A Listening Session is Coming to You; Your Book Choices Just Grew by 1 Million!
Community Listening Sessions continue across the library district. It's your chance to tell library leaders what you like about library services and what you'd like to see and do in the future. The next series of one-hour sessions begins Monday, Oct. 21, at 10 a.m. in the Midtown Carnegie Branch.
Patrons in the area of the 24-hour kiosk, the Library Express West, are especially invited to drop by two sessions in your neighborhood: 10 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 23, or 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24, at Price Cutter, 335 N. Nolting Ave., near West Chestnut Expressway and West Bypass.
More sessions are at 10 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 24, in the Library Station Santa Fe Room; and 10 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 31, at the Republic Branch
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Your selection of books and other materials just exploded. Members of the Springfield-Greene County Library District can now borrow materials from the largest public library system in Arkansas.
The Central Arkansas Library System, or CALS, is contributing a majority of its one million items to the MOBIUS catalog, accessible at thelibrary.org/catalog. CALS serves Little Rock and Perry and Pulaski counties.
Now through MOBIUS, you have access to more than 30 million items from 193 institutions in Missouri, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas, Texas and Arkansas.
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If you’ve ever done family research, you know that obituaries are an essential tool in building your story. In fact, an obituary is sometimes the only place the “story” of the deceased is recorded, says Connie Daughtrey, president of the Ozarks Genealogical Society, or OGS.
So researchers cheer the launch of the Ozarks Obituary Collection, an online collection of more than 115,000 obituaries from southwest Missouri newspapers (outside Springfield) that OGS volunteers have collected since the 1980s, digitized and just made available for all researchers.
You can find it at thelibrary.org/lochist, and click Digital Archive under the Browse by Topic.
"For those genealogy researchers with links to the Ozarks, finding an obit in one of our area newspapers can sometimes be daunting,” Daughtrey says. “Even though we often hear that ‘most genealogy records are online now,’ we are all aware that Legacy.com doesn't get all the smaller newspaper obits and Newspapers.com doesn’t always cover the smaller towns. Thanks to online obit projects such as the Ozarks Obits and their efforts to fill that gap, the ability to find a searchable database is priceless.”
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Two adult must-sees: Tour Haunted Libraries of the Midwest from 6-7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 22, at the Schweitzer Brentwood Branch. Library staffers Marily Weddell and Tod Jackson will share images, news stories and firsthand accounts of five of the Midwest’s most haunted libraries.
At 7 p.m. Thursday, October 24, in the Library Center auditorium, meet New York Times best-selling author Jennifer McMahon for Haunted Places and Haunted People. She’ll discuss her writing, her love of the horror genre and what it means to be haunted. Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event.
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