Yo-ho-ho!

The Children's Room Summer Reading Program: "Treasure Reading" was a huge success this year. The kids loved the pirate theme. Our room was decorated like a pirate's lair, we had pirate crafts and displays, and our prizes were piled in a pirate's treasure chest.

This year, 513 children registered to read books and earn prizes. That is the highest number of sign-ups ever for our summer programs.

Our drop-in story hour had 409 children and parents visit over the summer, and 142 children and parents came to our summer movies. Our pirate-themed crafts were huge this year- 1,818 crafts were made! That is 700 more than last year. On a beautiful day in August we held our summer party on the front lawn, and 139 people enjoyed the weather, the party food, the raffles, and our children's entertainer, Stephen Blunt.

It is gratifying to see so many kids involved in reading over the summer- we wish them all the best for the coming school year.

Search the World's Card Catalog!

If you look at the library's Interlibrary Loan page on our website, you'll see that a new little search box has been added. It's small, but extremely powerful! This is our quick link to the tremendous resources of OCLC's WorldCat database. Enter a title, a subject or a person into the search box and WorldCat will hunt through its 1.3 billion records of items in 10,000+ libraries worldwide. Use the database to locate libraries which have the books you want to borrow, then fill out an Interlibrary Loan Request form and we'll ask the owning library to loan it to the Dover Public Library, and thence to you! By entering your zipcode, you'll get a list of the nearest libraries which have the materials and links to the libraries' online cataloging records. The world's largest card catalog...give it a try!

Teen Summer Reading Program Announces Winner

The Teen Summer Reading Program is officially over for this summer, and the lucky winner of the iPodNano is Patrick Jencso. Congratulations!

This Teen Summer Reading Program has been our most successful ever with twice as many kids participating as last year. The participants wrote 86 books reviews and read for a combined total of 925 hours. I am happy to report that reading is alive and well in Dover.

Growing pains

Sometimes, working with modern collections in an old library necessitates fitting a round peg into a square hole.
Yesterday, the 2nd hottest day of the year, we reconfigured two rooms on the main floor of the library, moving heavy furniture and several collections. Our 101-year old Carnegie building was never constructed to hold our ever-growing collections of DVDs, music CDs, and audiobooks in various formats. In 1905, the library opened with sturdy oak built-in bookshelves, only bookshelves. Who could have imagined anything else? Well, 100 years later, we had pretty much stuffed our Browse Room, the "happenin'" place for new books, with all kinds of multimedia and the storage units that hold them. Patrons could hardly move around in there without bumping into free-standing shelving units or other people!
Alternately, our bigger Reference Room was growing smaller, print-wise. So many reference sources are now accessed online that our physical collection of non-circulating books was growing smaller. Hence, the move!
We consolidated and shifted and were able to empty almost 1/4 of the reference shelves. Yesterday, the DVDs, the music CDs, and the movies on video took their new place in the front left of the Reference Room. (By the way, feel free to ask our adjacent reference librarians about any of these items: the librarians there can answer all questions about all collections, not just ones that strictly use reference books!)
Back in the now-spacious Browse Room, we moved the "New Mysteries" and "Fast Reads" sections, the "New Biographies", the audio books, and positioned a table for six in the middle.
New signage is our next project, but in the meantime, just ask!