What's all the hoopla about hoopla?

"What is hoopla? Bringing you hundreds of thousands of movies, full music albums, audiobooks and more, hoopla is an all in one digital service made available to you through the ABQ-BernCo Library. From Hollywood blockbusters to best selling artists and authors – not just the hits, but the niche and hard-to-find as well – you’ll soon discover that hoopla provides you the freedom you've been searching for to experience, explore and enjoy what you want, when you want, and where you want. Simple to access and use, without the hassle of having to return the items you've borrowed, all you need is your library card, a web browser, smart phone or tablet to get started."
~from our website

Library customers can check out 5 titles (eVideos, eMusic, eAudiobooks, eComics, and eBooks) a month - videos checkout for 72 hours, music for 7 days, audiobooks for 21 days. There are no holds, wait lists, or late fees. It's easy to find hoopla material when searching the library catalog -  in a search, you will see a designation to the left of the item of eVideo, eMusic, eBook, or eAudiobook:

 If you look in the record, you can see the designation on the left, and "hoopla digital" will be nestled amidst the record's information, and of course, if you click on "Access". it will take you to hoopla.

We have found it easiest to search in hoopla itself for available material. Here's the in-app view:

You can view or listen to your checked out items as many times as you wish and return at will, but when you return an item and you have already checked out 5 for the month, you don't get to check out another item. Titles return automatically on their due date if not already returned.

It's easy to sign up! To register for a hoopla account,visit hoopladigital.com from your PC, or by using our mobile app on your iOS or Android device. You will need to provide an e-mail address, create a password, and have your library account information ready. The free mobile app can be found in the App Store and the Google Play store.

If you are an avid comic fan, be sure to check out hoopla's panel-by-panel comic reader! Just open up your checked-out graphic novel and double click on the first panel to activate.

Visit our digital media guide for more information, including a list of supported devices, help for iOS and Android, walkthroughs, links to app downloads, and information about using the service.

Subject Guides

Our library website features 129 eResources and databases with 24/7 access, free with your valid library card - just click on "Research" at the top of the page for a dropdown menu! These include Auto Repair Center, BrainFuse Help Now, Consumer Reports, Encyclopedia of World Biography, lynda.com, NoveList Plus, Pronunciator, and more. These are all great resources for students and lifelong learners. But did you know the website also features subject guides created by the staff of The Public Library ABQ-Bernco? Some of them you might have seen, if you've ever looked for New on DVD or New Music CDs. But the range of staff-created subject guides goes deeper than media - there are guides about New Mexico, Science Project Help, DIY, and more.

You can peruse the 31 subjects covered by our guides very easily! First, click on "Subject Guides" in the dropdown menu.

Then you can select your subject of choice from another dropdown menu.

Unsurprisingly, we have many choices under the subject "Books and Literature"! Some guides are strictly informational, like the Center for the Book; many link to catalog for easy hold placing, such as Monster Mashups; Booklists for Adults and Teens has printables; the Books & Literature guide shows events, book recommendations, and links to NYT Bestseller lists.

Each subject has two views, so you can easily switch back and forth between staff-created Subject Guides...

...and eResources and databases! Just click on the headings to switch back and forth.

We hope this short tutorial will encourage you to explore the library website and check out all of our online resources! Do you already use some guides or eResources? Let us know in the comments!

E-Resources, or Where Have All the Databases Gone?

Looking for peer-reviewed, full-text articles from the world's leading journals and reference sources?  We've got them. Detailed instructions on care, troubleshooting and repair information for cars, listed by year, make and model?  That too. Scholarly, government and general-interest titles on global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more? Ditto.  Thousands of legal forms, including legal reference books provided through Nolo, the nation's oldest and most-respected provider of legal information for consumers and small businesses? Yes, yes, & yes!  All this & more is available to you 24/7 via our website, with your valid library card & 4 digit PIN.

I get questions all the time to lead me to suggest our copious eResources & LibGuides. Many people don't know we have them. Other people remember finding them from a link called 'Databases' and wonder where they've gone. Well, as we expanded beyond collections of magazine and journal articles (stored in databases) to live one-on-one tutoring, language learning systems, practice exams for things like the GRE and LSAT, and streaming classical music...well, the term databases didn't fit anymore. After trying out a few other terms (including, we're afraid, online electronic resources - what a mouthful) we decided eResources was the best option, to match our other online collections: eBooks and eAudiobooks.

