Free Resources – eLibrary Backstage

Health & Fitness from Home

Post published:June 8, 2020

Looking for ways to incorporate a fitness routine into your lifestyle? Did you know that Hoopla offers a variety of health & fitness workout videos to keep you moving? All titles are available immediately with no wait! Access is easy with your library card.

Check out the fitness collection…

Yoga

Dance

Full Body Workout

Jillian Michaels Workouts

Pilates & Toning

Qi Gong & Tai Chi

Virtual Walks

Prenatal Fitness

Fitness For Kids

And of course, if none of these other routines work for you, you can always keep it classic…

PowerSearch & The Economist

Post published:November 30, 2018

One of the state resources is PowerSearch, which enables one-stop searching of many Gale databases. It shows results from magazines, news sources, academic journals, and more.

While searching for slightly varied terms can yield wildly different results, it is nice to be able to start in one place. Don’t hesitate to tweak your search terms repeatedly.

One publication that is indexed is The Economist. While it’s certainly not a graphic-friendly browsing experience, it is one way to read articles, now that RB Digital is going away as a County resource. Currently, neither Flipster or OverDrive offer The Economist.

Articles from The Economist can also be found in Gale’s General OneFile and Infotrac Newsstand.

In any of these Gale databases, on the main screen, under the search box is a button for Publication Search. (Alternately, you can choose the Advanced Search icon, then choose the Publication Search tab). Within Publication Search, you can click the link to show a list of All publications in that database or just type your targeted name in the search box. With just a few more clicks, you will be at a list of issues, then a list of articles.

Christy, Carnegie Library of McKeesport

What Better Time to Find A Grave 🎃👻

Post published:October 15, 2018

‘Tis the season to introduce your patrons to FindAGrave.com! (Oooh, so spooky!) It’s like the wikipedia of cemeteries, and a truly awesome resource for genealogy research! FindAGrave.com is essentially a communal catalog of grave sites from across the world – where users document the names, dates, locations, photographs, etc. of burial plots, which they upload and share. It’s amazing how many cemeteries and burial locations have been documented by avid genealogists/researches/cemetery enthusiasts in the area – 168 in Allegheny County alone!

It’s equally surprising how many small and unmarked cemeteries are documented. I discovered this small, family burial ground in my hometown of Coraopolis, PA (in Allegheny County), which has only 6 plots. Driving past, you’d never know it was there!

This is a great resource to share with your library patrons that are interested in genealogy!

Richelle Klug,
Sewickley Public Library

Ancestry Library Edition

Post published:September 9, 2016

Ancestry Library Edition is a wonderful resource offered for free by the library. By offering patrons access to 7,000 databases and billions of records, it can help support research into local history and genealogy. Ancestry Library is available to patrons only at the library. That is good thing because it compels people to come to the library to see all the other wonderful things we offer.

Ancestry is easy for patrons to use. It has an intuitive search interface, detailed search indexes and helpful tools. Patrons can search through records such as:

Birth, Marriage, Death and Military Records
Tax, Criminal, Land and Wills
Stories, Memories, Histories and Pictures
City, School, and Church Directors and Histories
Newspapers, Maps, Atlases and Gazettes

ProQuest has some YouTube training videos. They are nice and short, so you can share them with your patrons. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-aFAdxOSTDcpY0OQQoffKmX2AEjpUYUP

Instead of paying for an Ancestry subscription, our library edition is a great alternative for patrons.

Lisa DeLucia, Upper St. Clair Library