Category: Uncategorized

We’re allowed to talk about other major winter holidays now, right? It’s the day after Thanksgiving. Chuck out your turkey carcasses and start hanging lights already! Here’s a list of December events that will help you squeeze every drop of joy out of the holiday season. (Joy is good for the skin.)

…Okay, it’s a list of places to look for holiday events. We Louisianians take every opportunity to celebrate, and writing all of them down would make this a very, very long blog post.

Visit Baton Rouge, an organization aimed at increasing tourism to our fair capitol city, has a constant list of every major event happening anywhere in Baton Rouge at any given point. If you’re looking for events for a specific day, look here. The Advocate’s calendar is pretty good, too, with both holiday-focused events and regularly scheduled programming for locals.

On the other hand, the Baton Rouge Moms community has a great guide to family-focused, kid-friendly events happening up to sixty miles from the city. It’s got a great mix of culture, like The Nutcracker: A Tale from the Bayou, and places for kids to get some of that sugar energy out, like ice skating at the Baton Rouge River Center. BR City Key is another great resource for finding events specific to your neighborhood if you can’t travel far.

If you celebrate Chanukah, don’t miss the State Capitol ceremony on the first day, December 6th, from 4:30-6:00 PM. Chabad Baton Rouge will host several other events around the city.

And of course, the library’s got programming all over the place. If you like homemade Christmas ornaments, holiday-themed story time, winter movies, winter snacks, or anything remotely related to the month of December, keep an eye on our events calendar for a program happening near you.

 

The first Veterans Day was held in 1926 based on a declaration from Congress that World War I had finally come to an end. An armistice, or cease of fighting, for “the Great War” was called on November 11th, 1918. The holiday was actually called Armistice Day until 1954, when it turned out that “the war to end all wars” would be followed by World War II and United States involvement in the Korean War. The holiday is now intended to honor all members of the United States military that have served in conflict.

Many of our branches have developed book displays and exhibits to mark the holiday. The EBRPL Tumblr will be regularly updating with links to online history resources for United States military history. You can also visit the National World War II Museum’s website to see and hear oral histories conducted with United States veterans from all over the country.

We thank you for your service.

Hang on to your hats, friends – this could get bumpy.

This Tuesday and Wednesday, the 10th and 11th of November, the library will be updating our system software (the thing that lets us keep track of books and all our other resources). Unfortunately, since the same system keeps track of all our patron information, your library card numbers aren’t going to work on anything you’d normally be able to use from home.

You can still check out books and DVDs from any of our brick-and-mortar locations, as long as you have your actual library card with you – we won’t be able to look up any of the numbers. Or whether or not any books or DVDs are on the shelf. Or…anything.

Everything should be back to normal by Thursday, but until then, please be patient with Overdrive, Freegal, The Criterion Collection, Alexander Street Music, Screening Room, Zinio, Atomic Training, Indieflix, FastPencil, and any other databases that require you to log in with your library card even when you’re in the library; it’s not their fault.

They’ll come back soon!

Very few librarians have legal degrees or are in any way qualified to give out legal advice, and in general doing so makes us all very nervous. That’s why the library system subscribes to databases like the Legal Information Reference Center.

It pulls information from some of the most highly accredited consumer legal information publications on all the subjects seen above. Like all of our other reference centers, the main groups are further divided into more specific categories after you click on the picture.

You can search for popular forms:

Or you can search for forms by state:

This is especially important for Louisiana because law here is unlike law anywhere else in the country. It’s strongly influenced by the Napoleonic Code, because…reasons.

…ANYway, if you really need some information and you can’t wait for the next Ask a Lawyer session to come by your local branch or other community center, the Legal Information Reference Center is a great place to start.

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.

 

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.

 

It’s here. It’s finally here.

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!