We have a new reference database available.  ReferenceUSA is a great source for searching businesses and individuals in the United States.  With the U.S. Standard White Pages, you can search for individuals by name, address, or telephone number.  The U.S. Businesses search lets you search by company, personal name, city, state, or telephone number.  Customized searching allows you to find businesses by what they do or make, by location, even search for businesses in a certain area by how many employees or computers they have.

This is a great database if you’re looking for work, writing a business plan, researching sales leads, or just looking for a place to buy what you need.  Find it on our Electronic Resources page.

Brenna Thummler, a senior at Meadville High School and author of From Alligators to Zippers, will be signing copies of her book on May 7, 2011 starting at 2 pm in the Fiction Department.

Brenna wrote and illustrated From Alligators to Zippers for her Senior Project. The book uses the alphabet to highlight cultural and historical elements of Meadville and the surrounding area. Stop by to meet the author!

Meadville Public Library invites all children, young adults and families ages 0 to 100 to attend “We the People”, a free program on the Civil War.  This program will include information on local members of our community who played a part in the Civil War presented by local historian, Tom Barrett, of the Crawford County Civil War Roundtable, and feature members of the 150th PVI Bucktails Civil War re-enactors group, Civil War era games for kids and more.

The program will be held at the Meadville Public Library, 848 N. Main Street, Meadville, PA., on April 2, 2011 from 9 a.m. to12 p.m., with a special presentation at 10 a.m., by Tom Barrett of the Crawford County Civil War Roundtable.

The program is made possible by a gift awarded to the library through the We the People Bookshelf grant, which provided free hardcover editions of 17 classic books on the theme of “A More Perfect Union.”  The library also received bonus materials, including a DVD edition of “the Civil War,” the award-winning documentary by Ken Burns.  The grant was awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in cooperation with the American Library Association.

For more information, see our We the People page.

Contemporary Authors, a guide to modern writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, motion pictures and television, is once again available through the POWER Library. It supports Author or Title searching, as well as filters based on birth year, birth place, death year, death place, gender, nationality, and publication year.

The POWER Library is a collection of online resources available to public & school libraries in Pennsylvania. To access it, click the POWER Library logo in the sidebar of our website. If you’re using the POWER Library from home, you’ll need to log in with the POWER Code from the sticker on your library card plus your eight-digit library card number. If you don’t have a POWER Code sticker on your card, stop by the main desk and ask for one.

Commonwealth Libraries, in conjunction with HSLC/Access PA, the POWER Library and ProQuest, just announced that SIRS Discoverer, an award-winning general reference resource for beginning learners and researchers in grades 1-9, is once again part of the POWER Library suite of Databases and resources, beginning today, October 8, 2010 and continuing through the end of December, 2011 (i.e. for the next 15 months.)

SIRS Discoverer includes carefully selected full-text articles and images from more than 1,900 domestic and international newspapers, magazines, and government documents, along with 9,000+ educational weblinks via the integrated Discoverer WebFind content set. And, more than 29,000 graphics, photos, maps, and charts are available.

Discoverer also offers supplemental curriculum and learning materials, including an educator’s guide, middle- and elementary-level student workbooks, citation guidelines, research strategy worksheets, and more. To access SIRS Discoverer, click the POWER Library button on the left-hand column of our page. If you’re in the library, no authentication is needed. If you’re using POWER Library from outside the library building (or on our wireless connection) you’ll be asked to log in with the POWER code from your library card plus your 8-digit library card number.