Yearly Archives: 2021

Connect your patrons with the tools they need for a successful school year! Tutor.com is a one-stop-shop for homework help & test prep resources and is available to all library card holders in Allegheny County!

Tutor.com’s Student Success webinar series is coming back next month with three more webinars*. These sessions on confidence building are perfect for students seeking a strong start to the new school year.

Please share this information with your patrons. You can learn more and register via the following links: 

• How to Gain Confidence in Class (Sept. 17 at 12:00 noon ET) 
• Overcoming Test Anxiety (Sept. 24 at 12:00 noon ET) 
• How to Gain Confidence in Your Writing (Oct. 1 at 12:00 noon ET)

On the topic of webinars, Tutor.com is also bringing back their monthly orientations. These are great for staff as well as patrons of all ages. In these orientation, Tutor.com will review all of the features you can find within our program, and they’ll take participants through different use cases for patrons. We hope you’ll sign up for a session and share the link below with colleagues and patrons:

• Tutor.com Orientation

*With all of the Tutor.com webinars, if you are unable to attend the training at the given time you will be sent an email with a recording that you can view as your schedule permits.

Spreading the word about this valuable resource is easy with the Social Media Toolkit from Tutor.com.

Find everything you need to share information about this resource on social media – from images to suggested wording and a timeline of posting possibilities!

All of the files are available to download and share on the eLibrary Backstage Marketing Materials page.

Happy back-to-school season!

Richelle @ Sewickley Public Library

Audiobooks continue to grow in popularity, as evidenced by the amount of copies of top titles in OverDrive. For instance, Laura Dave’s current bestseller “The Last Thing He Told Me” currently has 467 holds on 85 copies.

While certain titles will be popular in all formats, audiobooks do have an extra hurdle that print books don’t: what if the reader isn’t good? Any number of factors can contribute to not enjoying the narration of an audiobook–the reader chooses to take on accents they shouldn’t, inconsistently pronounces or mispronounces names, or they just don’t seem to fit for the listener.

While traditional reviews and word of mouth on a book can help in selecting whether to choose an audiobook, there are now more outlets that specifically review the audio experience.

AudioFile Magazine reviews many new releases, along with an extensive back catalog of reviews.

Book Riot has an audiobook-specific vertical on their website with reviews, news, and articles. They just released an article called “Who Listens to Audiobooks”, which highlights an interesting study done called Immersive Media and Books 2020. An especially interesting statistic for library staff: 81/4% of survey respondents that listen to audiobooks have a library card.

Vulture, the culture website of New York Magazine, has been doing a monthly audiobook recommendation article that generally includes some more obvious bestseller releases (they recommended “The Last Thing He Told Me” for July) with some more obscure fare. One other aspect that is interesting about Vulture’s coverage is they note the speed you can listen to the book at for optimal listening pleasure. One major positive to the growing shift to e-audio is being able to speed up narration when appropriate.

As audiobooks continue to grow in popularity, there will surely be more coverage specific to the audio experience of a title. These sites are a great place to start for both those new to audiobooks and those that go through multiple books a month.

Jeff, South Park