NYPL Blogs

As the nation is going through an education reform to Race to the Top and Educate to Innovate, Mayor Bloomberg of the Big Apple is following suit in developing education programs inline with the national policy in general and meeting the education and employment needs of the New Yorkers in particular.

I love the cat breed illustrations on the inside of the front and back covers of this book. All of the cats look so happy! The book is full of poems that indicate the nature of cats, and anyone who has experience with cats or who has lived with cats knows exactly what Crawley is talking about in these cat poems.

For the week of March 31, 2013 we have hardcover fiction, hardcover non-fiction, and paperback non-fiction.

The sixth season of AMC’s hit show Mad Men premieres on Sunday, April 7. If you’re interested in throwing a historically accurate premiere party, or you just want to learn more about the 1960s, NYPL offers plenty of groovy resources.

Where in the world are you reading about? Fiction finds its settings in all corners of the world (and some places only imagined in our minds) but there's something special about fiction set in a familiar city or neighborhood. This week I thought I'd tackle another famous neighborhood of Manhattan, but now we're traveling uptown to Harlem.

Hello readers. This month the Reader's Den is reading A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

Titles and cover images often give readers a clue as to what lies within a book but I admit I was baffled about this one. 

A guitar and a goon squad? It didn't make sense. On the other hand, A Visit from the Good Squad was awarded a Pulitzer Prize (2011) and a National Book Critics Circle Award (2010). Plus, it was always checked out. I thought maybe I should give it a chance.

Here are scans of the color plates of U.S. Plant Patents received at SIBL for the weeks of March 5, 12, 19 and 26, 2013.

Plant Patent plates for 2012 and 2013 have been listed, with links, in the table posted here.

As before, please be careful in using these — they're really not appropriate to use for prior art or other similar searches. Otherwise, please enjoy!

A Food Network Star! I am a big fan of the Food Network, so you can imagine how thrilled I was to discover that TeenLIVE at the NYPL was hosting Johnny Iuzzini, head judge of Top Chef: Just Desserts, "Pastry Chef of the Year" in 2006, and author of Dessert Fourplay: Sweet Quartets from a Four-Star Pastry Chef at the Jefferson Market Library.

The City University of New York was awarded $19.86 million through the United States Department of Labor's Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training grant program to offer CUNY Career Path, a three–year program aimed at supporting adult students in career advancement and successful college transition, and building CUNY's capacity to serve adult workers.

The New York Public Library is pleased to announce the release of its Digital Collections API (application programming interface). This tool allows software developers both in and outside of the library to write programs that search our digital collections, process the descriptions of each object, and find links to the relevant pages on the NYPL Digital Gallery. We are very excited to see what the brilliant developers who use our digital library will create. In the following post, Digital Curator for the Performing Arts, Doug Reside, reflects on the importance of APIs in our age of digital information.

I can't say that I've always been the biggest poetry fan. But lately I've been getting into novels in verse, which have been popping up all over the YA Fiction scene for awhile now. Ellen Hopkins is the queen of this and if you've never read her work before, do yourself a favor and check out Crank as soon as possible. You will be hooked... freaked out... and hooked.

How much do you know about World War II? The Korean War? The Vietnam War? Or what about Operation Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom? What if you had the ability to listen to first-hand accounts about these wars from the men and women who served our country?

Abril es el Mes Nacional de la Poesia. Te invito a celebrar con poesías, escogidas al azar, para adornar tu día, y llevar a cualquier lugar...

April is National Donate Life Month. It is also National Volunteer Month. Becoming an organ donor could be the ultimate act of volunteering to help others.

In New York, nearly 10,000 people are currently waiting for a life-saving organ transplant and every 15 hours, one of them will die due to the critical shortage in organ donors. Currently, New York ranks 48th in the nation with just 21% of residents enrolled as registered organ donors. Are you an organ donor?

How do you celebrate Deaf History Month?

As a librarian, during this month I usually spend some time thinking admiring thoughts about Alice L. Hagemeyer, whose energy, spirit, and determination propelled service to the Deaf in libraries in Washington, D.C., where she worked for 34 years, and nationwide. Perhaps you would like to celebrate the month, which spans March 13-April 15 each year, by investigating some of the primary sources from the annals of Deaf history and culture gathered in this enlightening blog post from the Library of Congress. And, enjoy a book or two from NYPL's list of books for all ages by Deaf authors and on the Deaf experience.

Classic New York City architecture, the cleverness of crows, the real Toscanini, being good, color and commerce, anarchists, a call to secularism, the Asian underground railroad, gourmet food carts, escaping the Nazis, environmental crisis, structural tile vaulting and sexual discrimination in the workplace. What do these disparate topics have in common?

The U.S. Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration recently released a report, STEM: Good Jobs Now and for the Future (PDF), that profiles U.S. employment in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

Spring is in the air! I know this because my nose reminds me all day long! But you know what really takes away the sinus pressure? A trip to my local library! Visit and join one of these great programs that will make you forget about all that pollen!

We have all these great special programs available this month; Rainforest Connections, Dia Del Los Ninos, An Earth Day Celebration and A poetry workshop for children!

On Monday, March 25th, about 12 kids gathered in the picture book section of the children's room in the 115th Street Library to test their taste buds.

How much do we rely on our five senses? What information do we get from them that we might take for granted or just don't notice? How do they work together to give us a more complete picture of our world and surroundings? The experiment intended to explore just that.