Mercer County Library Blog

Summer is the busiest time for children’s librarians! Kids are off from school, and the library becomes even more of a hub than usual for families to enjoy many free programs, earn incentive prizes for reading, find help with summer reading assignments, earn volunteer hours, and simply just hang out in the air conditioning! Having help is much appreciated at such a time, and the Youth Services Department of the Lawrence Branch has been privileged to receive student interns these last two summers – Molly (a rising senior) last year, and Mazaiah (a rising sophomore) this year. Both have been fantastic, ready with a friendly smile for the kids, and willing to be an extra pair of hands wherever needed. I would like to take this opportunity to share a little about the internship program. Keep reading to learn the specifics of the program and to hear from Molly D. (Summer 2022) about her experiences! Details About the Internship Program The internship program is organized by Mercer County’...

No recipe? No problem! is the book I have been browsing through lately in my spare time. And, it is no coincidence that I have come across this book. I have actively looked to find something that speaks to my strange predicament: I host a monthly cooking program at the Hickory Corner Branch and I have been hesitating to give out recipes to participants. No, not because the recipes are family heirlooms or super-secret or such. It’s because I trained to cook under my mother and my aunts and their idea of measurements ran in approximations. How much? was almost always answered by---a “ fistful” of daal, a “ thumb-size” ball of tamarind, a “pinch” of asafetida, a “ spot ” of coconut oil, and so on and so forth. Whose fist? Whose thumb? What a crazy question! Yours, of course! Then, there were general principles of my native Konkani cuisine: which ingredients go together and, more importantly, which do not. There was an emphasis on eyeballing a...

Today I want to introduce you formally to the MCLS Teen Advisory Board , an important service we offer to teens in Mercer County. We often get questions in the Youth Services Department about TAB: Just what is it? Who is it for? Why is it important? On a personal note, TAB is the program I’m most proud to work on as a teen librarian. So, let me tell you a little more about it! What is TAB? The TAB is the Mercer County Library System’s Teen Advisory Board. It is a service organization for youth between the ages of 14 and 18 living in Mercer County. Teens attend a monthly virtual meeting and do service projects for the library, mostly remotely. Service is very flexible: members may skip meetings when they can’t attend, and there is no requirement for number of service hours performed. Our service projects are varied. TAB members can vote for books to be purchased by the library each month, write book reviews, and contribute to the quarterly TAB Zine . Members serve our community by ma...

Mercer County Library System now subscribes to Kanopy PLUS Packs and Kanopy Kids, two unlimited video services that allow you to stream movies and TV shows on almost any device. Patrons may access the service online, by using an app on their device, or using an app on a device linked to a TV. What is Kanopy and what can patrons find on the service? Kanopy is an unlimited video streaming service that offers two subscription options to libraries, a pay per use and unlimited use model. If you enter the Kanopy website or app and see help guides mention limits and the use of Play Credits, that does not apply to our subscription – patrons have unlimited access to the titles in our collection, with no need to return titles or place holds. Simply watch what you want when you want to. The unlimited PLUS Packs that MCLS subscribes to are curated lists of titles, which cover six topical areas and kids’ content. In our collection you will find British Cinema and TV (BBC and other British-produce...

New Jersey – what is this place? I don’t know. There was a time when I planned to leave, but those ideas dissolved and now I’m here for the duration. I’ve visited other places, tasted their terrible pizza, and watched people enjoy the way I pronounce certain words. There is nothing quite like this state – except for certain parts of Pennsylvania and New York. Life in New Jersey sometimes feels like the tang of a pork roll sandwich on a Sunday morning, pleasurable, yet melancholic. To nourish my Garden State soul, I’ve compiled a list of films that take place in or within our borders. Some are more acclaimed than others, but they all speak of our existence as the perpetual underdog that must fight, or work on our day off, in order to survive. I hope you enjoy them. If you want to recommend any movies to our patrons, contact Andrew at the Lawrence Branch HQ Reference Desk or put the titles in the comments! Atlantic City (1981) ISBN: 9780792179146 A smalltime, aging Mafia hood falls ...

“Question your tea spoons,” French author Georges Perec encourages in his 1973 essay “Approaches to What?” “The daily papers talk of everything except the daily. […] What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.” I lead a reading group at West Windsor called “Rule of Three” (you’re invited – https://www.eventkeeper.com/mars/xpages/xp_newpopevent.cfm?zeeOrg=MCL&EventID=7281025&sw=1600 ). Each month, we read a short story, a poem, and an essay all connected by a theme. In May, our theme was “Ordinary Things.” We read a different essay by Georges Perec: “Notes Concerning the Objects That Are on My Work-Table,” which is just what it sounds like. Some people in the group didn’t connect with the piece, but others found it calming and meditative. For some, in brought to mind cleaning out the hou...

On December 10, 2022, the Ocean City Free Public Library sponsored a live online talk with bestselling Swedish author Fredrik Backman. If you were lucky enough to have heard about it and attended, you came away, no doubt, feeling that you’d experienced a lively and informative hour-plus discussion. I am extremely fond of Fredrik Backman’s fiction. I am one of the moderators of Mercer County Library’s Facebook Book Discussion Group and Backman is kinda the unofficial patron saint of our group. So far, we have discussed four of his books— A Man Called Ove ; My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry ; Anxious People ; and And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer —and not one has disappointed. It goes without saying we will be featuring other works of his in future meetings. When Fredrik Backman speaks, I, for one, listen. In the course of that December discussion, Backman namechecked a fellow Swedish author: Niklas Natt och Dag, whose last name, unless the short bi...

As a millennial, I have fond memories of going to Blockbuster on a Friday evening with my family to rent that weekend’s movie (usually something from the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen collection if I was picking). Fast-forward a few decades and, thanks to streaming services, the need to leave my couch to find a movie has disappeared. All that convenience is great - thousands of movies and TV series at your fingertips sounds amazing - until you realize that you’ve spent so much time scrolling to find a movie that you’ve basically run out of time to watch one! A few months ago, my family decided to take a break from our streaming subscriptions. Working at the library, I knew there were plenty of DVDs to choose from if and when we wanted to watch a movie - but I hadn’t anticipated how much better this would make our at-home movie night! Suddenly I had that same Blockbuster experience: deciding in advance what to watch, reading the backs of the DVD cases to see what might be good, and allow...