Looking for a job? Trying to pass the GED? Taking the U.S. Citizenship class?

Whether you are going back to school, switching jobs, or just want to brush up on an academic skill, our Adult Learning Center is here to help!

One of the best resources is Write a Winning Resume! Upload your resume and they will review it and make suggestions on how to make it a great resume. Some places charge hundreds of dollars for this service, at the Library it’s free!

Other services include:

• Pass the GED
• Prepare for the US Citizenship Test (includes the entire test)
• Microsoft Office Help (Need to know how to do something in word, excel or Powerpoint? This will show you.)
• Career Resources (Looking for a job, start here!)

Paranormal Romance

With romance in the air this month, you may be looking for some romance novels in the library’s collection. To avoid the sappy love stories and opt for a paranormal romance.

Use NoveList to discover a broad list of titles, simply enter paranormal romance in the “Search For” box  and select in GN Genre on the homepage of NoveList and click Search. For a more specific search, use the additional lines in the Advanced Search page to include subject terms, such as vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, or demons. More general subject terms like supernatural or immortality will also yield results.

Because this is such a popular category, your search may still be too large. Use the appeal options in the “Narrow Results by” section to the left of your results to cut your list down to titles with a certain Tone (steamy, dramatic) or Writing Style (compelling, descriptive).

You can then re-sort your list by Popularity from the Sort by: drop-down to print the most popular 5 – 50 (selected from the per page drop-down) paranormal romances that match your subject and appeal preferences.

Once you find a book in Novelist you are interesting in reading, click the Check Library Catalog link at the bottom of the book’s record.  If the library owns the book it will take to the book’s record in the library’s catalog.

Hot Topics: Cricket and Veterans Day

Image via Wikipedia

Credo Reference has added these new topic pages this week. topic pages provide background information on a topic with links to other resources to learn more about the topic. They are a great place to start learning about a topic.

Cricket
Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir have been sentenced to prison terms for spot-fixing and match-fixing in exchange for large incentives enabled by large gambling rings. Such sentencing is the first of its kind as communication in a globalized world makes such situations more and more common not only in the cricket world, but also in sports.

Image by Josh LeClair via Flickr

Veterans Day
Just in time for Veterans Day (or Armistice Day), President Obama has launched his “We Can’t Wait” initiative in which veterans, particularly those serving post-9/11 and those who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, will have access to databases that will match skills learned in the military to civilian jobs in addition to job postings geared to veterans. The goal being that every veteran will be employed shortly after arriving home.

Novelist: Finding Read-alikes in Reviews

NoveList displays reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and School Library Journals in Series and Title Detail pages when available, and these are great sources of information for those deciding whether to pick a book up. But did you know that you can use the Advanced Search to mine those rich reviews to help you pick your next great read?

For example, you can use reviews to find read-alikes. Let’s say you  loved the Kay Scarpetta mysteries, but you’ve already read the series suggested in the NoveList Also Recommends section of the Series Detail page:

Use the Advanced Search (located under the basic search box at the top of the page) and follow these steps:

1. Access the Advanced Search page by clicking the Advanced Search link in the Search For… box on the homepage.
2. In the first field, enter scarpetta, and select RV Review from the adjacent drop-down.
3. In the next row, select NOT from the Boolean drop-down.
4. Type cornwell, patricia daniels in the next field, and select AU Author from the adjacent drop-down.

5. Click Search

This will give you a list of titles with reviews that mention the Kay Scarpetta mysteries, excluding those titles written by Patricia Cornwell.

Cyber-Bullying eBooks

Are you planning a lesson plan around Cyber-Bullying this school year?  The library can help with ideas and resources which can be found on our Hot Topic page – Cyber Bullying.

Resources include open access ebooks on Cyber Bullying from ebrary. The collection, which is subsidized by ebrary and now includes over 100 titles, will help parents, educators, and others better understand, prevent, and take action against this growing concern. You can find the link to this great resource of ebooks on our Hot Topic – Cyber Bullying listed under Internet Resources.

Newly added titles include Cyberbullying: Activities to Help Children and Teens to Stay Safe in a Texting, Twittering, Social Networking World, by Vanessa Rogers (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010) and Banishing Bullying Behavior: Exploring the Culture of Pain, Rage and Revenge, by Suellen Fried and Blanche E. Sosland (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2010).