Gales Courses

 by Edward Hirst Rowan Public Library

Thank you!!  This was my first online course and I enjoyed every lesson. It has given me confidence to try even more! 

This is just one comment from a student enrolled in Rowan Public Library’s Gale Courses online educational resource.  New classes begin on the third Wednesday of every month; students can register anytime with their library card.  The classes all have twelve lessons and last for six weeks. Lessons become accessible by students on Wednesdays and Fridays while the class is in session.  Students can expect to spend one to two hours on each lesson.  Gale Courses are offered entirely online and accessible 24/7. Expert instructors develop and lead each class. They provide feedback, answer questions, and facilitate student discussions.  Online courses allow students to study at their own pace and take classes at times they find most convenient.  Each course consists of readings, assignments, and a quiz. Supplementary information is provided for students as well a discussion area for each lesson. There is a thirty-six question final exam that is administered at the end of class. Students are awarded a Certificate of Completion after completing the lessons and passing the final exam.

Classes are available in the following subject areas: Accounting and Finance, Business, Computer Applications, Design and Composition, Healthcare and Medical, Language and Arts, Law and Legal, Personal Development, Teaching and Education, Technology, and Writing and Publishing. Some of the newest classes offered are Introduction to QuickBooks 2015, Writing the Fantasy Novel, Spanish for Medical Professionals II and Intermediate Microsoft Access 2013.

Registering for a class is very easy.  Just visit www.rowanpubliclibrary.org, click on the link for Online Tools, then scroll to Gale Courses.  The first time you register for a class you will need to create an account using an email address, contact information, and your library card number. Over three hundred courses are available each month.  All classes offered are free for registered users of Rowan Public Library. There is no limit to the number of classes you may take.

Rainy Day Gardening

 by Marissa Creamer  Rowan Public Library

To the delight of gardeners, the days are getting longer, brighter, and warmer.  Faithful perennials rising from the soil are like good friends returning from an extended vacation.  Native coral honeysuckle and crossvine are blooming at the edge of the woods, attracting hummingbirds and a variety of bees. Garden centers are filled with tempting new plants.  It’s the happiest time of the year for gardeners, who long for the weekend so they can get outside with their plants. There’s so much to do at the start of the growing season and so little time.  Unfortunately, the weather does not always cooperate.  (How can it be raining?  What are we going to do now? ) It helps to always have some gardening books on hand so you can get new ideas and make plans for your garden while you wait out the storm. Fortunately, Rowan Public Library has a wonderful collection of gardening books to enlighten and inspire you.

“Groundbreaking Food Gardens: 73 Plans That Will Change the Way You Grow Your Garden” by Niki Jabbour is filled with ideas for novel and inspiring food gardens from a variety of professional gardeners. You’ll find a garden that provides salad greens fifty-two weeks a year, another that supplies your favorite cocktail ingredients, one that you can grow on a balcony, one that encourages pollinators, one that grows twenty-four kinds of chili peppers, and dozens more. Each plan is fully illustrated and includes a profile of the contributor, the story behind the design, and a plant list.

Does your yard have a narrow strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the curb? With a little imagination, this space can add curb appeal to your home, expand the size of your garden and provide an environmentally friendly way to conserve resources. “Hellstrip Gardening: Create a Paradise Between the Sidewalk and the Curb” by Evelyn Hadden can help you reclaim this underutilized space. This comprehensive guide covers how to determine the city and Home Owner s Association rules governing the area, how to choose plants that thrive in tough situations, how to design pathways for accessibility, and much more. Gorgeous color photographs of hellstrip gardens from across the country offer inspiration and visual guidance to anyone ready to tackle this final frontier. With “Hellstrip Gardening” in hand, you can finally create the paradise you want in the most unexpected of places.

If you are crafty and would like to add a special touch to your garden, you might enjoy “Mosaic Garden Projects” by Mark Brody. This book applies the art of mosaic to both functional and decorative pieces for the garden. This hands-on guide includes a primer on the fundamentals of mosaic, with information on materials and the three different mosaic methods. The twenty-five step-by-step projects build on the basics and are arranged in order of difficulty. The book begins with simple projects, such as address numbers, bird feeders, and stepping stones, and ends with more involved pieces, including a jeweled frog, pagoda, and orb fountain. Project templates are included along with instructions on how to scale each project.

