new kindle title: miss buncle's book

From Melody--

A new title, Miss Buncle's Book, has been added to the Kindles.  Please sync any Kindles that are checked in, and be sure to sync them as they are returned.

Thanks!

affordable healthcare info session

Novant Health Rowan Medical Center will host an information session and enrollment event from 3 to 7 p.m. on Nov. 14 at the Salisbury Civic Center for people who are uninsured, purchase their own health insurance, or want to understand the current health insurance marketplace options through the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The event is a collaboration between the hospital, Rowan County Health Department, Department of Social Services and local insurance brokers.  Click here to read the full article from the Salisbury Post.

nc live workshops

NC LIVE Basics workshops will be held:
November 8 – Transylvania County Library, Brevard. Register here.
November 14 – Hickory Grove Branch, Charlotte Mecklenburg Libraries, Charlotte. Register here.


Click on the individual links above or visit the Train Station to register.   Space is limited and advance registration is required.

Coming in the spring . . . a new NC LIVE Advanced workshop and NC LIVE subject-specific training, including NC LIVE-Kids, NC LIVE-Health, and NC LIVE-Business.  Dates and locations for these spring workshops will be announced at a later date.

-From the State Library of NC's blog.

resource of the week: DocsPal

DocsPal is a free online file converter that supports all kind of documents, video, audio, images, e-books and archives like microsoft word (doc, docx), powerpoint (ppt, pptx), excel (xls, xlsx), open office documents (odp, odt, ods), and many others. Moreover, it offers an online viewer that allows you to view documents and images online directly in your browser, without having to install anything else.  It is similar to Zamzar (shared earlier on the blog), but DocsPal does not require an e-mail address.  Thanks to Edward for sharing this great resource!

resource of the week: affordable care act resources

The State Library of North Carolina has put together an excellent guide for the Affordable Care Act, which is now available from our homepage or by clicking here.  This guide features videos about the act, health insurance basics, brochures and pamphlets, applications, and more.  And thanks to Edward and Gretchen, the guide has been customized to include local resources for Rowan County.  WebJunction also produced an excellent free webinar back in July, which is archived for viewing here.  Additionally, Larry Ferlazzo has created a list of the best interactives showing how the new healthcare act works here.

new kindle titles

From Melody--
Two new titles have been added to the Kindles (two short stories by Lee Child).

Please synch all Kindles when they come in so that these will be loaded.

I have updated the list of Kindles in our procedures; we currently have 13 working Kindles.  All others have been withdrawn.

new features added to Overdrive

Two exciting new features are now available on Overdrive (NC Digital)... 

Users can now renew a borrowed title if no other users are on hold for that title. The renew option becomes available on a user’s Bookshelf three days before the title is scheduled to expire. Users may only renew a title one time.

A high-contrast option for visually impaired users is now available.

 

 

resource of the week: free OCR

Free-OCR.com is a free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool. You can use this service to extract text from any image you supply.

This service is free, no registration necessary.  Just upload your image files. Free-OCR takes either a JPG, GIF, TIFF BMP or PDF (only first page).  The only restriction is that the images must not be larger than 2MB, no wider or higher than 5000 pixels and there is a limit of 10 image uploads per hour.

Free-OCR can handle images with multi-column text and also supports more than 25 different languages.  Thanks to Edward for sharing this great resource!

convert PDFs to Kindle format

PDF4Kindle is a neat little free service that will convert PDFs into .mobi format for reading on Kindle devices.  To use the service all that you need to do is upload a PDF and let PDF4Kindle do the rest.  When the conversion is complete you can download the .mobi file.  The converted file will let you resize the text as you would with any other Kindle document.

Originally from Richard Byrne's blog, Free Technology for Teachers (07/17/13 post).

resource of the week: Forvo

Ever wondered how to pronounce otorhinolaryngological?  Or maybe something a little shorter but equally as baffling, like macabre?  If so, check out Forvo.com, the largest pronunciation guide in the world with audio pronunciations in more than 200 languages.  Forvo is used by the staff at RecordedBooks to help narrators correctly pronounce words in their audiobooks.