Abbot Public Library is Always Open Online!

Until the building reopens for staff so we can continue Curbside Service and resume accepting returns in our library return bins, you can peruse through ebooks, e-audiobooks, magazines, movies, television, and more from our digital collections! 

Overdrive and its Libby app, as well as hoopla, have many selections of ebooks and e-audiobooks which can be checked out online. Any items on hoopla can be checked out with no wait – although there is a limit of 5 items per month. Many titles are available on Overdrive, and those that aren’t can be reserved while you check out other available titles. If you didn’t want to bother with waiting, there’s a selection of always available ebooks and e-audiobooks you can browse through on Overdrive. 

With Halloween coming up, you may want to read or listen to some spooky stories to get into the spooky spirit. You’ll find ghost stories in ebook format for all ages, including these children and teen collections, all available on hoopla to read right away. Or you can listen to these hoopla e-audiobooks. There’s also a selection of ghost stories on Overdrive, as well as a collection of Halloween Books for All Ages on Overdrive and Halloween selections and supernatural stories on hoopla, the latter of which includes not only ebooks and e-audiobooks, but also streamable movies and television series, music, and more! Plan a movie marathon on hoopla with their various collections, including their featured Thrilling Series for Fall or October Movies of the Month, You don’t want to miss the Leaving hoopla in October movie collection.

If you want more than the 8,000 + movies offered on hoopla, check out IndieFlix and Acorn TV on RB Digital, along with RB Digital Magazines, which offers back issues of popular magazine titles with no return date!,  and The Great Courses, video lectures from some of the top professors about various health, economics, professional and personal development, and more!

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Books, Movies, Magazines, and More for National Yoga Month!

Did you know September is National Yoga Month? Even though today’s the last day, you can continue this healthy routine all year round. Abbot Public Library has hundreds of yoga items to reserve for Curbside Pickup or check out online via our various services, which can help teach poses and routines you can use every day. Starting last month, we even resumed our monthly children’s program Story Time Yoga with Lindsey Kravitz on our new YouTube Channel, which you may have read about on our previous blog post. Watch last month’s video below!

Kids have plenty of yoga-related items to choose from through the library catalog, Overdrive/the Libby app, and hoopla. Back in April, we discussed a few children’s selections in our Continuing Yoga for Kids at Home post from before we continued our yoga story time program online. Some physical books on the way to the shelves which you can reserve in advance for Curbside Pickup include:

The Three Little Yogis and the Wolf Who Lost His Breath: a Fairy Tale to Help You Feel Better by Susan Verde, art by Jay Fleck (available now on hoopla)

Dinos Don’t Do Yoga: A Tale of the New Dinosaur on the Block by Catherine Bailey; illustrations by Alex Willmore 

Teach Your Child Yoga: Fun & Easy Yoga Poses for Happier, Healthier Kids by Lisa Roberts

Yoga for Kids written by Susannah Hoffman; foreword by Patricia Arquette (available now on hoopla)

While you’re waiting for these to come in, there are plenty of other titles to choose from which will be available sooner. Doreen Cronin’s and Scott Menchin’s Stretch is a rhyming book that describes different ways of stretching. Kids will be mimicking plants, animals, and objects with the poses in Thia Luby’s Children’s Book of Yoga. These children’s yoga DVDs currently don’t have a checkout fee. Get a whole family workout from Yoga for Families, a dinosaur-themed routine from Yoga for Kids: Dino-Mite Adventure, and learn stellar practices from Yoga for Kids: Outer Space Blast-Off. Don’t want to wait? Everything on hoopla can be checked out right away! Stretch in the shape of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet with Alef-Bet Yoga For Kids by Bill and Ruth Goldeen or get a magical workout with Unicorn Yoga. You can even watch movies and Read-alongs!

Kids aren’t the only ones who can enjoy borrowing yoga books, movies, and more from the library. Yoga For Everyone: 50 Poses For Every Type of Body by Dianne Bondy has customized routines based on body type. Learn to sleep better and longer with Yoga for Better Sleep: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science–Postures, Breathing Exercises, and Mindfulness Practices For All Ages by Mark Stephens. Wake up with Waking Energy: 7 Timeless Practices Designed to Reboot Your Body and Unleash Your Potential by Jennifer Kries.

Yoga At Home: Inspiration for Creating Your Own Home Practice by Linda Sparrowe will teach you yoga practices from leading experts of Yoga Journal, accompanied by Sarah Keough’s photography. You can reserve print copies of Yoga Journal magazine through your online account, or check them out online through Overdrive/Libby. For a little humor, check out Dan Borris’s Yoga Dogs which teaches poses through the hilarious imagery of canines posing.  

Peruse through more yoga items for all ages in the library catalog or online through Overdrive/Libby and hoopla. There’s even a How To Do Yoga Great Course video series which you can stream through our RB Digital service. 

Celebrate Shark Week with Abbot Public Library!

Every summer, Discovery Channel hosts a week full of new films and documentaries about carnivorous Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fishes), a celebration known as Shark Week. Featuring a range of subjects, from Great Whites breaching to catch seals, to the little-known species of the deep, every year there are new surprises to learn about these long-feared creatures.

If you don’t subscribe to Discovery Channel, or if you want even more than what Shark Week can provide, Abbot Public Library can help! Check out the following selections from our collections in physical format through the library catalog, or online through Overdrive and hoopla! 