You can find these titles and many more gardening books at Rowan Public Library.  Make sure you always have some good books on hand whatever the weather.

Books by the Numbers

by Paul Birkhead Rowan Public Library
     
    When you browse the non-fiction shelves at your local library, you may notice the same thing as I have on a few occasions.  There are many books whose titles include a number in them.  Whether an author is giving you a ‘top-ten’ list about a particular subject or is extoling 100 ‘things to know’, it seems quite popular these days to quantify advice. 
    A book just recently updated and republished in time for spring, 101 Baseball Places to See Before You Strike Out, is a must-read for any baseball fan.  Author Josh Pahigian trekked across North America to guide the reader in discovering or revisiting baseball landmarks.  Some places are well-known (the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York) and others are not (the Bob Uecker statue in Milwaukee’s Miller Park).  There are many illustrations, so if you never make it in person to the Babe Ruth Birthplace in Baltimore or McCovey Cove in San Francisco Bay, it will at least feel like you have.
    Speaking of Milwaukee and if beer is your thing, you might want to check out Wisdom for Home Brewers: 500 Tips & Recipes for Making Great Beer by Ted Bruning.  Brewing beer at home has been practiced for thousands of years.  In America, it took several decades after the repeal of Prohibition for the practice to become popular and legal again in all fifty states.  In the last few years, the number of people brewing beer at home has climbed over a million, and the popularity of the hobby shows no signs of slowing down.  Books like Wisdom for Home Brewers do an excellent job explaining just how easy it is to make beer and adjust recipes to suit individual tastes.  Even those readers with a little more brewing experience will discover helpful tips and advice.
    Need a snack with that beer?  The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying & Start Making shows how to create grocery store staples from scratch.  Granola bars, pop-tarts, cake mix, pasta sauce and soup are just a few of the delights described.  Great photos, amusing anecdotes, and helpful recipes are sure to please those wishing to eat healthier and cheaper, reduce packaging waste, and have fun in the kitchen.
    If you have children, chances are you’ve sought out advice on one parenting aspect or another.  There’s no shortage of books in the library to help you with many of the challenges you might face.  Parenting Children with ADHD: 10 Lessons That Medicine Cannot Teach is a good resource for families struggling with that particular disorder.   Zero to Five: 70 Essential Parenting Tips Based on Science is aimed at folks raising young children.  Parents of older children might appreciate what they can learn in Teenagers 101: What a Top Teacher Wishes You Knew About Helping Your Kid Succeed.
     No matter what stage in life you are in, it’s always good to read and learn about new things.  Rowan Public Library’s mission is to support the life long pursuit of knowledge and one way that’s encouraged is by providing access to thousands of items on a wide variety of subjects.  Wondering if the library’s shelves contain tips, tricks, and advice for whatever interests you?  You can count on it.  
      
   

Comforts of Home

by Gretchen Beilfuss Witt  Rowan Public Library        
            Did you know that there are many library resources that you can use without even leaving the comfort of your easy chair?  Rowan Public library has access to many exciting items at the touch of a button.  Pull up the library website on your home computer, iPad or mobile phone and look for the “Online Tools.”   One of the largest sources for online materials is NCLIVE.   The North Carolina State Library provides many resources for all public and academic libraries in North Carolina on NC LIVE.  You just need your card number (include all the zeroes, but not the letters) and a pin number to access this material from anywhere.     Among the newer products that NC LIVE provides is a digital video collection, “Films on Demand.”  You can watch the latest Rick Steves’ exploration of a travel destination, a Ken Burns documentary, developing business communication skills or even how to take better photos on your mobile phone.   There are movies detailing the challenges of growing older in America, how to dance the Rumba, Jamie Oliver’s recipes for 15 minute meal’s featuring ingredients like Chorizo and Squid and segments of “Families around the World”, a program describing the day-to-day life in other cultures.

