The new year is a time for reflection. A time to make many resolutions, and possibly even to keep some, even if you simply promise yourself that this year you will put less pressure on yourself to be a totally different person because your new “Birds of Geographic Regions” calendar told you to.
Unfortunately, it is definitely a time to start getting real about paying off your student debt. The library can help you figure it out!
Come to one of our “20somethings Financial Literacy: Graduating with Student Debt and Building Credit” programs at the Greenwell Springs Branch, featuring Bennett Blackledge from Gulf Coast Bank! Presentations will be held Monday, January 11th, from 7:00-8:30, and again on Tuesday, the 19th, at the same time.
If you can’t make the presentation or you want more info, use your library card to log into our Financial Literacy database. It’s got everything from basic money management tutorials to lessons on how the economy actually works.
No one knows better than a librarian how frantic the holidays can be. With relatives flying in from all over the place, second cousins popping out of the woodwork, and everybody’s children running around like they’re being chased by a real live reindeer, it’s easy to forget about those holiday movies you checked out on DVD for a little family bonding – and/or the murder mystery you picked up to give yourself a break.
So sign up for an account on Library Elf! You just need an email address and a password to set up reminders up to a week before your items are due. You can also set up a weekly reminder so you can keep track of what you have checked out. It’s also got a “track your reading” feature that you can turn on to keep a record of what you checked out based on the check-out and return dates.
Way less creepy than this guy.
It’s extra-great if you’ve got a big family – you can link multiple library cards to a single Library Elf account, so you can keep track of things your children, uncles, parents, and whoever else check out to make sure everybody turns things in on time. If you want to renew anything, just click on the due date in the reminder email – it’ll bring up the library’s login page and you can renew everything online.
What better time than a national holiday to think about those that have come before us?
The History Reference Center is a great place to find articles on exactly that. Like our other reference centers, the History Reference Center lets you search thousands of resources focused on a specific field. If you go into the advanced search options, you can also search a specific chunk of United States or world history using their “Timeline” feature.
For example, Thanksgiving! You can do a regular search and come up with tons of stuff, or you can click on “European Colonization of the Americas” to learn more about that time period and all of the other stuff that happened before the USA began.
Not even a little true, Ron Ulysses Swanson.
If you’re interested in the origins of our biggest national holiday, this is a great place to start. You can also use it in combination with one of our databases full of teaching resources, ERIC, to find great ways to talk about this holiday with your kids in a way that respects both Native American history and culture, and what the holiday has come to mean: a time of gratitude and celebration.
We certainly are. We’re grateful to continue serving as your information guardians. From our family to yours, Happy Thanksgiving.
The app, part of continuing efforts to bring Baton Rouge into the digital age, lets you rate your experiences with various public services offered here in Baton Rouge, including the police department, airports, and libraries. Just search for the City of Baton Rouge from the app’s home screen.
You can specifically select different branches or locations in each category, say whether something was “good” or “bad” and what characteristics are particularly notable, and write in comments if you want to provide more information.
From service selection to comment writing.
If you want to address a particular person, you can tag it with their name. You have the option either to register with an email address and username or keep your feedback totally anonymous and use Expresit as a guest; either way, you can either make your feedback public or keep it hidden.
Let us know when something really great happens! Let us know when something really bad happens, so we can fix it! We’d love to hear from you.
All of us here at the library are so, so grateful for your continued support in renewing the tax millage this weekend. It quite literally keeps the lights on around here, and we’re all grateful not to be helping people find books and digital resources in the dark, as it is bad for the vision.
Ebook services abound; with Overdrive, you can read them, listen to them, or even watch streaming movies based on them. Our supplementary ebook collection Oneclickdigital doesn’t have video, but if anything else isn’t in Overdrive, it just might be there. Want to learn something technical? Safari Tech Books is the service for you; it’s got a wide selection of the “For Dummies” series if you want to learn a little, and a full range of subjects if you’d like to learn a lot (especially about coding and computer-y things).
Don’t be this guy. Let us help you out.
If you’d rather take online classes in a more traditional format, we’ve got Lynda and Gale Courses (formerly Learn4Life, the artist formerly known as Ed2Go), both of which consist of longer lesson or video-based sessions. Gale Courses take six weeks; two lessons are released each week of the course, and students have two weeks to complete each lesson. Lynda courses are videos of varying lengths that are broken into chapters that allow you to skip back and forth as necessary. Both of them can give you a certificate, which can be really useful in job-type scenarios.
The library! Coming to a health fair, school event, local festival, or pretty much anything else near you. When we’re not on the other end of the phone or the other side of the screen. (We weren’t joking about being everywhere.)
It’s going to be a great ten years, East Baton Rouge!
From getting inspired at our Maker Faire, to learning how to make something of your own at one of our awesome craft programs, to turning that new skill into a business that will actually make you money – what the heck can’t you do at the library?!
(Well, you can’t buy things – because it’s all free.)
The library has a lot of really great resources to help you get a job, start a business, tell people about your business, make your business grow, hold important business meetings, and retire to a nice island somewhere.
If you’re looking for a job, the Career Center is the place for you. The librarians there can help you with every step of the job search from figuring out what you might want to do through actually interviewing for the job that’s right for you (we’ve got Skype!). Read our September blog post for more information, or check out their website by clicking on the banner above.
All this and more.
Want to be your own boss? After we help you get some start-up funding with our grant resources, the Gale Small Business Resource Center is basically your one-stop shop for all the forms you’ll need, including sample business plans you can use as a jumping-off point AND a database of up-to-the-minute articles on the most pressing issues small businesses face today.
Do you just really like books? So do we! In addition to information on the electronic resources listed here (and many more), we’ve got an infoguide on Business in the Library that has lists of books on all subjects business-related, including a whole section on how and why to use social media to make your goods or services go viral.
And when all that’s done and you’re ready to kick back, we’ve still got you covered: check out our travel resources for everything from guidebooks to language lessons.
It’s a good life.
Maybe think of us a little, when you make your first million. But even if you don’t we’re always glad to help you however we can.
The Explora set of digital resources are great for students of all ages, and their teachers, too. They are online encyclopedias that have entries targeted to age groups from elementary through high school, as well as their parents and educators.
All of the encyclopedias are fully searchable, and in addition to topic overviews (available for most subjects), the results are pulled from scientific publications that are at the reading level of each age group. It’s a great way to find sources for reports on everything from jellyfish…
Explora ElementaryExplora High School
…to rhythm.
Explora ElementaryExplora (for adults)
Explora Teacher Resources has information on lesson plans, student tools, curriculum standards, and more:
EXPLORA! Another great resource that’s free with your local library. Explore today!
Do you love statistics? Or more likely, do you need statistics for school or for your business? If so, then we’ve got the resource for you! Statista is one of the largest and most up to date statistics portals in the world. You’ll be surprised what you can find. Stats and infographics are exportable and ready to be dropped into a presentation with ease.
You’ll find industry overviews, dossiers on individual companies, and market trends. All you need to access this world of data is your library card. Statista
Here’s a sample of some trending statistics:
Here’s an interesting infographic for all the chocolate lovers:
We’ve published an InfoGuide on Hurricane Katrina to commemorate the tenth anniversary. You’ll find books, library events, documentaries and other resources.
