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Monday, August 29, 2016

Do you have YOUR card?



“Library Card Sign-Up Month” begins Sept. 1 and starts a flurry of librarian activity as we try to get as many people signed up for library cards as possible. Library staff members will be out and about, all over Stillwater, encouraging you to get your free ticket to tens of thousands of books and eBooks, audios and eAudios, DVDs, and language learning, car repair and genealogy databases.

We’ll also be going out to businesses with our L.I.B. program. Businesses can become certified “Library Improved Businesses” by supporting reading through letting us come to sign up employees for library cards. Encouraging your staff to read has many benefits for your business. Studies on reading now show that the activity:

·        Lowers blood pressure and increases life span (Fewer sick days?)
·        Increases empathy and reduces stress (Better customer service!)
·        Increases motivation, goal reaching, and memory (Better productivity!)

·        In addition, children read more when they see their parents read, which means that your employees’ children could reap all of the same rewards!

If your business would like to schedule a L.I.B. visit, email us at askalibrarian@stillwater.org.

Library staff will also be out and about at community events. One event we are attending is the Aging Advocates Committee’s “Golden Ticket Resource Fair” on Thursday, Sept. 15, 9 a.m.-Noon, at the First Presbyterian Church located at Sixth and Duck.  The fair includes over 30 organization and business booths which will provide all sorts of excellent information, resources and opportunities on healthy aging.  The Oklahoma Lions Mobile Health Screening van will be there, along with healthy refreshments and door prizes.

Be sure to stop at the library’s booth to get a library card and to find out about the collections and services that will help your journey into the Golden Years be healthier and lots more fun!

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Kindle



So—I have been a huge proponent of the Kindle Fire. Each time someone comes in to ask for a recommendation about an ereader, the Fire has been at the top of my list. You can do eBooks, plus get most of what an iPad has but at a significantly cheaper price.

And then, I looked at my reading list to see what I had been reading. Not much! And yet I have downloaded quite a few books to read. What was going on? I had also noticed several of my Library Shelf articles talk about the fact that I hadn’t read for ages, then I go on a reading spurt and recommend a lot of the books. So why do I keep having these reading droughts, especially since I am an avid reader and, well, it is sort of part of my job?

As I wondered about this question, I picked up my Fire, opened “Cryptonomicon” by Neal Stephenson, a book I was reading because I LOVED his novel “Seven Eves.” As I was reading, I stopped to look up info about the history of the “output-feedback mode stream ciphers” that appear in the book.

While reading about the history of that cipher system on Wikipedia, I laughed at myself because I was getting info off Wikipedia, even though I detest Wikipedia because of the misinformation that shows up on its pages, and I recalled that we had specifically added “information literacy” as a  goal on the library’s Long Range Plan to help our users better understand good vs. not good webpages, but remembered that I had not started a plan yet for beefing up our information literacy outreach, so I went to our webpage to look up the specific wording in the plan, but when I was looking for the long range plan link, I saw the slide on our homepage for the Mobile FabLab (maker space) coming on Friday, which made me remember that I had seen an ad for the comeback of the TV show “Battlebots,” which my husband loves, but that I HATE so since we stream TV, I looked up articles on how I could block out an entire site like ABC, so that I wouldn’t have to watch it, and then I felt guilty for wanting to deprive hub of something that makes him so happy, which me feel sad, and then I was sad, and then I became concerned that I had become sad so quickly, so I looked up whether or not you can get Seasonal Affective Disorder in the summer, and as I read the list of symptoms, I saw that not enjoying things you used to enjoy was on the list, and I thought about how I was certainly not enjoying the escape game I had been playing on my Fire, so I opened the game to see if I still didn’t like it, and I didn’t, so I went to the Kindle app store and browsed through a bunch of apps to find and download a new escape game to see if I liked that one, but in the meantime, I found a cross-stitching game app that looked fun so I downloaded it to play, but I didn’t like it so I deleted it, and when I deleted it, the icon for my episodes of “The Bletchley Circle,” about the women who worked as codebreakers at Bletchley Park during WWII, appeared, so I stopped and watched the last two episodes I hadn’t seen yet, but then I was finished with the series and wished I had more, which reminded me that HEY—I’m reading a book about codebreaking!, so I reopened “Cryptonomicon,” read a page and half, then fell asleep.

So, I knew what my reading problem was. I checked out several hardcopy books the following day, and read and enjoyed “Fates and Furies” by Lauren Groff (very literary, 3.5 stars); “Girl with All the Gifts” by M.R. Carey (dystopian, 4 stars)Britt-Marie Was Here” by Fredrik Backman (5 stars!); and “I Let You Go” by Clare Mackintosh (4.25 stars).

I still love the ease and convenience of eBooks, but before I go back to Oklahoma Virtual Library, I’ll be getting a plain old, no frills Kindle.