Blogs

Cardinia Shire has received $2.5 million in Federal funding to assist with the construction of a new public hall facility to replace the existing P.B. Ronald Hall building. This is in addition to Living Libraries funding of $495,000 to assist in the construction of the library facility itself. The new Pakenham Library will be built jointly with the new hall sharing the foyer and facilities. The new Library will be 1200sqm in area and will feature the latest technology as well as the traditional services.

Contractors began renovation work at Endeavour Hills Library on Monday 11 May. Projected time for the work is 12 weeks (weather permitting) What is happening? An existing external courtyard is being enclosed and will become part of the usable floor space for the Library. The toilets are also being refurbished. Dubbed “The Sun Room”, this new space will be used for a variety of activities. While the toilets are being refurbished, staff and the public will share the use of the disabled toilet.

Thanks to all our users who have given us feedback on the new library website, it is very much appreciated. To give you an idea of what people have been telling us about it, here are just a few of the comments we have received: * It is so much easier to navigate around and I like the design. It has a more professional feel. * Much cleaner interface and easier navigation, and much easier to log in (which used to be my pet hate on the old site). The colours are easy on my aging eyes *grin*, I like the new books scrolling pictures, and I like the easy links across the top too.

We are in the process of developing our new library website and we want your help! We surveyed our website users in November of last year, looking for your input into what you wanted to see on the library website. We thank you for that feedback as it gave us some valuable help as we began planning for the new website in December. The development of the website is now at a stage where we can open it up to our users and ask for your help.

Google has been quietly at it again. In late 2008 they launched a website - Google News Archive, a subset of Google News where you can view newspapers they have digitised, using their newspaper viewer. To begin with the content was US only. However, the Google News Archive, in conjuction with the National Libraries of Australia and New Zealand, now indexes the Australian Newspapers (beta) and Papers Past (New Zealand) content, which gives you another access point to these historic newspaper archives.

We are pleased to announce the introduction of a small collection of Playaways for loan. Playaways are self-contained, battery powered audio books. PlayawayEach unit holds one title. You don’t need an MP3 player, iPod, CD player or tape deck to use them, everything you need to play the content is in the Playaway unit, which is about 1/2 the size of a deck of cards. The library will supply batteries, however you will require ear buds or headphones to listen to them. Ear buds may be purchased from the library ($1 per set).

Casey-Cardinia Library Corporation has subscribed to over 20 databases with a wide variety of content, on your behalf. Several of these include Australian newspapers and Australian and international journals and magazines. If you were looking for a particular magazine, you had to know which database covered it, or search several, go into it and then search for the title you were seeking. To make it easier for you, we have now catalogued 100 of magazine and journal titles from our databases, straight into the library catalogue.