Starting next month, movie nights will be slightly made over.  Every Wednesday at 4 pm, we will now have a Family Movie Night, where we will show a selection of films for the whole family.

In addition to Family Movie Night, we will also be introducing a weekly Game Day Frenzy.  Take an hour to play games on our iPads and Playstation 2, or come with a group of your friends and sit down to a more traditional board or card game. 

Game Day Frenzy starts on Monday, June 4th, and will take place every Monday through August, starting at 4:30 pm and going until 5:30.  Hope to see you there!

Yesterday, a few of the folks from the Taipei Cultural Center dropped by the library to install this beautiful photo exhibit celebrating Taiwan's (or the Republic of China's) centennial.  The exhibit is called Retracing Our Steps: A Photo Journey through 100 Years of the ROC.  It is meant to explore "the ROC's development over the past century, encouraging visitors to remember the past, cherish the present and look forward to the future," as well as to "illustrate the nation's transformation and the blossoming of diversity, creativity and tolerance in the hundred years since the founding of the ROC."

Retracing Our Steps will be on display throughout the library until the end of May.  Come on by and celebrate one hundred years of Taiwanese culture with us. (More pictures from the exhibit after the jump.)

Beginning next Saturday, May 5th, Cinco de Mayo, our Tech Tutors will be offering weekly one-on-one sessions from 10 am to noon.

Drop by the library any Saturday through August with your digital device and we'll walk you through the process of checking items out from our Digital Media Catalog onto your device.

Sessions start when we open at 10 am and will be offered on a first come, first serve basis.  Hope to see you there!

It's one of those three times of year again!  Next Saturday, April 28th, the Friends of the Northwest Library will be hosting another one of their infamous book sales.  Books for all ages, VHS, DVDs, CDs, & LPs for a small fraction of their retail value, and a variety of deals throughout the day. 

The sale starts when we open at 10am and lasts until 4pm.  Make sure to stop by and show your support for your local library and your community.

The OverDrive App is now available for Android products!  You can download it free of charge through Google Play, the new Android Marketplace, on your smartphone or tablet.  

An exception to this rule is with the Kindle Fire.  The App Store on the Fire is run through the Amazon marketplace, which is a subset of the Android marketplace that, unfortunately, does not at present carry the OverDrive App.  However, there is a fairly simple way around this.

Amazon's default settings of the Kindle Fire make it so that you cannot download third-party (i.e. non-Amazon) apps.  To their credit, they make it fairly easy to turn this setting off.  The first step in getting the OverDrive app to your Kindle Fire is to tap the gear at the top of your screen to go into the device's settings.  Next, select the far right option that reads "More..."  Scroll down and tap where it says "Device".  Towards the bottom of the screen, tap where it says "Allow Installation of Applications From Unknown Sources".  Naturally, a warning about the security of your Kindle pops up.  Select OK.  You should now be allowed to install third-party applications to your Fire.

The next step is to open the web browser on your device and to head to Overdrive.com.  

As you may have already noticed, our webpage has had something of a facelift.  With this has come a slight difference in how to access our Digital Media Catalog.  You will notice that the "HCPL Digital Media Catalog" icon is no longer in the center of the page.  But fear not!  There are several simple paths from our new homepage to our Digital Media Catalog.

The first path, and probably the easiest navigationally, is by clicking the blue icon on the right side of the page that reads "eBooks and More".

Did you know that we've added 692 titles to our Digital Media Catalog in the past 30 days?  If you are already familiar with our Digital Media Catalog, browsing for recently added titles is relatively painless.  What follows is a step-by-step tutorial on how to do so.

First, head to HCPL's website, hcpl.net

Of course, if you are using an iPad, you can bypass this step by using the Overdrive app.  

So.  What makes a good book?  It's a tough, and perhaps ultimately unanswerable, question.  And if there is an answer, it certainly varies from person to person (Every reader his [or her] book -S.R. Ranganathan).

When I first heard about Why We Broke Up, the new Young Adult novel written by the great Daniel Handler and illustrated by the great Maira Kalman, I knew that I had to read it, because I thought it had the potential to be a great book. But, as will happen from time to time, I thought wrong.

Have you been meaning to try reading one of those eBooks everyone's been talking about on your iPad?  Do you read books regularly on your eReader, but you're tired of coughing up all of the dough to do so?  Do you have a brand new reader and no idea where to start? 

Let us help!

In celebration of Read an eBook Week, which runs this year from March 4th-10th, on Saturday, March 10th,  the Northwest Library will have two of our Tech Tutors on hand, offering one-on-one sessions all day (10am to 5pm), advising you on how to check eBooks out from our Digital Media Catalog to your digital device.

Bring your own device in, or learn with one of ours.  And don't fret:  with the recent addition of over 500 new titles, there's surely something in our Digital Media Catalog for everyone.

As Deborah has already mentioned, next Saturday, February 4th, Menchie's Frozen Yogurt will be teaming up with the Friends of the Northwest Library for a fundraising event.  And while we will have an abundance of flyers inside the library available, we have also made the flyers available online for you to print out, on our Facebook page as well as in this blog entry below: