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EUGENE CITY COUNCIL NEWSLETTER January 27, 2005 City of Eugene 777 Pearl Street, Room 105 Eugene, Oregon 97401-2793 (541) 682-5010 (541) 682-5414 (FAX) www.ci.eugene.or, us STORYTIME IN BRAILLE SURVEY SOLUTIONS BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT FUND SUPPORTS LOCAL SWEET SHOP READIN' IN THE RAIN 2005! HEALING HANDS OF EUGENE TSUNAMI BENEFIT PESTICIDE-FREE HOT FOAM KILLS MOSS, IVY IN PARKS ACROSS EUGENE Stoqrtime in Braille Eugene Public Library's Pre-school Storytimes on Wednesday, January 19, celebrated Braille Literacy Month with a featured guest reader, Heidi von Ravensberg. Heidi, a community member who is blind, collaborated with Youth Librarian Michele "Pigg" Green to develop and present the program. Heidi read aloud from Braille text while Pigg displayed the illustrations and the children enthusiastically described the pictures. More than 60 kids and parents enjoyed the stories, watching intently as Heidi's fingers glided over the Braille. Along with tales on themes such as helping others and bravery, the presenters provided introductory information about blindness, tactile and auditory senses, and appropriate behavior around working guide dogs, with Heidi's dog Curry as an example. Kids also got the chance to feel the Braille alphabet for themselves. Eugene Public Library thanks Heidi for contributing her time and talents at Storytime, as well as for serving as a past consultant to the Library's Adaptive Technology Committee. Heidi works at the U of O College of Education and is a patron of Oregon Talking Books and Braille Services. For more information, contact Librarian Michele Green at 652-6623 Survey Solutions LRCS is ready to rollout a new, powerful and versatile software/hardware package that will vastly improve the City's survey and evaluation capabilities. The Telecom funded software, "Survey Solutions," enables the use of PDAs, the Intranet, and the Internet to collect responses in addition to paper forms. With this system, patrons can now enter their own information, which will reduce staff time/costs for that tedious duty. It also creates convenience for the web-savvy customer and vastly expands our polling ability. Two other key strengths of the system are the ease of survey creation, and the quick production of results in graphical and/or data form. In a demonstration this week, 5 PDA's were passed around in a staff meeting with a simple survey onboard. The 14 responses were quickly downloaded to a laptop, and the results were tabulated and displayed in four charts. The total time for entry, download and crunching was less than 10 minutes. The product is very user-friendly, the database is fully-accessible, and our LRCS Department Automation Team--Sharon Edwards and Julie Gilbert--are already adept with the software. EUGENE CITY COUNCIL NEWSLETTER PAGE 1 January 28, 2005