Mercer County Library Blog

My former co-worker, Tom, is a beer aficionado. If you’ve read my beer-related post of November 2018 , you’ll know I credit him with teaching me what to look for to find beer I enjoy. Since then, I’ve visited several more craft breweries in New Jersey and have recently branched out into Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The impetus for this branching was discovering the Bucks County Ale Trail . Here was a framework to explore the county across the river and become better acquainted with the towns I may only have heard of or driven through before. One of my best memories of the summer is visiting Perkasie, Pennsylvania. Perkasie is home to at least three craft breweries – I have tried one, the Van Lieus Brewing Company .  The reason the town brings up good memories is because I had walked a trail there many years ago and had been trying to find the name of it for the past few years.  All I could vaguely remember was that there was a carousel up on a hill, a pedestrian sus...

If I had a nickel for every AI book I've cataloged in the last six months, I’d have a lot of nickels! Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced to a point where it’s no longer a novelty but a pervasive part of our lives. Can you believe ChatGPT was released on November 30, 2022—almost two years ago? That’s 14 dog years! So, what has been happening in the AI world behind the scenes during this rapid evolution? In this post, I want to shed light on AI-related developments in publishing and libraries that might have slipped under your radar. Some of the revelations I've come across in my research have been quite surprising! Imagine we’re playing the game Password, and my clues are: “Crawling, scraping, harvesting.” Any guesses? If you said deep learning or machine learning, you’d be spot on. Here’s what these terms mean: “Crawling” refers to the systematic exploration of the internet or digital spaces to gather information. “Scraping” involves extracting specific data from websi...

As a children’s librarian, I help children and parents find books. “Miss Grace, where are the truck books?” and “Do you have princess books?” and “What historical fiction books would you recommend?” We look through the book shelves and pull out options and soon the family is on their way with their next fun read. Occasionally, a parent asks me to help them find a book for their child on a difficult topic, such as the loss of a pet or the loss of a grandparent. Grief is sad, challenging, and frustrating for an adult to process and it may be overwhelming and confusing to find a way to discuss it with a child. A picture book may be a great vessel to open the conversation to these complex life circumstances. The term bibliotherapy refers to using books to help someone’s mental health. Children may relate to the story or find tools in the story to help them. If you are looking for books on grief for children, I encourage you to read the book several times ahead of time to make su...

One of the roles librarians play in the Digital Age is that of helping patrons navigate the world of misinformation (incorrect information) and disinformation (intentionally wrong information). We all know, as everyone has become more sophisticated in being able to identify what is false and what is fact, the minions of misinformation and disinformation are hard at work making sure that it becomes more difficult to distinguish what’s real and what’s not. While some have referred to our time period as the Post-Truth Era, the reality is that what’s true has never changed – just the amount of noise attempting to keep people off the trail. Imagine my surprise when the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child film trailer turned out to be an extremely well-done deep fake. While I felt both betrayed and, frankly, relieved, that experience then made me somewhat skeptical when I first heard that Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter – who first acted together in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure – would ...