And The Winners Are...

Every year about this time, children in Oakland wait in anticipation for the call. Will they be the winners of the Summer Reading Challenge Grand Prize? Here are the lucky two.

Paws to Read logoEvery child who reads during the summer wins!

This summer the Oakland Public Library awarded prizes to children for reading 20 days during the summer.  9873 children participated, and so far 5203 reported reading 20 days or more.  If you have not finished logging the days your child read June 14 - August 8, please stop by your library and we will help you.

In addition to picking out a book, getting a cool badge, and receiving coupons for Oakland attractions, children also received one chance in our raffle for the first 20 days they read (and an additional chance for each additional ten days).  There were many prizes available in the raffle, but we drew our city-wide grand prize raffle after the reading challenge ended on August 8th.

 This year's grand prize winners are:

The 

Click here to read more

Literary Romances

What was it like to be married to William Shakespeare or Zelda Fitzgerald? Check out these fictionalized accounts of famous literary couples.

Did you know that August is National Romance Awareness Month?  I didn't, but I recently came across this article in the Huffington Post, which inspired me to highlight literary romances in this post.  During the past few years fiction titles focusing on famous literary couples have been popular.  Here are a few available at OPL. 

 A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald       

Click here to read more

Q&A Patrons ask; librarians answer: Starting School

Q&A: Children's Librarians answer questions all day, every day, from children, parents, caregivers, and teachers. It's August, people always ask for starting-school and back-to-school stories, of course!

Q: My daughter is starting school in a few days...what books about school do you have that we could read together?

A: We have so many!* No matter what age or grade, we've got something for you to read abocover of Richard Scarry's Great Big Schoolhouseut school, to set the stage so that your child's anticipation is more likely to stay positive. Some kids need to know exactly what will happen, some are looking forward to joining

Click here to read more

New DVDs For August 2014 @ Oakland Public Library!

New DVDs for August 2014 at Oakland Public Library

Get ready to place your Holds!  We have a great selection of new DVD titles arriving shortly at Oakland Public Library.  Besides blockbusters and foreign films like The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Belle, Captain America:  Winter Soldier, Nymphomaniac, pts. 1 & 2,

Click here to read more

The Roving Eye: Scenes from Summer

Summer scenes captured at our libraries. It looks like Oakland had a great summer!

Yuyi MoralesYuyi Morales helped us kick off summer when she visited the César Chávez Library in May. She shared her "bolsa de sorpresas" (bag of surprises) with toys from her childhood in Mexico. And she read her newest book Niño Wrestles the World to musical accompaniment.

 

 

Summer wouldn't be summer without the Bubble Lady. She combines clowning, bubbles, and science into a child (and parent) pleasing performance. We've had her in Oakland every summer for as long as anyone can remember

Click here to read more

Upcoming Branch Schedule Change!

Beginning November 1st, 2014, the Golden Gate and Piedmont Ave. Branches will revert to a Tuesday - Saturday schedule.

Effective November 1, 2014,  days of service at two Oakland Public Library branches—Golden Gate and Piedmont Avenue—will revert to Tuesday to Saturday.

The change is the result of a pilot program that began in September 2013 to offer library hours on Mondays in more areas of Oakland. Library Administration encouraged public feedback on the new schedules through an online and paper survey (April 15-May31), comment cards, and community meetings. Administration’s evaluation of the community’s responses and data on library usage at the pilot branches led to the decision to end the new schedules at the Golden Gate and Piedmont Avenue branches.

Two additional branches were part of the pilot.  Brookfield and Eastmont branches will remain on the Monday to Friday schedule.  As always, you can see branch schedules on our website

Thanks to everyone

Click here to read more

Let Books & Authors find that next great read for you

Books & Authors is a database at Oakland Public Library that can help you explore titles, authors, and various subjects, to find that next great read.

In May, I posted about Novelist Plus, and the variety of ways it connects readers with the right books for them. This month, Andrew Demcak tells us about another OPL database just for book lovers. Take it away, Andrew....

Avid and casual readers know that feeling: You’ve just finished a great book and you want to start a new one. But which book will be your next book?  Books & Authors is a database at Oakland Public Library that can help you explore titles (both fiction and nonfiction,) authors, and various subjects, to find that next great read.

Click here to read more

Great Graphic Novels for Kids

A list of recommended graphic novels and comic books for kids that are available at the Oakland Public Library.

From superheroes to manga to comic strips and beyond, we have all sorts of excellent graphic novels and comic books for kids in the library. Ask library staff to help you find the 741.5s! Here, young readers will find interesting characters, awesome art, and fascinating stories full of humor, action, adventure, history, mystery, and emotion. Graphic novels are incredibly popular, especially among kids who like stories but aren't ready for long chapter books and students who are visual learners.
Here are some of our favorite / most popular graphic novels for kids. Let us know in the comments which of your favorites we may have missed!:

Click here to read more

Free eBooks from the library and other sources.

Load up your eReader with free content - books, music, and more!

eBooks are freely available from OPL - we have a number of different collections and formats, all listed here. And, we'll help you get started with ebooks and such at the Main Library - just come in and talk to any librarian, or come to our monthly program - every last Wednesday of the month, we'll walk you through our various e-collections. You can bring your device to follow along. Remember, you'll never get a fine on e-materials!

There are other sources as well. One of the most popular sources for free eBooks is Project Gutenberg, which includes more than 45,000 eBooks, all free; all titles are in the public domain. There's also a number of digitized

Click here to read more

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan.....The Lakeview Book Club Update

Lakeview Book Club Update on the discussion of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

Our discussion leader did an outstanding job in presenting the background story on Zealot.

Dr. Reza Aslan is a non-religious American whose family emigrated from Iran to the United States when he was a child. His family was Muslim. He was invited to go to a Christian summer camp and became a Christian, because it attracted him emotionally and helped him feel he belonged. He was a practicing Evangelical Christian for some years. He was later educated by Jesuits and investigated the historical Jesus, finding that he could no longer be Christian. He studied Islam and found that he was attracted to it intellectually.

In his book about Jesus, he pulled from the few historical records of the time and from the social history of the era. In his research he discovered that much we have all been taught about the life of Jesus does not correspond to the real history of the times. He points out that three fourths of

Click here to read more
http://www.oaklandlibrary.org/blogs?page=4
www.oaklandlibrary.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-42
35497
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5O7AU6DX2LWYOAEVHVE2TRHMWI3NKVBC
<urn:uuid:9f7212e4-53a2-4ea8-8c8a-c909fc1a02df>
2014-10-25T11:19:02Z
72.27.230.96
sha1:6LKIWDYJ57IVGUUHZPIPGLWXBULGYEXI
<urn:uuid:7c131d6e-bd20-4726-bd2f-fb575690ce9f>
http://www.oaklandlibrary.org/blogs?page=4
length
response
<urn:uuid:04a25f3e-cc64-4cce-a583-b444ae2db008>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-16-133-185.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-42
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for October 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf