image courtesy of flickr user prupert

Learning is a lifelong journey. Computers can help you discover new information, stay connected to family and friends, and keep you entertained.

Join us for one-on-one computer lessons pairing tech-savvy teens with Darien seniors wanting to improve their computer skills. Any and all of your technology questions are welcome. Would you like to set up an email account? Get started on Facebook? Find information online? Or just learn how to us a mouse? Then this is the program for you!

This is a program led by Darien High School students and held at Darien Library.

For more information, or to be matched with a partner, please call Alex Hylton at 203-669-5260.

Beginning August 16, the Darien Library will expand its audiobook collection to include downloadable audiobooks from OverDrive. OverDrive is a large database of downloadable audiobooks compatible with iPods and a wide variety of other MP3 players. Providing access to popular new titles as well as classics, OverDrive will be accessible to all Darien Library patrons. Each user may download up to 10 audiobooks at a time. The audiobooks "check out " for 21 days and are automatically returned at the end of the borrowing period. Although you cannot renew an OverDrive audiobook, you may check it out again if no one else is waiting for it. In addition, you can rate audiobooks and share suggestions with friends on email, Twitter, and/or Facebook.

Before you can download audiobooks from OverDrive, you will need to download and install some free software--OverDrive Media Console. The download takes just minutes, and the software makes transferring, burning (when permitted by publisher), and playing audiobooks fast and easy.

We hope you're as excited about this new addition to our audiobook collection as we are! Come in and let us show you how it works.

See you @ the Library!

Beginning July 1, users of the Darien Library's public computers will be given 5 free black and white (BW) printouts each day. Any additional computer printouts will cost .10/page for BW and .25/page for color.

Prices for photocopying remain the same: .10/page for BW and .25/page for color.

If you have any questions about this change, please let us know.

See you @ the Library!

APM in So/Ho

If you've stopped by our Small Office/Home Office Center on the Library's Lower Level recently, you may have noticed a new addition--our Automated Payment Machine, or APM, for short. Yes, it may look like a coin machine, but it's actually much more sophisticated than your standard coin machine. With our new APM, you can deposit money to your printing account and/or pay down your fines. The APM accepts nickels, dimes, and quarters, and paper money up to $20. With a touchscreen interface, the APM is easy to use, and it is equipped with a receipt printer, so you will receive a record of every transaction. On July 1st, we will add two more APMs: One to the left of the Welcome Desk on the first floor and another adjacent to the Finance printer/copier on the second floor. We hope these new additions make your use of our public computers and printers easier and more efficient. As always, our staff is on hand to assist you with whatever you may need.

 See you @ the Library

Photo courtesy of The Library of Congress

Ah, June. A great month for weddings, graduations, anniversary parties, family reunions, and other social gatherings. Events such as these often call for a colorful banner to herald the occasion. But printing a banner can be difficult and expensive. No worries. The Darien Library is here to help. Our hp designjet printer, located in our Small Office Home Office (SoHo) center on the Lower Level, can print out banners up to 24 inches wide and as long as you want. The preferred file formats are .pdf and .jpg. We charge $2/square foot for banner printing and offer 24-hour turnaround.

Have something in mind you'd like us to print for you? Just email Judy Sgammato at jsgammato@darienlibrary.org or call 203-669-5256. We'll be glad to lend a hand!

See you @ the Library!

Photo courtesy of flickr user jurvetson

With May comes an onslaught of events, from crafts fairs to carnivals, art exhibits to outdoor theatre. It’s so hard to keep track of everything that’s happening! No worries! The Darien Library has the answer. Our Community Calendar allows you to keep track of events for adults, teens, and children taking place in the Library, in Darien, and in lower Fairfield County. And because it's a Google Calendar, you can automatically save events to your own personal Google Calendar with just a few clicks. If you aren't familiar with the Community Calendar, we invite you to take a look. And if you have an event of interest to the Darien Community, please let us know. We would be happy to add your event to the Community Calendar. Send an email with the Who, What, When, and Where to Judy at jsgammato@darienlibrary.org or call her at 203-669-5256.