Planning a trip to Europe, South America or even China?  Want to challenge your kids to keep their mind working this summer?  Rowan Public Library has resources to help them learn at least the important phrases in languages spoken all over the globe.  The Pronunciator program provides the opportunity to learn 80 different languages – the regular French or German, four types of Chinese as well as Telugu, Urdu, and Swahili.   Registering with Pronunciator helps track your progress, remind you of  your last session, and has playback tools to achieve proper pronunciation.  Particularly notable in this program is the ability to choose different levels of intensity.  Patrons wanting to share a language with their children can choose from two different age ranges 3-6 years and 7-12.   The Early Learners may learn the Russian words for colours over a five day period while the 7-12 year olds learn words for Good morning, goodnight, high-five and hug. Adults can start with an 8 week travel preparation course, a general beginner course or a specific healthcare course.   If planning to travel for business or pleasure or learning the language of your heritage, this resource presents a terrific opportunity to accomplish your goal!

If a new language is not in the stars, perhaps another personal goal might be.  Earning a GED, preparing for the GRE, learning how to use computer programs with ease or preparing to write a grant for a new business venture are just a few of the courses available online through the libraries Gale Courses.  Gale Courses are offered on myriad topics from personal finance and investing to creating websites; medical transcription to basic drawing.  Each course is offered monthly with the next enrollment May 13^th and continues for six weeks.  Courses are led by professional instructors and are offered both for professional development and personal enrichment.   These courses are free and open to anyone with a library card.  Explore your options under Online Tools – Gale Courses or the Gale Courses Icon and browse the catalog for topics of interest.  

Other resources like Chilton’s auto repair, Heritage Quest for genealogy, Legal forms and much, much more are also available; Take advantage of the wonderful opportunities offered through the library online resources without ever leaving home.

How We See

by Rebecca Hyde Rowan Public Library

                Artists and scientists are interested in the act of seeing.   How do we see?  What do we see?  Answers to those questions have changed with discoveries in science and art.

                As a painter and art historian, James Elkins appreciates art, but curiosity has led him into areas of science and the natural world.  In his book “How to Use Your Eyes,” he offers us a way to examine and appreciate the world around us, from the intricate to the complex.   It’s a book about “learning to see anything,” by simply stopping and taking the time to look, and keep looking, “until the details of the world slowly reveal themselves.” 

                He divides his investigations into two large categories:  things made by man and things made by nature.  Man-made includes postage stamps, tracing their history and revealing subtle political and artistic details.  The fine motorwork of a locomotive on a United States 3 cents stamp from 1869 is barely revealed under magnification.   When Elkins looks at patterns in moths’ wings, he is looking for nature’s simple “ground plan,” the template that is more or less shared by all butterflies and moths.  It takes practice because symmetry is modified by the need for camouflage.  He also studies culverts, Chinese and Japanese script, fingerprints, twigs, and sunsets. 

                Elkins’s investigations into art and seeing take a different approach in his book “What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy.”  Here he argues that science and our usual approach to art appreciation cannot explain the act of painting.  Elkins explores what an artist does in the studio to transform paint into a painting:  thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting.  The thoughts of the artist are embedded in the paint, or “liquid thought.”  And the process of turning the thickness of paint into a picture is like the efforts of alchemists, trying to mix and mingle ingredients to produce a purified, rare substance.  He examines the term “hypostasis,” the concept that something as dead as paint might also be deeply alive and full of thought.  For example, a painted window can be brilliant with light (as in Matisse’s windows open to the ocean air), but it is also a heavy mineral deposit of paint and absolutely opaque.   Or look at the brushstrokes that remain fixed in a painting for all to see:  material memories of the artist at work.

                “Eye of the Beholder:  Johannes Vermeer, Antoni  van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing,” by Laura J. Snyder, describes the use of new optical instruments in the 1600s by scientists and artists, which changed how we perceive the world.  Snyder terms it “the invention of the modern notion of seeing.”  The notion of the eye as an instrument, comparable to a camera obscura, fascinated artists and scientists.  The reach of sight was extended by the telescope and microscope.  The descriptive impulse, rather than just storytelling, was pervasive with the collection of data, specimens, and observations of the natural world.  It was the age of the artist Vermeer, who infused his paintings with the new optical discoveries.