Library Life
Looking for more books about good love gone bad, bad love that feels good and love in all the wrong places?
Check out our KCPL Pinterest page, Books of Love.
The Library’s latest Pinterest Contest, Christmas Books: Past, Present, and Future, is over. But before we settle down for a long winter’s read, we’d like to congratulate Kristi Bond, the winner in the drawing for the grand prize.
From Dec. 3 - 10, 2012, the Kansas City Public Library invites patrons to use Pinterest to share their Christmas Books: Past, Present, and Future for a chance to win a Kindle Paperwhite.
Do you like giving books as Christmas presents? How about receiving them? What books remind you of holidays past?
These are the questions we want you to keep in mind as you join us on Pinterest for a celebration of giving (and receiving) the gift of reading over the holidays.
If you’ve ever read or seen A Christmas Carol, you probably noticed how we’ve adapted the book’s Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future as our guiding motif. That’s no accident as we’ve been remembering Dickens this fall through our What the Dickens? series of book discussions, performances, and events.
Now, as Christmas approaches (whether you celebrate the actual holiday it or not), we want you to have fun and get practical by using Pinterest to plan your book reading, gifting, and receiving this holiday season – all for the chance to win a pretty sweet prize.
Why do Kansas City kids love their library? For some, it’s the books, movies, and stories that inspire and excite. For others, it’s having a safe place to let their imaginations run wild.
One thing’s clear. Kids do use – and love – their local libraries.
A recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 60 percent of Americans under 30 used a library in the past year for activities such as research (46%), borrowing books (38%), and reading newspapers and magazines (23%).
“The statistics are nice, but what really means something to us is the anecdotal evidence,” says Outreach Education Librarian Anna Francesca Garcia. “We wanted to collect as many stories as we could to get a sense of the impact the Library has on people.”
Over the past several weeks, our Youth Services librarians have been inviting Kansas City Public Schools students to write us telling why they love the Library. The best submissions are being honored at an awards ceremony on Thursday, November 8, 2012, at 6 p.m. at the Plaza Branch (4801 Main St). The winners will be awarded books as their prizes
Do you like to read aloud to your kids? Now’s the time to prove it! This November for Family Read Aloud Month, we’re teaming up with Mayor Sly James’ Turn the Page KC initiative to show the world, in pictures, that Kansas City is a reading town.
It’s like magic. Patrons around the metro will be filling Harvesters’ pantry with food, and their Library late fees will be dropping like autumn leaves. Yep, it’s Food for Fines time at the Kansas City Public Library!
Monday, October 22, through Sunday, October 28, 2012, bring undamaged and unexpired boxed or canned non-perishable food items to any Library location during normal business hours. Each single food item will be applied as a $1 credit toward the reduction of existing overdue fines. All food will be donated to Harvesters Community Food Network.
We do Food for Fines every year, but this time we’ve come up with a special treat for our 7,000-plus Twitter followers.
Because Kansas City has got a crazy-good restaurant scene, we thought it would be fun to connect with some local restaurants and ask them for a $10-$15 gift card to give away each day during Food for Fines.
Of course, they all said heck yes! and so #FoodforFines officially got hashtag status!
Kansas City Royals Hall of Famer Frank White launches his new memoir with a public event on Tuesday, October 23, 2012, at the Kansas City Public Library Plaza Branch, 4801 Main St.
To mark this home-run event, we’re giving our social media-savvy Library fans a chance to win two autographed copies of his new memoir, and two signed baseballs. Read on and play ball…
Frank White was considered by many to be the premiere second baseman of his generation. An outstanding fielder (he won eight Gold Gloves), White was also potent at the plate (he was one of only two second basemen to bat cleanup in a World Series after Jackie Robinson).
He was also a Kansas City icon. He played his entire career for the Royals, helping lead the team to two World Series appearances and a World Series victory over the St. Louis Cardinals in 1985. His No. 20 is one of only three Royals numbers to be retired.
He later managed the Royals’ AA affiliate – then in Wichita, Kansas – and later became the color commentator for the big league club.
On Wednesday, October 23, 2012 at 6:30 p.m. at the Plaza Branch, White will discuss his memoir One Man’s Dream: My Town, My Team, My Time, which gives fans an inside look at White’s baseball legacy and also touches on his dramatic split with the Royals in 2012.
For a library, sending people to Google may sound, well, a bit self-defeating. But when we learned that Google would be launching its brand-new, ultra-high-speed network in Kansas City, we began preparing for a Google Fiber future.
In the new free film series Movies That Matter, the Library’s film czar, Robert W. Butler, has programmed 20 films he deems essential to film literacy. They range from Citizen Kane to Snow White.