Once you are at the library website (you can find the URL on your card!), you want to look down the sidebar on the left for Research Assistance, which is followed by the "eResources" link.  It'll look like this:

If you click on "eResources", you'll come to this page:

The eResources page is kind of one-stop shopping.  It explains that generally, what we call eResources are collections and services paid for by the library and only available over the Internet. Examples include databases full of magazine articles, one-on-one live homework help, study guides and practice tests, dictionaries, business and financial information, and much more. All the eResources are split into handy, browsable categories.

Maybe you already know what you want, for example to access Morningstar® Investment Research Center or Newsbank, but just need to find the link.  You probably just need  to consult the A to Z eResource List, which you can find at the top of the Featured Guides list.  This guide contains a full list of our subscription eResources organized by name. Here's a sampling of what that guide looks like:

I hope this addresses questions you might have had regarding our eResources.  I encourage you to stop by the library website & explore!

Free Online Courses

I know the word "free" often makes us all sit up and take notice-after all, who doesn't like being able to get something for nothing? Well, I have discovered that there are a plethora (I have loved that word ever since I first heard it spoken by El Guapo in The Three Amigos) of free online education courses from the article, "How to Go to College for Free", in Reader's Digest. The list in the article was not extensive, but I took the author's advice and searched the web for "Free Online Courses" and was blown away by the number of educational opportunities that are available to anyone willing to take the time to devote to expanding their knowledge.

First, I must mention the library has a huge CD and DVD collection of free courses that can be found by typing in "The Great Courses" as a keyword search in the catalog. At this time there are over 493 items! Some of the selections we have are, "The Origin of Civilization", "The Medieval World" and "Building Great Sentences" to name a few.

There are also databases through the library's Resource Center that customers can access using their library card from their home computer. Some of the great learning tools you can use are:

--The Learning Express Library has hundreds of tests that can be taken to brush up on skills for college or different careers that require tests such as police officers, civil service, or nursing.

--Our BYKI language database allows you to practice on 80 different languages.

--The Global Road Warrior allows you to study different countries and cultures

--and, our huge collection of Info-Trac databases have thousands of articles from newspapers, journals, and magazines on everything from pop-culture to physics.

The author of the Reader's Digest article, David Hochman, really pumped up my geek factor and through my own Google search I found so many websites dedicated to providing open courseware that I couldn't wait to try them all. I managed to contain my enthusiasm and whittled my ever-growing list to what I think are some of the best, which are:

--Openculture.com One of the best websites out there! Not only is there access to free educational courses, but there are hundreds of links to audiobooks, podcasts, and over 300 hundred movies that you can watch online. Click the link on the right side of the page under the caption "Videos and Movies", then click "Free Movies Online". You can watch classics such as Bringing Up Baby, Moby Dick or Yellow Submarine. The "Intelligent Videos" link will take you to an A-Z listing of documentary websites, some of which include the "Australian Screen Archive", the "Europa Film Treasures" or "Snagfilms", which has a huge offering of films.

--Khanacademy.org is a wonderful learning site for people of all ages. It has math lessons ranging from developmental math to trigonometry. Science lessons to include, chemistry, biology and cosmology. All done in video no less! Underneath the video it will have links to download or get exercises.



--Academicearth.org This site has courses from art to writing, with many of the them taught by some of the country's top scholars, such as Donald Kagan from Yale, Walter Lewin from MIT and Michael Sandel from Harvard.

--TheProblemsite.com has hundreds of educational puzzles-math games, word games, strategy games and a section on reference and resource, plus daily puzzles and even a section for juniors.

Also, for you Apple enthusiasts out there that may not have yet run across iTunesU, this is another great application that can be used to learn online and can be accessed right from your device or on your computer through the iTunes software.

These are just a small sampling of places on the internet where you can get free courses to help further your education or to help enrich your life, so the next time someone asks if you know what a quasar is or how the Hawaiian islands were formed you will be able to answer without a blank look on your face!