Your databases

With adds, drops and tweaks, we begin 2012 with 35 databases, about half of which you can also use from home. (Sometimes the cost of remote access is prohibitive!) New this year are:
PowerSpeak: instruction in seven foreign languages and ESL for Spanish and Mandarin speakers
Dow Jones LP Galante, venture capital firms
S & P Industry Surveys (has been added to our existing S & P NetAdvantage)
Prices for Antiques, auction prices for collectibles and art
LoisLaw
PACER, the US Courts electronic case tracking system

Expanded is Foreign firms in../US firms overseas, from UniWorld. We had a subscription to NJ only, have expanded it to national. This resource is particularly valuable to those of you who are bilingual and might look for employment with overseas firms having offices here, or vice versa.
Questions about any of this? Contact our Reference desk, (973) 285-6969.

Brotherhood of Unemployed

Local history librarian Miriam Kornblatt has added September-December 1934 to our Great Depression project, Morris life as seen through the Daily Record. Fall of that year included the Brotherhood of Unemployed, Local #1, Denville, meeting and a CCC company moving into barracks on Whippany Rd to work on flood control and mosquito extermination.

Cooper Seward family

Interesting family, the Cooper Sewards, of Chester. Beulah Cooper, Abraham's daughter and Nathan's (Cooper's Mill) niece, married Henry Seward (descendent of Obediah Seward who is on the 1752 freeholder list) and had a son William. William Seward, through the 19th century, became quite the land baron, buying, mortgaging, even foreclosing. We've learned all this in cataloguing the Cooper-Seward deed file here. Some of the documents are too fragile to scan (though not the 1778 deed--terrific rag paper!) so we'll try photographing them to digitize.

Yes, the Chester family was related to Secretary of State William Henry Seward, who thought the US should buy Alaska. Land acquisition seems to have run in the family?!

FamilySearch

We've just been granted Family Search affiliate library status by the Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah. This means we'll be able to rent ($5 per reel is your fee) microfilm from them, for you, through our interlibrary loan office.
The Utah library recommends these tools for determing what's in their collections:

FamilySearch Pilot
FamilySearch Indexing
FamilySearch Wiki

The bottom line

Among our spending reviews is year-end unit cost analyses of the databases we buy for your use (Ancestry (library edition), Mergent, Morningstar, Dun & Bradstreet, etc. etc.) At the end of the calendar year we divide the annual cost of a database by the number of uses, to get the per session amount. $2 or less is acceptable, over $2 means its time to reconsider the subscription.

A few titles are on the 2012 chopping block at this point, will be dropped if use doesn't increase substantially and lower the per use cost this year. AllData Automotive, Mergent Online, Morningstar Investment Research Library and Valueline are all candidates for a drop..the last for an announced $3,000 price increase, the others for low use. Best ROI? Ancestry, the library edition (which is far superior to the home edition); folks love genealogy research.

Databases you can use from home are found on our remote resources web. Our library value calculator estimates the cost benefit of your library visits.

Morris County Magazine

For 15 years, between 1982 and 1995, the county Chamber of Commerce published Morris County Magazine. Reference librarian Donna Burkey has indexed the entire run, identifying the local places and people the magazine highlighted.

We have the entire run of the magazine in our NJ collection. Drop us a note if you need one of the indexed articles.

Another gem!

Found another gem in our local history files: proof copy of volume 1, number 1 of a literary magazine, "6 x 9". The name was taken from the nine writers of the 6th district (Morristown) of the Federal Writers Project, WPA, who put it together. The editor, Albert Truman Boyd, and associate Carl John Bostelmann were Denville residents. Associate Benjamin Goldenberg and illustrator/printer Lewis W. Biebigheiser lived in Morristown. Biebigheiser (1914-1992(, who cut 12 original linoleum blocks for the issue, would later own a printing business in Chester. We've let his family know what we've found.