What's New!

Pikes Peak Library District employee Vincent Colicchio never considered himself an artist, but he became one nonetheless, through the curiosity and caring he exhibited at his job in Circulation at PPLD’s downtown Penrose Library. According to Colicchio, “It began by me saying, ‘That’s a treasure. That shouldn’t be thrown out.’ " Colicchio handles books for a living, so he sees a lot of them on a daily basis. But he recently found his love of books extending to damaged books that were being discarded. “I, like other people who work in libraries, get heartbroken when I see books in the recycling bin. I think it’s a waste,” he said.

When Colicchio turned his eye to the bare shelves behind the checkout desk at Penrose Library, the altered book project began to take shape. “I was telling my supervisor, ‘You know we could jazz it up back there.’ I said, ‘We’ve got this space, we should do some displays.’ “Then around Christmastime, my supervisor said, ‘I like your ideas. Go ahead and make a display and let me know if you need anything.’ “I hadn’t really intended to do anything myself, so I was like, ‘Oh no! Now I actually have to do something!’ So I did some altered books around the holidays in a matter of just a few days just to have something there.” Colicchio said he found books in the Library’s Catalog on how to make altered books, and then he found “quotations by writers that I liked and really reflected the spirit of a book and its relationship to a reader. And those became the focal point. By just contemplating that quote, vague visions and imagery would come up, and I would try to follow it and let it grow as I was creating each altered book.” “It just lends itself to being at the library. It’s recycling and it’s creativity inspired by books we have in our catalog that have the techniques on how to do it.”

Colicchio recently donated two of his altered books to the Colorado Library Education Foundation for their upcoming silent auction to raise funds for scholarships for Colorado library employees to attend Colorado Library Association and division workshops and the annual CAL conference. Colicchio’s art speaks to the great potential of books -- even discarded books--to enrich and change lives. The images below show the extreme care and detail Colicchio brings to his work. The work is even more impressive in person and is currently on display in the Friends Bookstore in East Library.

At a ceremony on Saturday, July 21 in Denver’s Seawell Grand Ballroom, Pikes Peak Library District Multimedia Producer Jamey Hastings was awarded a 2012 Heartland Emmy Award in the Interstitial Program category for her piece, “Colorado Springs Beat: The News Photography of Stan Payne.”

The short documentary chronicles the work of Stan Payne, a Gazette Telegraph employee from 1947 to 1976, and was based on research by PPLD Special Collections Assistant Manager Dennis Daily. The Heartland Chapter Emmy Awards represent excellence in television and media production.

“This is a huge honor,” Hastings said. “There were a lot of great submissions and I’m so thrilled that our piece was chosen.”

Pikes Peak Library District wants to preserve the record of the historic Waldo Canyon Fire and its effects on our community. We are doing this in several ways:

• We are collecting images for an online photo gallery (see below), which you can send to photos@ppld.org. Feel free to include any personal accounts associated with the image, which we will use as a caption. Please note that we cannot receive email attachments larger than 8 megabytes at a time. If you have multiple images, please send them individually. Please limit your submission to five photos total.
• In addition, we are seeking video and high-resolution photos for our Special Collections archives for use by future researchers. If you have video or high-res pictures you would like to donate to our collection, please email us at photos@ppld.org with “Archives” in the subject line so that we can arrange acquisition of your photo or video. Do not email your high-resolution images, but you can send samples. Keep in mind we have an 8 megabyte attachment limit. Please do not email video files, but links to online streaming (YouTube, etc.) of your video footage are okay.