See you @ the Library!

Photo courtesy of flickr user Guillermo Esteves

With the growing popularity of eReaders, including Amazon's Kindle, Barnes and Noble's Nook, Sony's Reader, and Apple's iPad, to name a few, more and more of our members are looking for free sources of audiobooks and eBooks. If you're looking for the latest best-seller, these sites won't work for you, but if you're a student, researcher, or general reader looking for a classic piece of literature or, perhaps, a particular issue of Life Magazine from the year you were born, you're in luck. Enjoy!

•  AudioBooksForFree - Audiobooks only. Children's and classics. Filters available to narrow your search. Preloaded audiobooks, hard drives, CDs/DVDs available for purchase.
• Escholarship - Open-access scholarly publishing site from the University of California. Good for scholarly research. Downloads in pdf format.
• Google Books - Older issues of magazines, non-fiction (including health, self-help, and computers), and classics. Good for students. Log in to your Google account to create a personal bookshelf and to share your picks with friends.
• Internet Archive -Videos, music, books; classical literature. Includes a database of federal cases. Check out the WayBack Machine to explore archived web content.
• ManyBooks - Over 26,000 free ebooks, available for download in 25 different formats.
• Memoware - Eclectic mix. Good basic information on eBook formats.
• Online Books Page - University of Pennsylvania-sponsored site. Over 35,000 works in English. To be included, a work must meet 3 criteria: be legitimately available for free; be full-text; and be available in a stable, well-formatted standard format (html, pdf, plain text)
• Oxford Text Archive - Thousands of scholarly texts in over 25 languages.
• Project Gutenberg - E-books and audiobooks. Think classics--Austen, Dickens, Thackeray. Download entire CDs/DVDs. Digitized sheet music, too.
• Scribd -Social networking publishing site; original content.
• Wikibooks - free textbooks and cookbooks.

See you @ the Library!

See our tips when you check in!

From the Darien post office to your grocery store of choice to, of course, the Darien Library, there's a lot of places you visit in a day.  What if you recorded - checked in - where you went daily on your mobile phone and what if you were given points for those visits?  Sounds like the making of an interesting game...

That's the exact premise behind the online game foursquare!

Play along with your fellow community members to see what places are of interest in the area.  When you check in other folks may have left tips for you at different locations - called venues.  The library staff has put together a nice list of things to check out while in the library at our venue on foursquare.

The more you check in, the more points you get.  Check in enough times and become mayor of that location!  If you become mayor of Darien Library please stop by the Welcome Desk and show our staff your mayor badge to claim your very own Darien Library tote bag (a $25 dollar value)!

One bag per mayor please :) 

Photo courtesy of flickr user phool4XC

The answer to this frequently asked question is "No." However, although the Darien Library does not have a fax machine per se, we do offer free outgoing fax service to our patrons. How, you ask? Through Fax.com. If you need to send a fax, just come down to the Power Library on the Library's Lower Level. The Help Desk staff will assist you.

In order to send a fax using Fax.com, you will need to have an electronic copy of the document to be faxed. You can bring your document in on a floppy, CD/DVD, or flash drive, or you can download it from your email account. If you have a printed document, we will help you scan it into the computer. Once this is done, we'll log you in to Fax.com and help you fill out the information for your fax and prepare a cover sheet, if needed. Once the fax has been sent, we can print out a confirmation for your records.

You can send faxes to any destination in the United States and Canada for free. Faxes sent outside of the United States and Canada are billed according to Fax.com's standard international price list on a per-minute basis in one-minute increments, and these charges are added to your Library account as a fine. If you need to send a fax to an international destination, check with the Help Desk staff first. We will look up the pricing for you.

More questions? No problem. Just call the Help Desk at 203-669-5238, and we'll do our best to answer them!

See you @ at the Library!