Carrie Willis 
Posted on November 5, 2015
By Anne Nagrant, Customer Success Manager
I enjoy the act of writing, and I used to write really long essays in college, but I’ve never tackled a major project like writing an entire novel. It seems so daunting. I think I might have trouble staying motivated long enough to really make progress. Luckily for people like me, November brings us NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)!
Posted on November 4, 2015
During the time of unrest in Ferguson, we at the Ferguson Municipal Public Library (FMPL) made a conscious decision to simply stay open for our community. We forged many vital relationships during those difficult days by providing empathy, respect, and comfort to the people in our community.
Empathy and Respect – Keeping our doors open during the hard days created a shift in how the people of Ferguson thought of their library. The empathy and respect we showed our patrons created a synergistic boost to the community as a whole.
Understand patrons, and respect them as people. Everything else grows from this, but you have to really mean it. If you care deeply about your community, it shows in every conversation, decision, and service. This cannot be an abstract thing—caring in aggregate but not in specific. It’s about building actual relationships. After all, we serve each patron as a person, individually.
Read moreTools of the Trade: Empathy, Respect, Openness,
Communications, and the Library Mission
Posted on November 2, 2015
By Susan H. Hildreth, Executive Director, Califa Group, Pacific Library Partnership, Peninsula Library 
System, and Administrator, NorthNet Library System
I believe that the future relevance and success of the public library is dependent upon the library’s deep knowledge and commitment to community growth and success. Although many libraries have had stated commitments to community priorities, I do not think that we have been disciplined or strategic in effectively deploying the library’s assets to support those priorities. I want to highlight two resources funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that can provide a framework for integrating community insight into the ongoing program of the library.
Read moreSuccess = Aligning Library Services to Support Community Goals
Posted on October 30, 2015
With more than 45 million Google Apps for Education users worldwide and an average of over 40,000 Google search engine queries per second [1], Google is indisputably the place where people get their answers.
As the library seeks to continue to be a valued educational partner in communities, schools, and institutions, bringing trustworthy digital content into the natural path of the student or patron has never been more important. To make it easier for people to find and use this relevant, authoritative information, Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, has partnered with Google for Education in two ways: providing intuitive integration of popular workflow tools through Google Apps for Education and indexing content in Google Scholar.
The ability for students to seamlessly login using Google Account credentials is now available through:
Posted on October 29, 2015
Note to librarians: This blog post is for you to share! If you have this title, be sure to link it to your GVRL collection. If you don’t have this title and want to learn more, access a free trial today!
Almost everyone has a “vested” interest in knowing more about money and how to make it work for them. But if it were easy, everyone would be rich.
Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan once said, “The number one problem in today’s generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.”
Read moreThis Blog Post Is Only for People Interested in Making Money
Posted on October 26, 2015
By Jena Crable
Here’s a familiar genealogical conundrum: A researcher has traced his/her ancestors from present-day California back to the Dust Bowl-era in Nebraska, into Missouri just as it was achieving statehood, and finally to Indiana in the 1830s. At that point, the trail has grown cold even though legend has it that the family patriarch was a Pennsylvania patriot during the Revolution. So, how does the genealogist pick up the scent of the missing ancestor at this point?
By Rivkah K. Sass, Director, Sacramento Public Library
Randomly select 20 strangers and ask them what they think about their local public library. You’re likely to get 20 different answers, and most of them are probably not what you want to hear. As we think about who we are, what we do and, more importantly, what our brand is, chances are that our customers think we’re about books while we try to convince them that we’re so much more. After all, many of us loan games, do prom dress drives, teach punk-rock aerobics, partner with microbreweries (Edgar Allan Porter, anyone?), and offer 3D printing services. We push the envelope of what we loan and how we program for one reason and one reason only: to get people in the door so that they can discover what we really have to offer — ideas, inspiration, and access.
By Traci J. Cothran
“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads!” – Doc Brown
It’s hard to believe the first Back to the Future movie – starring Michael J. Fox – was released thirty years ago – 30 YEARS AGO! It may also surprise you to note that the “future” date visited via the time-traveling DeLorean in the movie is October 21, 2015 … which puts us officially in The Future.
Our editors on Biography in Context uncovered this fast fact recently, and currently feature Michael J. Fox (a.k.a. Marty McFly or Calvin) on the home page. We recently launched a new hotspotter feature in Biography in Context allowing users to hover on the pulsing circles on the picture to explore more facts about the subject (in this case, Parkinson’s Disease).
By Holly Hibner and Mary Kelly
Literary fiction “tends to focus on complex issues and the beauty of the writing itself,” according to the Writer’s Relief Staff at the Huffington Post (1). This is a great definition, and makes a distinction between literary fiction and mainstream or “popular” fiction, which is driven more by plot and characters than by insight or clever use of language. It seems short sighted to think that literary writing falls only outside of genre fiction, though. There are plenty of literary mysteries, literary science fiction novels, and even literary graphic novels. I’d like to suggest that literary fiction can, in fact, fall into a variety of genres and still hold true to the definition above.
Note to librarians: This blog post is for you to share! If you have this title, be sure to link it to your GVRL collection. If you don’t have this title and want to learn more, access a free trial today!
Resumes without special formatting… online applications… no phone calls… social media networking… computer-based screening…
If you’ve ever tried to explain the current processes for applying for a job to a grandparent (or maybe even a parent), you have a sense of how much it has changed in the last 20 years. And it continues to change. Today’s impersonal process can be confusing and off-putting to even the most determined job seekers.
Find information about careers, job hunting, and more
To support people in our community who are looking for new opportunities – whether for a job change or a new career – the library provides free access to a great resource: Life & Career Skills: Employment.