You’ll find a curated collection of Shark Week movies on hoopla with a few family-friendly titles such as Sea Level and Shark Lady (also in print format); to selections geared towards mature audiences, like the horror movie Shark Lake or the action/adventure Swamp Shark, two movies about shark attacks which give these peaceful creatures their bad reputation. But if you watch documentaries such as Tiger Shark: Predator Revealed, you’ll find that sharks don’t seek out humans as prey, but prefer their natural appetite of fish, seals, and other sea creatures. The documentary Sharks shows how many shark species are becoming extinct and need our help in order to survive. 

IndieFlix has a few shark videos you can stream as well, including Sharks in My Viewfinder, about an underwater photographer who went around the world to film sharks; and the short, The Shark and The Can, in which a shark tries to find acceptance from the other ocean creatures who are scared of him. Log into IndieFlix via Abbot Public LIbrary’s RB Digital Services to access these and more IndieFlix videos. 

You can check out even more shark movies in DVD format! While Abbot Public Library is offering curbside service, there will be no fee to check out DVDs. Reserve them online for Curbside Pickup and make an appointment to pick them up from the rear entrance of the Abbot Public Library. Read these instructions for the full details. There are kid-friendly titles like Finding Dory and Wild Krats: Shark-tastic! to the adult thrillers Jaws and The Shallows. For something realistic, try the documentaries Oceans, which features other sea creatures as well, or Shark Dive. 

If you’d rather read about sharks than watch them (some of these shark attack movies can be pretty gruesome and scary), check out Abbot Public Library’s print, Overdrive, and hoopla collections for all ages!

Some feature fiction titles for kids include Swimming with Sharks by Heather Lang, about how Eugenie Clark saw a shark at the aquarium when she was young and grew up to be a scientist who studied them; Shark Baby by Ann Downer, about a lost baby shark trying to find out what kind of shark he is; and Fins by Randy Wayne White, about three kids who help a marine biologist research the local endangered sharks. 

Adults can enjoy titles such as the horror classic Jaws by Peter Benchley, which you can reserve in print format for Curbside Pickup or listen to with no wait as an audiobook on hoopla. You can also reserve the movie based on the book. The Shark Club by Ann Kid Taylor features a woman who is attacked by a shark and grows up to be a marine biologist. 

To learn true facts about sharks, check out some of these nonfiction titles on hoopla! Discover The Truth About Great White Sharks, learn 101 Amazing Facts About Sharks, and find out about Deepwater Sharks and the World’s Weirdest Sharks. You can also learn about individual species such as the hammerhead, Great White, thresher, bull, tiger, goblin, whale, and more!

Between the Abbot Public Library’s online collections and digital resources, you’ll learn everything there is to know about sharks!

Tips and Tricks to Searching the Library Catalog

The NOBLE catalog is the gateway to all the materials your public library provides. Come discover digital resources and items from your home, and now you can reserve physical titles for curbside pickup! See our post on Curbside Pickup for more information.

At the NOBLE library catalog, you can find not only print books, DVDs, and books on CD, but also item records for some of the ebooks and downloadable audiobooks you can check out online, with information on where to check them out on Overdrive or hoopla. For a complete list of the titles available in the library’s online services, including music and video streaming, please search directly through Overdrive/Libby, hoopla, and RB Digital.

Using “Basic Search” for keywords, such as “Jenny Colgan,” and limiting to “Marblehead Library” will show you all the formats of works by this author. For any physical item, you can request the item to be reserved for you to pick up as part of the Curbside Pickup service. For records that say “e-book” or “e-audio”, click on the title and then click on the link to “Overdrive” or “hoopla” to reserve the ebook or downloadable audiobook copy from these online services.

On the left-hand side of your completed search, there is a “Filter By” section that shows search terms you can use for a detailed search to find similar works. For example, going to “Advanced Search” with the genre term “humorous fiction” will give you an extensive list of titles that you can then filter using the facets on the left for more specific results. 

If you click on one of the titles, you can also scroll down to find links to NoveList (discussed in the blog posts “Discover Your Next Great Read With NoveList” and “More Features of NoveList To Help You Choose What To Read Next!”) with read-alikes and series information, links to professional reviews and Goodreads for reader reviews, and a link to subscribe to newsletters from Nextreads.

Feel free to browse for online collections of ebooks, audiobooks, movies, and more directly from Overdrive/Libby, hoopla, and RB Digital. If you’re ready to check out physical items again, please carefully read our instructions for Curbside Delivery and start reserving items online from your online account! If you need to register for a card, please fill out this form. Questions? Email mar@noblenet.org! 

“Find Your Place” on the Abbot App Map

April 19-25 is National Library Week! This year’s theme is “Find Your Place at the Library,” which was chosen before COVID-19 forced us all to close the doors of our physical spaces. But, you can still find your place in the library! Libraries across the country have been dedicated to providing more online resources—ebooks, movies, music, virtual story times, programs, and more. Help us celebrate by diving into our virtual world!

This “app map” shows the ways you can enjoy the Abbot Public Library’s e-collections! You can access all of these by downloading the Libby, RB Digital, and hoopla apps here or in your device’s app store, or by clicking the buttons on the eBooks, Movies, and More! page to read, watch, or listen from your computer!