Google Fiber is coming to Kansas City. But will it come to all of KC – or just to the neighborhoods where people are already enthusiastic about having fiber-optic power in their homes and local schools and libraries?
At the Kansas City Public Library, we want everyone to be connected. It’s why we provide more than 700 public computers plus free wi-fi to our patrons. It’s also why we’re working to insure that each of our eight locations that are eligible for Google Fiber will receive the free connection that Google has promised to public buildings in neighborhoods that reach their goal by the September 9, 2012, rally period deadline.
Wait, there's a deadline?
It’s true. Google has divided KCMO and KCK into “Fiberhoods.” Each fiberhood must rally its residents to go online at fiber.google.com and show their interest in receiving Google Fiber by paying a $10 pre-registration fee. All Fiberhoods must hit a minimum number of pre-registrations by September 9, or they will not get access to Google Fiber – and that includes the schools, libraries, community centers, hospitals, and other public buildings located inside those fiberhoods.
At the Library, we want to provide all of our patrons with access to Fiber – but especially to folks in areas of town that aren’t already wired.
Equipped with a planning grant from the MacArthur Foundation, the Kansas City Public Library and Science City are plotting a digital media "learning lab" for teens in Union Station. Check out our progress!
The Kansas City Public Library could become one of the first public libraries in the nation to provide customers a free connection to Google’s cutting-edge high-speed fiber optic network. But we need your help to get it.
Though Google will deliver on its promise to provide a free connection to libraries, schools, hospitals, community centers, and other public buildings in Kansas City, Mo., and Kansas City, Kan., there is a catch.
Google is not going to hook up those buildings unless the people who live in the neighborhoods around them demonstrate an interest in getting Google Fiber at home.
In other words, Google is not going to build the physical infrastructure for Fiber without some indication people will subscribe to the service. That’s why it has carved the two cities into “Fiberhoods.” These areas must each meet a designated threshold of pre-registrations (usually about 10% of the pop. density) by a deadline of September 9, 2012, or no one in those neighborhoods will have a chance at getting Fiber.
When Ritchie Momon thinks of his history at the Kansas City Public Library, the image that stands out is of an open door.
The door stood across a courtyard at Southeast High School. Beyond it lay the school's library, where Momon would head every day after school and during summers as a kid.
Later, in his freshman year at Southeast, he would go through that door to work the card catalog as a library clerk.
It was there that Momon learned to become a steward of knowledge.
"Before the computer age, when you needed to know something, books were the first line on information, the first place you'd go," Momon says.
Now, 31 years after his first job at Southeast, Momon is about to become director of one of the biggest libraries in the city, the Kansas City Public Library's Plaza Branch, where he will succeed the recently retired Dorothy Elliott as Branch Director.
Like so many great librarians, Momon worked his way from the ground floor up, moving through just about every department in the system before turning branch manager. He worked through college and while getting his MLS at the University of Missouri (for which he took a year off, the only year he hasn't worked in a library in three decades).
Libraries don’t just open up books for young readers. We also open doors on potential futures, new friends, and better ways of living. (And sometimes we even have fun doing it, too.)
For the second year in a row, Medical Explorers, a partnership between the Kansas City Public Library and Truman Medical Centers, is helping Kansas City teens explore careers in medicine and learn how to make healthier choices in their daily lives.
Every Thursday in July, 47 teens from the Southeast, North-East, and L.H. Bluford Branches are coming together to explore careers in medicine by visiting local medical sites and connecting with health educators. Through a series of weekly field trips and two lock-ins, they will not only learn about jobs in medicine, they will also learn how to make healthier choices in their lives (whether it’s diet and nutrition or STDs) and have a blast getting to know other teens from across the city.
“Medical Explorers is unique in that it mixes fun with health and information,” says Mary Thompson, the Library’s Outreach Manager.
In by far the biggest landslide of this entire literary All-Star extravaganza, Hannibal's own Samuel Clemens (better known to book-ball fans as Mark Twain) was chosen Off-the-Shelf coach.
But lest you think the contest for chief was a shutout, this final draft saw some of the most creative write-in voting of the entire series so far.
Yesterday morning, the Major League Librarian Selection Committee (a shadowy organization powered by Thai noodles and the smell of old books)*, took to Facebook and presented its official nominees for a Regional Author to coach OTSAS: Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, Jim Butcher, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Though Twain took an early lead, candidates rolled in from all corners of Kansas and Missouri. Here's the final ballot as it appeared on facebook.com/kclibrary this morning at the close of voting:
Though Twain prevailed by an out-of-the-park margin, the poetic Hughes garnered a respectable second place, write-in contestant Daniel Woodrell of the Ozark League came in third, and Independence hometown hero Butcher came in fourth.
And with that, our Literary Midsummer Classic closes.
Here's the final roster: