Friday, February 24, 2012

Happy Hunger Games!


Mark your calendars, you are hereby invited to the Hunger Games Movie Premiere Party hosted by the IKM-Manning High School Library! The movie hits theaters on Friday, March 23rd and our party will take place on Thursday, March 22nd at 5:00 pm.

Events will include Hunger Games training sessions in camouflage, knot tying, and other survival skills. Games and prizes as well as food and drinks will be provided. Come to discuss your thoughts on the FIRST BOOK and movie such as:
  • The cast: good, bad or indifferent?
  • The story: what will they mess-up/get right?
  • The soundtrack: (Taylor Swift) brilliant or not quite right?
If you are seriously interested in attending this event please RSVP to Ms. Stohlmeyer in the library!

Monday, February 13, 2012

Online Bookshelves


Hello Readers! Ever have trouble keeping track of the books you want to read? If you're anything like me your list never seems to shrink, just grow! There are several ways to handle this problem.

1. Write down titles on scrapes of paper, margins of notebooks, class assignments, or any available space.

2. Keep a list of titles in a Word doc or other text file on a flash drive or other electronic storage device.

3. Create an account at one of several online sites created for book lovers around the world! For example Shelfari, LibraryThing, and GoodReads.

Let me give you a piece of advice, choices 1 and 2 don't work. I don't know how many books I've forgotten to read because I lost the scrape of paper where I wrote the recommendation down. Keeping a Word doc is great, until you realize you lost your flash drive. So if, like me, you need a better way to organize what you read there is an "app" for that! I have personally used LibraryThing and Shelfari. I recommend Shelfari or GoodReads for causal readers, and here's why:


I prefer Shelfari for the horrible reason that it was prettier than my LibraryThing account. But I also found that the ways I could store information about my books was better. There are three "shelves:" books I plan to read, books I am reading, and books I have read. I can write a review of any book I have read for all to see or I can make notes for myself. I can rate the book, and note if I own a copy or would like to own a copy.


I know that GoodReads is similar to Shelfari, but they have more ways to personalize the organization and look of your "shelves." I feel like GoodReads is the next level up on the social media scale. This site is geared toward sharing and recommending books for all. I enjoyed my brief look at the site and would probably have started an account if I didn't already have a Shelfari account.

If you are looking for more information about any of the sites talked about in this post come on over to the library!


Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Countries of the World!

Are you looking for more in-depth knowledge about the United States or another country? Well look no further than Culture Grams Online Database provided by the AEA Online.

To begin choose between the World, State, or Provinces Editions. Next choose the location desired. For example in the World Edition I clicked over the continent Europe then clicked on the country I was interested in, France.

Once you get to the main article for the country you can browse around for the information you want. The left hand navigation has a variety of choices: Background, The People, Customs and Courtesies, Lifestyle, Society and finally At a Glance. The right side navigation has the following options:
Photos, Videos, Slideshows, Interviews, Famous People, Recipes, and more. I enjoy looking up information about famous people and recipes just for fun. some of the same options can be found at the top of the page navigation. Click on Recipes along the top and you are prompted to pick another country. This is navigation makes it easy to look up similar information about different countries.