Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

I would like to point out a little used feature of this blog. If you are reading the entries on the website (as opposed to via email) then on the right side of the window you see a heading called Categories. Under that word there are 8 links. Each of those links lead to a subset of all the blog posts, belonging to that particular category. (Most blog posts belong to more than one category though.) Here is the explanation of what the categories refer to:

• About: posts related to the physical facility of the library (e.g. new shelf labels, opening hours, furniture …), its virtual presence (e.g. links or representations on other sites) or involving the staff.
  Purpose of the category: to share the news what’s going on in the little world of the library.
• Books: posts describing individual (or sets of) books in the library.
  Purpose: to generate interests to books in our collection related to current events, anniversaries. To counter the general tendency to focus only on newly published books at the peril of forgetting exiting works.
• DVDs: posts pointing out items in our growing DVD collection.
  Purpose: our intention is to create a great assortment of Jewish themed feature film DVDs, making the library a destination and source for entertainment.
• Events: posts announcing and reporting of events, such as filmclubs, author readings, festivals …
  Purpose: to market the events of the library (and other organizations) to the potential audience and summarize lessons learned.
• New books: posts featuring newly acquired or donated books. (Currently we are still through a backlog of the 100+ books we received from Copperfield books earlier this year. Once all of those are introduced we will start purchasing books again and “new books” section will feature books as they are arriving.)
  Purpose: to point out new books for those who are thoroughly familiar with the existing collection.
• Resources: links to other sites, lists of books, topics of interests not necessarily related to the library, but more generally to Jewish literature and literacy
  Purpose: to serve our readership with interesting resources outside the library, to position the library in a wider context.
• Reviews: longer evaluations of books from the library, read by the staff. If a “review” of ours does not appear in the category it means we generated the description based on paging through the book, reading others’ reviews, but not by reading the book itself.
  Purpose: to give detailed overview of interesting books containing and objective description and subjective analysis.
• VHS: describing one or more of our 100+ VHS tapes
  Purpose: to help readers and patrons discovering these somewhat hidden gems. We can not convert most of these to the nowadays more common DVD format because of copyright reasons. Nevertheless, our collection of documentaries, children films, feature films, and musical tapes is worth checking out.