Yearly Archives: 2012

REGISTER ONLINE

The Electronic Resource (EREC) Committee is organizing another workshop for staff to learn about resources and earn CE credits. A certificate for 2.5 hours of continuing education credits will be earned by those who attend. This electronic resource workshop will focus on the subjects of Business and Finance.

Presenters will include Nancy Worek, from CLP Downtown and Business and Stacey Knibloe from Gale/Cengage.  Major topics will include the transition from Business and Company Resource Center to Business Insights and the Morningstar Investment Research Center. The workshop will also have an overview of business resources available at the Carnegie Library and other useful free online resources.

The program will take place on Thursday, September 27 from 10 AM-12:30 PM at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh – Allegheny Branch, 1230 Federal Street Pittsburgh, PA 15212. Parking is available on street or within the adjacent medical center parking garage. This program is organized by the Electronic Resources (EREC) Committee.

Registration will be accepted online.

NoveList is continually adding exciting features to make our jobs and the lives of our patrons easier.  Recently added are the “Professional Resources” located on the far right side of the NoveList homepage.

The Reader’s Advisory Toolbox offers quick access to information on Genres, Read-alikes, and Book Discussion Guides that will supply your book groups or inquisitive readers with book summaries and sample questions.  Featured Book Display Ideas are also available for ages ranging from Adult to 0!

The Teaching with Books feature provides BookTalks and Picture Book Extenders ready to go.  You can also find curriculum-based book lists and annotated bibliographies categorized by subject and grade level.

Keep an eye on NoveList for more enhancements and special tools geared to Librarians!

-Rob (Bethel Park)

The rush for required school summer reading list books is on… if you’re working at a public service desk, you’ll already seeing students of all ages coming in who need their required summer reading books, and you’ll probably seeing your collection of these books depleted.  There are plenty of free eBook versions of these commonly requested titles available and often students can access and download them immediately.

The library-provided Overdrive and EbscoHost services are available to students  and while Overdrive is probably familiar to most library staff, EbscoHost also has eBooks to download (but not Kindle ebooks at this time).

Project Gutenberg (which contains public domain books) is a good choice for free downloads.  PG offers most of its books as free Kindle books, as well as in the ePub format. (You can download free Kindle books directly to your Kindle by pointing your Kindle browser to m.gutenberg.org).  It also has a useful guide to downloading books from this site.

Epubbooks offers Kindle and ePub books available as free downloads. iBookNook has these downloads also and currently on the site is a recent post that lists 50 classic books that are available to download.

Amazon has free Kindle books that students may be looking for, and Barnes and Noble ran a promotion for a while for free “classic” eBooks but this has apparently ended.

Google offers free eBooks although they don’t organize the free ones as a browsable group.  Many classic books are offered for free.

I’ve included this link to free eBooks for Nook, and this link to free eBooks for Kindle (includes information on a free way to convert eBook files to Kindle) as additional resources.

If you only find a book in PDF format and have a real desire to read the book in the ePub format (here’s an article on the advantages of reading an eBook in the ePub format) for $23.95 you can download a PDF to ePub converter.

Looking forward to your comments on this post with your experiences with getting free eBook versions of the required summer reading books and what sites are better than others…

Ann Andrews

Cooper-Siegel Community Library