Your Local FOL Needs You!

While this is a Technology Training blog, I wanted to take a little time to mention your library's Friends of the Library (FOL) group.  An FOL is an organziation made up of everyday citizens.  As a member there are many opportunities to attend programs such as author visits; meet others from the community with the same interests; help with book sales or other fundraising events; discover new adventures or rediscover an interests long forgotten. 
The FOL goes beyond month meetings and programs.  Many provide assistance to a local library in the form of volunteers, fundings through donations, promotion of the library as a valuable part of a community, and support a wide range of public programs. 
If you are interested in joining a local FOL or perhaps purchasing membership for someone else as a gift, contact your local library to find the group closest to you. 

Where to find those free e-books

Many times I'm asked "Where to find free e-books outside of the library catalog?"  What follows directly is "Are these safe sites?"  While I have my favorites that I have provided in the past, Public Libraries published in its July/August 2011 issue a list of free sites that are great additions to the list:
Baen Books: There are about 120 titles available in the science fiction and fantasy genre for PC or Kindle.
Book Lending: Registration is required.  Supports Kindles and you may lend or borrow a book between other users.
Digital Book Index: This site supports iPad, Kindle, and Nook readers.  You may search by title, author, title and author, or title keyword among its 165,000 digital collection.
E-Discover the Classics: Looking for a great classic but don't want to search hours to find them?  Kindles, iPads, Nooks and many other readers are supported. 
Inkmesh: Free and easy to use, Inkmesh has sort by device, free or for cost e-books.  It hosts about 3,500 e-books in fiction and nonfiction.
Open Library: Need children's books?  Open Library includes title from popular Golden Books.   Formats include but not limited to PDF and EPUB.  Membership required.

Don't forget to check out your local library for their digital collection.

Stark County District Library: 

Do you know about CTRL + F?

In a recent interview with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist for Google, the Atlantic's Alexis Madigral learned something startling- about 90% of people do not use the CTRL + F function when searching.  CTRL + F is an incredibly useful tool when browsing the Web, reading or writing documents and browsing PDFs.  It is a keyboard shortcut which opens your computer's "find" function.  Here is what it can be used for:

Take, for example, the website craigslist.org.  This is a website that is useful for buying and selling, trading, finding apartments and looking for jobs.  There is a craigslist specific to most major cities in the United States.  If you go to the link posted above, you will be taken to the main page, which lists every city-specific website.  To find Canton, OH specifically, you can do one of two things.  One- scroll through the whole site and browse or two- use the function CTRL + F.  When you press and hold the CTRL key and the F key AT THE SAME TIME, a box will appear on your screen (could be top, bottom or floating depending on your web browser) which looks something like this:

In our craigslist example, you would type "canton" into the find box and click "next".  You will see that all instances of the word "canton" will be highlighted on your screen.  Keep clicking next to jump from canton to canton until you find the right one.

And THAT, in a nutshell, is the CTRL + F feature.  As mentioned, you can use CTRL + F on the Web, in Word documents and in PDFs.  It is dead useful if you need to find specific information admist a large chunk of information.

Now of course, nothing in technology is perfect.  Some limitations to CTRL + F:

1) Your spelling needs to be spot on.  There is no "did you mean..." like on Google.  If you spelled it wrong, you will not find it.

2) It only finds exact phrases.  If, using our example, I had searched "canton ohio" instead of just "canton", I would have had no results because nowhere on that page are the words canton and ohio right next to each other.

Despite these limitations, overall CTRL + F makes finding information much, much easier.

Deleting Online Accounts

Ever want to permanently delete an online account such as Facebook or Twitter?  October's issue of Smart Computing & Consumer Electronics has a great article, "Signing Off: Cancel Your Online Accounts," with detailed instructions on how to delete online accounts.  Don't subscribe to this magazine?  SCDL does.   Visit any SCDL location for your opportunity to read this insightful article.