Blind Date With A Book

Need a date for Valentine's Day? You can check one out at the library!

Snow Time to Read

We're just over a month into our adult winter reading program, Snow Time to Read. If you haven't already signed up you can do so here. Anyone 16 and up is welcome to participate. The program runs from January 1st to March 31st. You simply log your books online and once you've read 15 Young Adult or Adult books you get a prize--an attractive mug and a pen that also functions as a stylus for your mobile device or tablet! Your name will also be entered into a drawing for even more great prizes.

Have you ever heard of Amazon Smile?

Amazon gives %.05 of the total you spend on Amazon to the charity of your choice! If you're already an Amazon shopper, all you have to do is pick a charity and start you shopping at smile.amazon.com.

Learn more about Amazon Smile here

We'd love it if you picked the Friends of the Bemidji Public Library, but we know Bemidji is a giving bunch with many wonderful non-profits to choose from. We just wanted to let you know about this exciting (and free!) opportunity to help your community. Check it out today!

Go to Amazon Smile

2016 Reading Challenge

Bemidji Public Library is hosting a reading challenge in 2016.  Readers completing all 30 challenges will be invited to an end of the year party.  Those completing the bonus challenges as well will also be entered into a prize drawing.  Keep track of your books and either bring your completed list to the library or email it to us at bjprograms@krls.org.

If you need suggestions on any of the challenges, we'll be posting book lists here on the blog.  We'll also have book displays up year long at the library.  Do you have any good recommendations?  Leave it in a comment!

23 Things Accomplished, But Still Experimenting

Earlier this summer I finished the 23 Mobile Things program where I tried out mobile apps on my phone and Kindle Fire.  I had so much fun that I'm still trying out new things.  The exception is I'm trying out programs on the computer.  Just as fun and exciting.  And full of frustrations.

Since I do a lot of the posters around the library, I'm always on the lookout to jazz them up a bit.  Microsoft Publisher works pretty well, but there's only so much one can do with it.  So far I have found two internet sites that I've been playing around with,  Canva.com and infogr.am. Each have free options and pay options.  Right now I'm just using the free ones.  If they turn out to be super cool and I can't live with out them, maybe I'll upgrade.

Canva.com is a program where you can design posters, covers and pictures for your social media pages and posters to print.  It took me awhile to figure out how to print my poster.  It's a lot simpler to post it directly to Facebook or other site.  So far the free options are working just great for me.  There are a lot of text fonts to choose from, lots of colors, cool graphics and other options.  They also have awesome tutorials that walk you through many of their options and give great graphic design tips.  The one thing that I've found frustrating is that it doesn't work on Internet Explorer.  All our computers have IE.  I was able to download Firefox onto a couple computers.  Now I can usually use canva.  One time the computer freaked out and restarted itself while I was in the middle of trying to make a new picture.  Not quite sure what that was about, but everything still worked after.  Weird. But anyway, here's the poster.  Not too exciting, but I'm still getting a hang of the program.

I'll post about infogr.am next time.  I still haven't done much with that one, but so far it's super neat.

A Little Bragging

 

Completed all 23 Mobile Things! Yay!  It was a fun program, but I'm glad it's done.  On to something new!

 

 



Check out the 23 Things if want to check out all the apps we had to choose from.  I didn't try out even half of them.

Thing #23--Evaluate 23 Mobile Things

Doing this project was very fun and interesting.  Many of these apps I don't think I would have heard about, much less tried out, on my own.  I also came away knowing that there are more to apps than social media, games and buying things.

My favorite app has definitely been Wattpad.  My husband told me my motivation level has gone way down since I downloaded that one.  And of course the Facebook app I use a lot.  Both for checking my personal account and the library's account.  I have also found myself posting more and more photos on Instagram.  Never thought I'd be doing that. 

All in all, I'm glad I participated.  I learned a lot and I would definitely do something like this again.