On an unusually snowy March night I ventured out to take Laurie Foley’s free workshop called “Blogging- Who, What, Where & How?” at the brand new Toco Hill-Avis G. Williams library. The audience was small due to the weather and mostly women. (Two-thirds of bloggers are men.) We all wanted to know the same thing — how do I start a blog and more importantly how do I get readers?

Laurie Foley is an award-winning blogger and business coach.  She presented us with the history of blogging. Did you know that 133,000,000 blogs have been indexed since 2002 but ninety-five percent are abandoned within four months? 72% are hobbyists, 15% are part-times, 9% are self employed and 4% are professionals.  A great professional blog is Huffington Post and a good local one to check out (besides DCPLive) is Decatur Metro.

Then she recommended some good books: The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott; Wordpress for Dummies, 2nd Edition by Lisa Sabin-Wilson and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (you can find all of these titles at DCPL).  Then she wowed us with the fact that 900,000 blog entries are posted every twenty-four hours. I must say I feel a little daunted but determined.

If you missed this class, don’t worry.  Every month the Library has many other computer classes which you can check out in our events calendar.

March 7-13 is Teen Tech Week, a national initiative that focuses on promoting libraries’ nonprint resources to teens. This annual event is sponsored by YALSA, the Young Adult Library Services Association and this year they have chosen the theme Learn Create Share @ Your Library. This year’s aim is to remind teens and those that work with teens that the Library is a place to learn how to effectively, efficiently and safely use technology in order to help with school, future careers and more. And of course, knowing how to use technology can be lots of fun!

In celebration of Teen Tech Week, the Dunwoody Library will be having a Teen Internet Scavenger Hunt. Teens are encouraged to stop by the Dunwoody Library to pick up a list of questions to be answered using the Internet and the DeKalb County Public Library website and Reference Databases. Those who answer all questions correctly have a chance to win a cool prize! Please click here for more information.

The Brookhaven Library will be hosting Robots, Go! a fun and interactive program that allows teens to create actual working robots. Click here for more information.

And don’t forget to visit DeKalb County Public Library’s teen events calendar for a listing of teen events through the Spring. There are ongoing programs that are designed to acquaint teens with various technologies at many of the DeKalb County Public Library branches. Stop by the Chamblee Library or Flat Shoals Library for a Wii game night, or sign up to take a PowerPoint class at the Toco Hill-Avis G. Williams Library.

And most importantly, if you are struggling with anything from research to resumes to social networking, remember that your librarian is here to help! So stop by your local Library today to see how you can use technology @ your library.

Also: check out the Library’s new Teen website, available March 5.  It’s a completely re-designed website where you can find advice from the library’s own teen volunteers on what to read, watch, and listen to.  It’s also got many other things too, like polls, reviews, and homework help.

Celebrated British novelist Salman Rushdie will have a multimedia exhibit of his life and works at the Emory Library’s Schatten Gallery from February 26 to September 26, 2010.  The exhibit is called “A World Mapped by Stories: The Salman Rushdie Archive,” and as part of the opening festivities tomorrow (Friday, February 26) there will be a symposium with Rushdie and other authors.  Read the full press release to find out more details.

The DeKalb County Public Library has copies of many of Rushdie’s novels, including Shame, Midnight’s Children, which won the Man Booker Prize as well as the Best of Booker Prize in 2008, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories and about a kazillion others.

Chinese New Year, that is. Chinese New Year is a centuries-old celebration that is based on the Chinese lunar calendar. The New Year celebrations begin on the first full moon of the year and last for about a week to 15 days.  This year marks the year of the Tiger and will begin on February 14. Festivities take place all over the world and many images that characterize the New Year include dragons, lanterns, fireworks and parades. Check out some wonderful images from last year’s celebrations at The Big Picture.

If you would like your child to learn more about Chinese New Year, the Library is an excellent resource! Check out the following books:

Celebrate Chinese New Year by Carolyn Otto

Paper Crafts for Chinese New Year by Randel McGee

D is for Dragon Dance by Ying Chang Compestine

The Chamblee Library will be hosting fun and festive programs in honor of the New Year and the Year of the Tiger. Children can drop by the Library by February 13 to pick up a tiger to decorate and enter in their Chinese New Year Art Contest and they can attend the Chinese New Year Craft on February 6. And don’t miss out on Chamblee Library’s Chinese New Year Celebration kickoff on February 13. There will be traditional drumming, dancing, and more! For more information call the Chamblee Library at (770) 936-1380 or check their online event schedule.

Recently, award winning author Neil Gaiman hosted a segment on the National Public Radio program Morning Edition during which he talked about the past and future of the audiobook format. Among the subjects he addressed were whether authors should narrate their own audiobooks (appropriate for some, while others “should never be allowed in front of a microphone”), the various challenges of the recording process (including audiobook performers whose “loud stomach noises” are equal in volume to their voices), and the difference between audiobooks and traditional books.

The segment also includes brief interviews with author David Sedaris and audiobook performer Martin Jarvis. If you are interested in hearing more than the excerpts included in the piece, you can head over to Neil’s blog to listen to the full length interviews.

Of the four audiobooks authored by Gaiman available in the DCPL catalog, he has acted as his own narrator half of the time; both were books produced for younger readers (Coraline and The Graveyard Book). If you, like Neil, enjoy the sound of your own voice, you might enjoy doing some volunteer work for LibriVox, a website which provides free audiobooks from the public domain. Volunteers simply record themselves reading chapters of eligible books and then those recordings are uploaded and released online as free audiobooks (you can search their catalog of available titles here).

