Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Book Sales Abound

I was reading an article just now about surprisingly strong book sales around the country this holiday season.  The NY Times article quotes several book sellers expressing the wish that both print and ebook formats for books could coexist.  Personally, I think that they can, but only time will tell at this point.

Here at HPL we have 2 sales in December.  One, a Scholastic Book Fair which has just ended netted over $1,000 in credit with Scholastic for books for the Children's Department!  A second sale, which continues until December 23, is a special in-store sale in the Freindshop.  The Friends have 2 entire walls of their store at half-price.  Quite a bargain especially if you have a particularly voracious reader to buy for this year.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Success! Are You Prepared...for winter driving?


Saturday morning marked our first official "Are You Prepared...?" program with a winter preparedness car check provided by Midwest Superstore's service department.  Special thanks go to Clint and his crew from Midwest's service department for providing a pleasant, friendly and FREE experience for the patrons who signed up for the program.

Here's what happened:  We registered participants ahead of time for 12 time slots.  Patrons arrived in our NW parking area and checked in inside our garage area.  The folks from Midwest pulled the cars in by turns and provided the owner with a free visual inspection of the vehicle that included airing up the tires, wiper fluid fill and a check of filters, tire tread, and battery voltage.  The Midwest staff then explained their findings to the vehicle owners with recommendations regarding any issues they might want to address before winter arrives full-force.

We will continue our series of "Are You Prepared...for the END?  programs after the Christmas/New Year's holidays.  The programs are intended to be practical and fun and making light-hearted use of the fact that 2012 marks the end of the Meso-american long count calendar.  Look for upcoming programs on winter safety and preparedness, travel, gardening, financial and legal preparedness and more throughout 2012!

Wow!  We have a lot of junk in our garage!

Both stalls filled!

Who is that balding guy on the right?

Voltage test


Monday, December 5, 2011

The End of a State-wide Era

Today marks the end of the State of Kansas contract with the company OverDrive that supplied library patrons state-wide with access to downloadable eAudio and eBooks.  This change has only slightly affected us here at HPL since we have continued our own separate relationship with OverDrive (one that has existed since before the state-wide consortium).

The State Library is starting up a new service called Kansas EZ Library.  Right now patrons are only able to access eAudio provided by the State's new contractor, Recorded Books and their One-Click Digital service.  I hope that HPL patrons will try this new service and give us their thoughts about its value compared to OverDrive.  We have looked hard at alternatives to OverDrive and have yet to find one that we felt would serve our patrons best.  I am anxious for the State's eBook service to start later this winter.  The State will be using 3M's Cloud Library to loan eBooks to Kansas Library Card holders, which includes HPL patrons.  Again, once this service starts up, I hope to hear from our patrons regarding what the service is like from their perspective.  For our part, we will be evaluating both services.  Our process will continue to be driven by what is best for our patrons.