Expresit Yourself

What’s on your mind? Let us know with the new Expresit app.

http://brgov.com/expresit/

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.

Expresit Comment Process
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.

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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.

One Book, One Community 2016: Kingfish

This year’s One Book, One Community title is Kingfish, by local political historian, Richard D. White, Jr. Librarians braved the rain and wind to announce the book at this past Saturday’s Louisiana Book Festival, and information and events are showing up all over the library’s website.

The One Book, One Community concept started in 1998 with the Washington Center for the Book’s project, “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book”; today, cities and towns all over the nation strengthen their communities through a celebration of reading. 2016 will see a new governor for Louisiana and the election of a new President of the United States; what better way to celebrate democratic tradition than to read about the ways it has been manipulated?

Kingfish details Huey P. Long’s rise to power both as governor and senator, focusing on what he tried to accomplish for Louisiana and for the nation and on the not-always-ethical tactics he used. Material was drawn from interviews with some of Long’s closest cronies and some of his fiercest enemies, in an attempt to let the reader decide whether Long was a simple demagogue, benevolent dictator, or true delegate of Louisiana’s disenfranchised. Either way, the reforms he forced into place to help Louisiana citizens living in poverty made him an enemy of trade unions and big business in the state.

Cubee P. Long
Learn how to make this guy!

 

The library has the book available in physical, e-book, and audio formats, available at any branch and through Overdrive; check out a copy today to join in, and take a look at our Kingfish infoguide for more books like this one, as well as info on upcoming and past events, background reads on some of Long’s favorite projects (like education), books and activities for kids and teens, and more.

 

OBOC 2016

Come Write In with National Novel Writing Month

It’s here. It’s finally here.

Gather, my children, and you shall hear Of the greatest and most ridiculous writing event of the year.

National Novel Writing Month is based on the idea that it’s possible to write an entire novel of a minimum of 50,000 words in a single month, and more than that, that it’s fun! You can write about anything you want as long as it’s fictional and it’s all part of the same plot – or you can go rogue and write ten 5,000-word short stories, or fifty 1,000-word essays, or 50,000 one-word poems. Pretty much anything goes.

On the NaNoWriMo (Nan-No-Rye-Moe) website, you can set up your novel, track your word count progress, earn cool badges, hang out on the forums with other new and experienced Nano-ers, and join a local region!

The Baton rouge area’s home to the Red Stick Wrimos, and the lovely people who claim membership there will be happy to show you the ropes and get you settled in to your first NaNo experience. Home regions also do word wars with other NaNo groups, in which the group that writes the most words in the shortest amount of time wins bragging rights.

The library is here to help! We’ve got an infoguide full of resources for local writers, and we’re planning no fewer than ten write-in events at three of our branches. If you need some inspiration or want some company, join your fellow writers for a concentrated writing session to up your word count and push through writer’s block.

It is often said that everyone has at least one book inside of them. Take this opportunity to find out what yours is about!

Have Fun Storming the Castle

There’s a lot of stuff going on this weekend in our fair city, and none of us are going to want to miss any of it. Even if it means getting a little wet.

First stop for kids and grown-ups should definitely be the Louisiana Book Festival, happening in downtown Baton Rouge from 10:00 AM-5:00 PM come snow or rain or heat or gloom of night (like the Post Office, but without the threat of utility bills)! Stop by the bookmobile and the library’s tents to check out all kinds of neat stuff. You can also stop by the Main Street Market for breakfast and local produce as long as you get there before 1:00.

 

The Halloween Parade will walk by just a few blocks down. Because of the weather, the parade has been pushed up to 9:30 AM. It will still follow the same route and stop in several locations to accept donations of canned goods and other non-perishable food items.

 

If it’s not raining, by some whim of local air pressure systems, and if you like science, you should also stop by the Highland Road Park Observatory’s Fall Day, happening from 10:00-12:00. (If we recall correctly from our college days, they’ve got some very cool displays with liquid nitrogen to look forward to.) (Liquid nitrogen freezes things, you see, and – ) This event is for Science Academy Cadets ages 8-12 and their chauffeurs, and costs $5 for in-parish kids and $6 for out-of-parish kids. (All you have to do to become a Science Academy Cadet is show up, basically, but you can also pre-register on Brec’s WebTrac by looking for “Activities” under “Observatory.”)

Due to the sky’s recent attempts to teach us about what kinds of things can be used as flotation devices in an emergency (meaning, threats of lightning), Mayor Kip Holden has moved trick-or-treating to Friday, October 30th, from 6:00-8:00 PM. But pretty much nothing stands in the way of a group of kids and a sugar high, so be on the look-out for some tiny pirates and superheroes to show up on your doorstep. Remember to keep your porch light on to let them know you’ve got the goods.

They’ll come back with books and knowledge after one of our awesome library events.

If you don’t “do” Halloween, but you still want something to do this weekend, the Ascension Community Theater is putting on The Addams Family, and our own Theatre Baton Rouge‘s production of The Miracle Worker opens this Friday! Have a great weekend, Baton Rouge!

Thank 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.

To remind you of all the stuff you get with your shiny, shiny library card, we thought a quick run-down of some of our favorite things was in order! (Kittens, roses, and brown paper packages not included.)

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.

career-center
We can also help you find a job.

Anything else you might want to know about can certainly be found in our infoguides, which cover everything from local fashion, art, music, and other events, to tax information, to bowling. Of course, you can’t forget the book recs. We’ve got book recs for days.

YEAH we do.

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!

Build your Business at the Library

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.

Start your career today.

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. (It's not pretty, but DANG is it good.)
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.

Early Voting Starts Saturday!


Good morning, residents of East BatonRouge Parish! Early voting for the October 2015 primary election begins tomorrow from 8:30 AM – 6:30 PM and runs weekdays and Saturdays until October 17th.

Got questions about your early vote location? Check out the Secretary of State’s Early Voting, In Person guide to find the address of the registrar of voters office near you. They’ve also got a sample ballot with full text of the amendments up for renewal available through the Voter Portal – you just have to provide your address.

To learn more about the library’s presence on the ballot, please refer to the Dedicated Library Tax Millage FAQ posted on our website – and if you want even more information than that, call your friendly neighborhood librarians at (225) 231-3750!

And just in case you can’t make it next week, don’t forget: