The Washtenaw County Department of Planning & Environment, The Washtenaw County Historic District Commission, and the Michigan Historic Preservation Network are offering a workshop titled Owning Property in Local Historic Districts: Benefits and Practice, featuring Kristine Kidorf, Owner of Kidorf Preservation Consulting. The workshop will cover the basics of local historic district commission processes, the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation, and the 25% Michigan rehabilitation tax credit.

This workshop will be offered Saturday, September 6, 10:00am to 12:00pm at the Washtenaw County Library Learning Resource Center (LLRC), 4135 Washtenaw Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48107. Please RSVP to: miltonpungm@ewashtenaw.org or (734) 222-6878.

The Library is pleased to offer Brainfuse, a new online tutoring service that matches students with a live tutor for personalized homework help. Just log on to chat one-on-one with a tutor in real time for individual help answering homework questions, building skills in specific subject areas, or writing a better research paper. Tutors (including Spanish-speakers) are available from 2-11 p.m. 7 days a week and help is available for all students, from elementary school through high school and beyond. No appointment is necessary.

As Ann Arbor marks the opening of its newest high school, take a look at this 101-year-old photograph of the then-new Ann Arbor High School in 1907. It was the pride of Ann Arbor, with its attached Carnegie library, but as fate would have it everything but the library facade was torn down last year to make room for the soon-to-be North Quad dormitory. An earlier image of an Ann Arbor high school is this 1859 engraving from the Making of Ann Arbor collection.

Here are some "Back to School" books for young children: Ready, Set, Preschool!, It's Time For School With Tallilah, I Love School!, Bunny School: A Learning Fun-For-All, Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready For Kindergarten, The Bus Stop, D.W.'s Guide To Preschool. If you'd like to know what professionals suggest for parents, you may explore the Discovery Education web site or, PBS Parents web site.

History is boring. Local history is even worse. You must be a spectacular geek to be interested in, much less involved with, the local history scene.

Well, that might be true, but here I am anyway. I have loved this town for as long as I can remember and, like the people I love, I want to know Ann Arbor's whole story. That's all historians do. Fall in love with a place, person or era and find out all they can about it.

For example, what did Ann Arbor look like when she was a baby? How about as a teenager? I look at the book Historic buildings, Ann Arbor, Michigan, by Marjorie Reade and Susan Wineberg like an old family album. I study it and try to recognize something of the past in the town I know today. (FYI, if you click here you can look at this book online.)

Click image for larger view and the text from Historic Buildings, Ann Arbor.

The William and Mary Palmer House, Ann Arbor's only Frank Lloyd Wright house, is on the market for the first time and the asking price is 1.5 million. The house, at 227 Orchard Hills Drive near the Arboretum, comes with original furniture and a collection of Wright's papers, but there's a catch--the house must remain as-is. Find out more about the Palmer House through AADL's Ann Arbor Architecture Archive, which includes the entry on the Palmer House taken from Historic Buildings, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

We've made a few changes to the AADL Research page for better access to our many magazine and research tools. You can browse a new subject listing at the top, quickly scroll through a more detailed ABC listing, or jump right to our most popular magazine database. We'll be featuring a selection of databases in the right-hand column, and from the left-hand menu you can now click on A2 Facts for links to interesting facts and statistics about Tree Town.

Some of the best browsing you can find begins at aadl.org in the Research section. AADL Select Sites offers high quality Web sites on many topics, chosen by an AADL librarian. Click on the first topic that interests you. A great surprise for me was in History: Primary Sources, Making of America. It was a very readable digital copy of a June 1842 article, "Blindness and the Blind," in Southern Literary Messenger. I will be going back to this site a lot because there's something for everyone!