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Although the unemployment rate in Pennsylvania is around 4%, it’s always a good time for librarians to be aware of information that our patrons can use regarding new or changing career paths.

One such tool is Blue Career by EBSCOlearning. This is an easy-to-use resource that provides information on skilled trades.

Blue Career offers three different ways to explore careers and jobs – exploring, interested, and experienced.

For those exploring Blue Career provides an assessment based on a person’s skills and interests in a fun and interactive way.  

The results will also have the option to explore other trades if the result is not to your liking.

For those who already have an idea of what industry they would like to work in, the “Interested” section is the place to go.

From there Blue Career gives a list of positions available in an industry. From there they provide even more information about the job, like average salary and what skills and education are needed. There is also information on organizations to join, people to follow on social media, interesting blogs and videos to watch.

For those looking with experience and training looking for jobs, they can create a profile to connect with employers.

Tracy – Monroeville Public Library

The available collections from AncestryLibrary are constantly growing. There are more than 11,600+ collections featuring billions of records to explore!

But did you know that there are now more global records than ever before? Users can access records from countries all over the world – from Indonesia to France to New Zealand and so many more.

For example, one of the most recently added collections is the Births, Marriages, and Deaths 1539-1893 from Haute Garonne, France. This collection, all in French, offers full digitized records from the region.

In fact, many records collections contain untranslated, primary source documents in their original languages – preserving content along with context.

Users have many ways to search and browse these collections. They even have the ability to broadly search by geographic region through an interactive map under the advanced search options. Maybe they know they have family in a small town in France, but using the map, they can protentially see documents from nearby towns which may expand their search.

Collections include not only vital records (birth/marriage/death) but also digitized reference & history books, directories, land records and more.

This ever growing resource is a treasure trove for genealogists, researchers, scholars and anyone who is even a little curious!

– Richelle, Sewickley Public Library

Libby has made some new changes to help clarify what is going on with your holds – and that is great news!

You will now be able to see when a hold is expired or weeded from the collection and give you the option to clean up that hold. Examples of what that will look like are shown below.

The “Clean up hold?” option in red allows you to quickly cancel and clean away those holds.

The next great hold related news is related to those of us who have more than one library card listed on our Libby app. If you have more than one card with more than one library system this one is for you!

Now when you borrow a book but you have it on hold on another card with another system Libby provides the option to cancel that other hold. This is great news as it could free up space on the wait list for other patrons. Now we are all being a part of the solution and isn’t that a great feeling.

We know you like a tidy bookshelf (and hold shelf) just as much as we do so use these helpful new additions to Libby whenever you come across them!

Happy Reading,

~Adrianne, Northland Library