It’s that time of year again where avid gardeners are planning out their summer designs. Did you know that Libby and Hoopla has a large collection of Gardening materials?
https://libbyapp.com/search/acla/search/query-Gardening/subject-31/page-1
https://www.hoopladigital.com/search?q=gardening
Next time a patron asks for gardening books, don’t forget to check out the e-resources and all they have available!
Gabi – Robinson Library
This week is more of a life improvement tip than a professional pick-me-up. As (most of us, I assume) are residents of the wonderful Allegheny County, we are entitled to a lot of electronic library resources—particularly the titles available in Libby. Despite the best efforts of the DRC, some titles are simply too popular, and waitlists can sometimes extend into weeks and months. Sure, you could just find another book to listen to/read, but wouldn’t it be nice to have even more options for borrowing?
Enter the Free Library of Philadelphia.
But wait—we do not live in Philadelphia, how is this relevant? To answer, I would like to emphasize this paragraph from the Free Library’s website:
“A Free Library card is available at no cost to anyone who lives, works, pays taxes, or goes to school in the City of Philadelphia. In addition, anyone who lives in the state of Pennsylvania can obtain a Free Library card without charge.”
This would be a great time to mention a user can load several library cards onto their Libby account. My most recent and favorite success is South to America by Imani Perry. Recommended by a coworker, I was disappointed to see the waitlist extending into the double-digit number of weeks. But, with my handy-dandy Free Library of Philadelphia card, all was not lost:
The process for getting the card was simple and painless, and you can get started HERE. Because I am not a Philadelphia resident, the approval took a little longer (a few days) than for a typical Philly-dweller. Having two large libraries’ worth of electronic resources is proving a vast quality of life improvement.
I am curious if you have any hacks you have learned over your years in the greater PA library system! Please email me at smithc2@einetwork.net if you have any issues getting a Philadelphia card or want to swap tricks.
Happy reading.
Cameron R.S. Smith – Cooper-Siegel Community Library
One of the most often requested updates to Overdrive’s app Libby is now available – to request titles not yet owned by your home library, right in the app! This update includes two features called “Deep Search” and “Notify Me.”
Deep Search allows you to discover titles that are not yet in your library’s collection. Expanded search results will show when:
· You search for something that returns no results, or
· Your search results contain fewer than 100 titles and you manually turn on a filter called “Deep Search.” Libby will then show results not owned by your home library.
You can also add a “Notify Me” tag to titles that are not in your library’s collection. If your library purchases a title you have tagged, you will get a notification with the option to borrow (if available) or place a hold on the new item.
Watch this video from Libby on how this updated feature works!
Please Note: Users who previously accessed a similar feature called “Recommend to Library” in the classic Overdrive app or website will note that this option will be ending in April 2023, along with the discontinuation of the classic Overdrive app. Be sure to update to the Libby app or link to https://libbyapp.com/library/acla to keep accessing your library’s collection and to use the new features available for title suggestions.
— Heather Auman, Western Allegheny Community Library
As library staff, we are often asked to find a book someone read a few years ago or as a child. During the interview process, usually some information is gathered about plot, characters, location/setting…but we lack the title. In comes NoveList! I’ve used this resource many times to successfully locate the title and author for the patron.
Here you or a patron can enter in search terms and narrow down criteria for the book. For this patron, she had read a vampire romance YA book (that wasn’t Twilight). Under Advanced search we can enter in keywords and select the age group.
Once we brought up the results, you can further narrow down the results by selecting publication date range.
Narrowing down the results gave us a much smaller list to look over and looking at the book covers, we were able to successfully locate the book!
There is also a hand link to check the catalog!
A successful book hunt all thanks to NoveList!
Gabi B. – Robinson Library
