paints a remarkable portrait of how a powerful company created enormous opportunities, irrespective of moral concerns and consequences. It's a chilling lesson in politics and business that remains potent relevant, and highly revelatory.

Hardcover: 528 pages
Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (February 12, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN: 0609607995

Latest developments at the Ester library

Many exciting new developments have occurred in the last few weeks. These include:

• Sending the 501(c)(3) application to the IRS. It's quite likely that we will receive our federal charitable nonprofit status sometime this summer (the application was sent March 1); this means that donations to the library will be tax-deductible for the 2011 calendar year. The board of directors has been working toward this for over a year and a half, developing the appropriate policies, bylaws, and other organizational documents needed for a charitable organization. We will provide donors with a receipt and our identification number when we receive it. And our sincere thanks!
• The (almost) final architectural plans have been received from USKH. Other pieces, including the civil engineering and site plan, the structural plans, and the detailed architectural plans, have been contracted for and are expected by May 11, 2011. Electrical engineering, the computing and internet technology plan, and our various permits are also progressing. To view the current floor and site plans, please check out the design and construction planning pages on our website.
• Launching our community survey. This important survey will help the board plan future programs and better manage the library; the suggestions and comments we've already received in this first two weeks have given us some great insights that will help us with construction, operations, and budgeting. The board is seeking critiques, comments, kudos, and suggestions; we are hoping to see how the community views the role of a library; the importance and meaning of libraries and community spaces to the local population; the best hours and desired programs or services for the community; how important internet access, computers, and e-books at the library are to people; reading and materials preferences; and more. Board members and other volunteers will be at the Ester Post Office every Saturday through the month of April from 10 am to 1:30 pm to discuss the library's future with you. Please come and talk with us and tell us what you think!
• Setting up an endowment. While we have a capital campaign to raise funds for our building construction, we also need to plan for our long-term fiscal health. Operating the library in perpetuity requires a stable source of funding, and an endowment can help supply this stability. The board voted at its March 13 meeting to establish an endowment with the Alaska Community Foundation, beginning with a $2,000 allocation from our savings; we will need to increase this to $5,000 within a year in order to secure it. As soon as it is set up (which should be no later than the end of April, and perhaps sooner), supporters of the library will be able to donate to the fund in a variety of ways, including payroll deduction, the PickClickGive program, bequests, and other possibilities.
• Scheduling a grantwriting workshop. A significant part of our capital campaign includes applying for construction grants. We are offering a grantwriting workshop/work session to the public on the first two weekends in April, where attendees will gain experience in the grant application process by working on actual grants for the construction of the library. We expect a group of people of mixed experience; students will be both teaching and learning from each other and the instructors. (For more information, please contact us at library@esterrepublic.com or call 451-0636.) If you are on Facebook, you can sign up as an attendee there, too.
• Our second library lecture series season has begun! Upcoming lectures will include Thorsten Chlupp on April 20, discussing the type of design we plan to use in the new building, Passivehaus design for low or near-zero net energy usage; Jennifer Jolis on the fate of the people of Attu Island during World War II (May 18); Neil Davis; Sandy Jamieson; and others. This season's lectures are at Hartung Hall on the third Wednesday of the month, 7 pm.

These are the major highlights of the library's current activities, but there is more. If you are interested in becoming more actively involved with the John Trigg Ester Library or would like more information, please contact any member of the board.

The Panchatantra: statecraft for blockheads

Image from Wikipedia, from an illustration of a tale
in an Arabic version of the Panchatantra.

Emeritus professor of philosophy and eastern religions Walter Benesch will present the first Ester library lecture of 2011, on the Panchatantra, one of the world’s oldest and most satirical/practical guides to politics and political science—applied to the politics of our time!

Come hear Benesch talk about this collection of fables originally composed between 400 and 200 BCE. The author(s) are not clearly known, but the whole is attributed to a Brahman, Vishnusharman, who had been asked by a king in Kashmir to teach the king’s three blockheaded sons the art of statecraft so that when the king died, his kingdom would continue to flourish.

Wednesday, March 16, 7 pm, Hartung Hall
at the corner of Main Street and Ester Loop (parking available at the Golden Eagle Saloon just a block away)

All Ester library lectures are free and open to the public (donations gratefully accepted, however!).