“The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.” Kurt Vonnegut

We will host a program on Sunday, April 12 at 3pm on making Health Care Advance Directives, presented by Jackie Fournier, who is a palliative care nurse practitioner at Central Maine Medical Center. Join us here at the library to learn what you might need to know about sharing directions for your medical care with family, friends, and health workers, in the event that you cannot let your wishes be known. We also have a DVD of “Consider the Conversation: a Documentary on a Taboo Subject” on loan from Jackie. Please feel free to come in and borrow it. We also have Atul Gawande’s quiet and informative book entitled Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.

As many of you know, we pay a subscription to the Maine State Library Downloadable Books project for our patrons. Use of this resource by our adult patrons has increased greatly this past year, and we want you to know that the project includes many juvenile and young adult titles which might appeal to the younger generation. Please let your kids know these are available for loan to download onto their Ipads, Kindles, Nooks, or other tablets and computers. To access the collection, go to the MSL website at http://www.state.me.us/msl/ and click on “Download Library for e-books and audiobooks” under Popular Services at the top of the page. To sign up, our patrons use their four digit library number that is handwritten on their library card, rather than the barcode that is attached to the card.

Cool website of the month: a nice one for searching and then downloading free images. Try Pixabay at http://www.pixabay.com and search for the image you might need for a flyer or card.

There are some beautiful physical books being published lately. They are a great pleasure to hold and study. It is a nice reminder that e-publishing and traditional hard copies are both important for building knowledge and life experience and memories. We have mentioned Christie’s novel, Gutenberg’s Apprentice, in a previous column — such a beautiful book to hold as well as read. There are some children’s picture books being published in large format, beautifully illustrated, also. We have Jenny Bloom’s Animalium, which is chockfull of information, with classic illustrations on nicely textured paper. Steve Jenkins’ The Animal Book is also wonderful, as are the Eyewitness series of books. This winter we acquired the gorgeous new Historical Atlas of Maine, put together by UMaine – lucky for us, because the first printing sold out quickly.