free webinar: finding your african-american ancestors

Public Library Staff are invited to participate in the second in a series of genealogy webinars, Finding Your African-American Ancestors on Monday, May 19^th at 10:30 a.m.  Advance registration for this session is required – please register on the Train Station.  

This webinar is designed for North Carolina library staff and will introduce research techniques for finding African-American ancestors during slavery through the 1940 census.  Topics will include free African-Americans before 1865 and standard genealogical methodology.  Several strategies will be presented to help others who are beginning to research their enslaved ancestors.

A link to the webinar will be emailed to registered participants one week in advance of this session.  The webinar will be recorded and available on the State Library website for those unable to attend the live session.  This is an excellent training for personal and professional development--and the price is right!

resource of the week: Science Daily

Since its inception in 1995, Science Daily has provided breaking news about scientific discoveries.  Offering thousands of research articles, images, encyclopedia entries, book reviews, and educational videos.  Visitors can browse more than 500 individual topics, grouped into 12 sections.  Stories and videos are posted daily, selected from hundreds of sources from around the world.  Links to sources and relevant journal citations (where available) are included at the end of each post.

new items in the catalog UPDATED POST

Thanks to Rebecca's suggestion and Edward's ingenuity, there is now
a "New Titles" link at the top of the catalog.  It defaults to new books
within the last month, but you can remove those filters and add your
own by clicking "Remove" and "New Titles" as noted above.

(the instructions in this post will still work, but this method is simpler)

resource of the week: GetHuman

If you've ever contacted a call center, you know how frustrating it can be to go through dozens of menus only to be caught in a web of press 1's and say the number's and I'm sorry, I did not understand that's. 

GetHuman, the web's largest database of customer-service information, provides free access to a catalog of direct phone numbers for large companies in 50 countries.  This resource is backed by Consumer Reports, LifeHacker, Time Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal.

new items in the catalog

Want to find the latest in YA fiction?  Our newest audiobooks?  The latest in children's non-fiction?  It's super-easy in our new catalog!  Just use the following steps (click on picture for larger image):

resource of the week: Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a collaborative effort of natural history and botanical garden libraries to digitze their collections and make them available.  BHL now includes more than 50,000 titles and 100,000 volumes that can be browsed or searched, together covering more than 1 million species.  BHL includes collections from Harvard, the American Museum of Natural History (NY), and the Smithsonian.  -Excerpted from Best Free Reference, Library Journal, 03/01/12.

resource of the week: ACCESS North Carolina

ACCESS North Carolina is a free, downloadable vacation and travel guide for people with disabilities that mixes text and icons to offer basic tourist site data.  Users can tell at a glance if a site is accessible or partially accessible for persons with disabilities.  It is published by the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services.