New encyclopedia available of Northern Kentucky

Lu-Ann Farrar - Online Content Manager

A link to the Kentucky News Review is available throughout the day on Kentucky.com, under the Find It Now tab, in the black navigation bar above.

Crit Luallen has been named among the public officials of the year by Governing magazine, according to a press release. "Crit Luallen, Kentucky’s auditor of public accounts, has successfully fought corruption and fiscal mismanagement, the capstone to her 35-year career as a versatile problem-solver in state government," according to the magazine. Bluegrass Politics also reports on the award.

Northern Kentucky has a new encyclopedia to document its history. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports on the recently released Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky. The original goal of co-editors Paul Tenkotte and James Claypool was to find 1,000 topics, but the encyclopedia actually swelled to 2,112 entries. The work was a six-year project with 350 writers. The composer of Santa Claus is Comin' to Town was from Covington!

This year's Museum of Modern Art annual festival of recently preserved films includes Wallace Kelly's Our Day, according to the New York Times. The film is a 16-minute black-and-white silent home movie of a "day in the life" of a middle-class family in Kentucky around 1938. KET has the video online.

The University of Kentucky libraries has a new exhibit of Islamic manuscripts on display in the lobby of the M.I. King Building on the university campus. The collection of manuscripts are dated as early as 1517 — an illuminated rendering of the epic Shahnameh by the Persian poet Ferdowsi — and continue to as late as the mid-nineteenth century. A variety of illustrative styles can be found. The press release describes the exhibit as including illustrations "of rather spare geometric and floral patterns to ornate court, hunting, and battle scenes in miniature — most of whose pigments are still fresh and vibrant." The exhibition is free and open to the public.

In some Cincinnati public libraries, video rentals tops book circulation, according to a report in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Eleven of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County's 41 branches now circulate more videos than books. "At one time I checked, and they had 187 copies of Spiderman 2 and 12 copies of Plato's Republic," former state Rep. Tom Brinkman Jr. said. Kimber L. Fender, the executive director of the countywide public library system, explains: "I think it's availability. If you live in a suburban community, you may have a video rental store close by, but in urban neighborhoods you may not have access to these materials any other way."