One final note: Gaiman will be in town speaking and then signing books at Agnes Scott College’s Presser Hall on December 14th. As the tickets were free, and of limited quantity, it is unlikely there are any available at this point, but I felt it worth mentioning nonetheless. Click here for more info.

The first decade of the New Millennium–what are we calling these years? the aughties? the oh-ohs?–is coming to a close. If you scour the internet and troll the newsstands you’re likely to find that the jury may have reached a verdict on how to define the 2000s. If Time Magazine is to be believed, we have reached the denouement of “The Decade From Hell” (ouch!). There are numerous events within this decade that merit such harsh judgment: the current economic crisis, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. In light of those events, it’s easy to get caught up in the doom-saying and disparaging of an entire decade. But with only 29 days (and counting left) of The 2000s I’d like to at least try and find something nice to say about the decade.

Thinking back on where we were ten years ago, I can’t help but to recall the excitement yet trepidation with which we looked to the future. The 2000s were upon us! The Capital F Future was on its way! We were all very excited because we had a feeling that The Future was gonna look something like this:

Even though it’s been 9 years since the dawn of The New Millennium, to me the phrase the year 2000 will always have a futuristic ring to it. That phrase represented, for many generations, our hopes, dreams and fears for the forseeable yet distant future.  The 2000s decade may not have come to fruition in ways that our forebears had hoped (alas, no flying cars yet) and is instead being defined by the crises and challenges that came to a head in these years.  But perhaps we can also come to appreciate these strange and trying years for the opportunities they presented to us. I know for me, it’s most often through adversity and change that I learn who it is I really am and who it is I’d like to be.

The newspapers and media outlets scramble to assign a name or a definition to the years 2000 and beyond. But how do you define the decade? What has the New Millennium meant to you thus far?

I have to thank DCPLive’s own Jimmy for blogging about National Novel Writing Month last year because now the portmanteau “NaNoWriMo” is forever lodged into my brain. I ran out of time last year before I could reach the 50,000 word count (the number of words necessary to claim novel-writing success on the official website). Also, I just really couldn’t resist the urge to chuck the ideas that I grew frustrated with while racing the NaNoWriMo clock, thus completely missing the point of this particular exercise in freewriting and perseverance. So I’m going to give it another shot this year (though I’m now down by four days). So…thanks, Jimmy!

There are several books in DCPL to help you along the path to creating and finessing the novel of your dreams. Here are two that I like so far:

The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways To Bring Fiction To Life by Noah Lukeman: After you hammer out your NaNoWriMo novella, you may be wondering how to make it readable (and perhaps even enjoyable) to the masses. This is a great little book full of helpful hints and practical exercises for developing characters and plot.

Your Novel Proposal: From Creation to Contract by Blythe Camenson and Marshall J.Cook: Now that you’ve drafted a winning manuscript, take a look at this book. I really like the fact that it provides in-depth guides to conquering the more administrative aspects of authorship such as searching for an agent and submitting query letters. But first things first…let’s just make it through Novel Writing November and think about this other stuff later.

Happy Writing, ya’ll!

It seemed like the perfect way to spend a rainy Saturday morning. I’d read all the James Herriot books at least once. ER was my favorite TV show and lastly, my Dad was a doctor. An Animal First Aid Class seemed appropriate. And it was.  I attended the First Aid for Cats and Dogs class at the Dunwoody Library on October 17th.

Our Christopher Walken look-a-like instructor (John McCarren from Paw Paws Pet Sitting Service) showed us the basics of pet first aid. We learned everything from the infamous Mouth to Muzzle breathing technique (on a dog replica that came with a heart beat and pulse to show you if you were doing the technique right).  We learned to use an old credit card to scrape out stingers and to carry a dog to the car rather than have him walk, if a snake bit him.  We learned how to perform CPR, how to stop bleeding, how to strap a dog to a backboard if his back was broken and my favorite–the doggy Heimlich manuever.

I came home from class and my dog, Sammy, knew he was safer or at least he let me take his pulse and shake on it.  If you missed this event, don’t worry–you could check out Emergency care for cats and dogs : first aid for your pet by Craton Burkholder.  Also, there are many other educational programs at the library.

The thought of it sounds delightful but the cost brings me down–quickly. The library has the perfect solution for a night of family fun: dinner and a movie.  Several libraries offer recent blockbuster films.  All you have to bring is the family and a blanket and/or lawn chairs to sit on and of course, dinner.  You can even wear your pajamas . The kids will eat it up. And you won’t have to shell out for tickets and popcorn. (Although you can bring your own if you like!)

Upcoming movies include Bedtime Stories at the Chamblee Library on Tuesday, October 13 from 5-7PM.   Covington offers Teen Movie Day on Monday, October 12 from 1PM-3PM and Family Movie Night on Monday October 19 from 6PM-7:30PM.  Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa will be playing at the Wesley Chapel-WCB Library also on Monday, October 19 from 6PM-8PM.  The Gresham Library will show the holiday classic, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving on Tuesday November 24 from 6PM-6:30PM.  Check the online calendar for additional film screenings and more details.

The big S you see on DCPL programming is for Seniors.  Yes, the library has programs geared towards senior patrons (though you don’t have to be a senior to attend).

We offer everything from Healthy Living programs to Senior Movie Times. Here is a sampling:

• come test your knowledge of trivia at the Chamblee Library
• come knit with us, on the second and fourth Thursdays of every month, except for holidays
• come discuss a book, we have book discussion groups at many different branches
• want to learn about what classes the Georgia Perimeter College has to offer?  Denise Rixter gives you the details
• learn how to use the computer
• map out your ancestry in one of our genealogy workshops, every third Thursday of the month, except for holidays.

Here is a list of all our senior programs.