Kindle Book Loaning Enabled

Amazon has announced a new program of lending its Kindle books. Following Barnes & Noble's lead with its Nook e-book reader, Amazon now lets users "lend" books for 14 days to others even without a Kindle. While the book is on loan the original owner can't read the book.
Not all books are available for lending. Publishers and authors need to authorize such use. Books which are available are noted as being Lending: Enabled in the product details.

Remember: if you order from Amazon from the library's website the library gets a small percentage of the total.

Project Gutenberg eBooks Available from Library Catalog

A member of the school librarians' listserv recently forwarded a message from Valerie Horton of the Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC) and we have decided to take advantage of the offer.


CLiC created a project to clean up the most popular MARC records from Project Gutenberg called eDiscover the Classics. They identified the top 500 or so downloads and cleaned up those records and made them available to other libraries.

Since that time the records have been further enhancemented by Douglas County Libraries and University of Denver.

Valerie says to "please consider these MARC records a gift to the library community!  The more patrons think of libraries as a source for content for their Kindles, Nooks, IPads, MP3 players, etc - the better!"


These records are now searchable from the library catalogs of the Tam Unified HSD.


BTW, many more ebooks are available in the catalog by searching for call numbers starting with ADE. These are available through Adelaide University (Australia) and include a great number of books about the early exploration of Australia as well as many classics of British and American literature.


Need help accessing the catalog or finding these materials? Ask your teacher librarian.

Short Stories, Conic Sections, and the Magic Eye

It's not that often that a teacher brings a class in to find short stories to read. Today Jeff Ryan brought two of his American Lit classes to the library to find short stories.

I was able to show them how to find short stories using the catalog--search for the subject "Short stories," for example. Then I explained than in our library story collections by more than one author are kept in a special collection at the end of all the fiction books but that short story collections by one author are interfiled with the authors novels in the main fiction collection.

We also explored some online sources for stories. Since I had just recently downloaded the MARC records (1306 titles!) for the e-book collection at the University of Adelaide (Australia) I showed them how they could access the books directly from the catalog. Of course, most of the stories online are in the public domain and therefore fall into the "classic" designation.

Jeff had already alerted them several other collections online from his web page and I plan on linking to those sites as soon as I can from the library catalog. Some of the better ones included Bibliomania, Short Story Classics, and Classic Short Stories.

A couple other classes also used the library today.

Aaron Simon brought his Pre-calculus class to work on conic sections and vector projects. There's a well-established Mathematics page on the Library website which features a Google Custom Search box that searches good quality math websites. Students find the search and the links to specific sites to be particularly useful for this project.

And Matt Tierney brought his Psych class in to view some "magic eye" images.