We are very excited to announce that the  Book Hunters! Your Personal Reading Consultants is the public library recipient of the 2012 Highsmith Library Award from the Texas Library Association. eBranch Librarian Grace Lillevig and Linda Stevens, Coordinator of Marketing and Programming accepted the award of behalf of Harris County Public Library at the Second General Session at the TLA conference, in Houston on April 19, 2012.  The award is for “libraries that have implemented creative marketing projects and/or promotions to enhance their visibility within their service community.”  

The Book Hunters service offers personalized book recommendations based on the preferences listed by the reader.  Are you looking for something new to read?  Try it out today.

Congratulations to all of the Harris County Public Library Book Hunters

The eBranch has been working on a facelift to the website for several months.  The facelift is now complete.  The changes include:

• Navigation menus were reworked to be more compact.  In addition, clicking on a menu item takes you directly to the page.
• Locations dropdown menu once again includes all branch locations for one-click access
• Links to important content are reorganized, made more prominent
  Branch pages are more streamlined
• Design is brighter, more graphics-based, less text
• The outdated Spanish language section has been removed.  In its place is a Google translation option for Spanish, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Vietnamese.

We  hope you enjoy the redesigned website.  We welcome any comments or questions you may have.

We are giving HCPL.net a facelift! Click the image below for a larger preview. The aim of the facelift is to fix several issues with the website. The following changes address those issues:

• Navigation menus are more compact
• Menus are now clickable
• Locations dropdown menu will once again include all branch locations
• Links to important content are reorganized, more prominent
• Branch pages are more streamlined
• Design is brighter, more graphics-based, less text

The new design will launch in late March. If you have feedback, either comment below or send us feedback.

Update @ 2PM - The upgrade is complete and we have a temporary solution in place to help with the socket errors many of you have seen over the past few days.  A permanent solution should be in place by next week.  Thank you for your patience.

Our Digital Media Catalog vendor, OverDrive, will perform an equipment upgrade today (12/29/2011) at 10:30 AM to improve performance. This will cause an interruption of service that could last from 30 minutes to up to two hours.

We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

We experienced some major problems with the site over the past couple of days and as a result we have had to switch to our new theme. For some customers, the menu containing the links to our catalog and My Account is being pushed into the banner and making it difficult to read. We are still working on this issue as well as the problems some customers are experiencing with the dropdown menu tabs. The menu that allows you to access the Catalog and My Account now also appears in the left hand sidebar just under the weather display and the Twitter button and Facebook Like button. Please click the image to the right to see a screenshot highlighting this menu.

Tomball and Cy-Fair libraries will close at 4 PM on Wednesday, February 9 due to current weather and road conditions.  We anticipate they will re-open at 10 AM on Thursday, February 10.  If conditions are bad in the morning, please contact the libraries before heading out.

UPDATE: All Harris County Public Library branches and Library Administration will be closed on Friday, February 4.  Regular hours will resume on Saturday, February 5.

All Harris County Public Library branches and Library Administration will be closed the morning of Friday, February 4, 2011.  Lone Star College Cy-Fair and Lone Star College Tomball libraries will be closed all day Friday and Galena Park and South Houston normally closed on Friday. Weather and road conditions will be assessed late in the morning to determine if any branches will open in the afternoon.

The Digital Media Catalog is back up!

The Digital Media Catalog is currently not working. We are aware of the problem--it is an issue on the Digital Media Catalog server. We hope that the Digital Media Catalog will be restored as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience while we wait for it to come back up.

We apologize for any access issues you may have had over the last day or two to our website.  All problems should now be corrected.  If you used the contact form or Book Hunters form over the last day or two, please resend your request or question.

Do you enjoy reading fiction adventure - think Tom Clancy, Brad Thor, etc.?  Or perhaps you're more interested in biography and nonfiction?  Want to get monthly suggestions on new titles to read?  If so, check out our new newsletters for Fiction Adventure and New Nonfiction.  You can sign-up to receive these newsletters each month either via email or RSS.

If you read something else, say romance or mystery, we have newsletters on a variety of topics.  Sign-up today from the same page and start getting monthly suggestions!