Please join us in welcoming the latest addition to Parkway Central's Philbrick Hall team. Patrice is the new Teen Center Specialist, and she'll be hanging out in the Teen Center after school Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.

In her own words:

" I'm incredibly excited to meet you all as the new Teen Center Specialist for the Free Library Main Branch.  I'm a Philadelphia native and a graduate of the Art Institute of Philadelphia where my concentration was media arts and animation.  I hope to be able to bring a lot of my artistic skills and love for young people to the activities we'll do and the time we spend together.  I have a lot of things I want to share with you all about myself and I'm sure that you all have some things to teach me.  I'm truly looking forward to that."

Tags: Teens

We love year-end "Best of" lists here in Libraryland! There's so much good stuff published each year that we ache to share the books we love with everyone we can get our hands on.

Sometimes we just want to force you all to curl up in a comfy chair with a cup of hot cocoa and a fantastic book and not re-emerge until you're done. Since some people might get mad if we did that (and we don't have an endless supply of hot cocoa), we use Best Of lists to try to get you to love what we love.

As a librarian in Philbrick Hall at the Parkway Central Library, I'm so fortunate that I get to see all the new and cool books, both fiction and non-fiction, that come though our doors. I've sifted through the 267 books that I've read this year (so far) to come up with my 20 favorites to share with you!

This month I'm counting down my personal favorites that were published in 2012 over at the Philbrick Hall Facebook Page. Each day I'm posting a new book, ranging in topic from memoir to history to romance to science fiction to essays, and I'll unveil my absolute favorite of them all on New Year's Eve.

All the books are available right here at the Free Library either as a real book, an e-book, or both. Come like Philbrick Hall and see what I've been reading!

Tags: reading

There's a new face in Philbrick Hall at Central this week - Michael R. has joined the team to be the After School Leader in the Teen Center. 

Michael graduated from Vassar College in 2011, with a major in Art History and a minor in Urban Studies.  At Vassar, he worked at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, developing and teaching outreach art programming for students at Poughkeepsie Middle School.  Through this experience, Michael became interested in the ways public institutions can engage their communities with innovative, exciting, and relevant programming. 

Since graduation, he has worked at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum, and currently works at both the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Free Library.  As an artist and educator, Michael is interested in questioning the way we understand ourselves and those around us. 

Outside of his professional life, Michael enjoys baking cupcakes, exploring new cities, and going to museums as frequently as possible.    

Drop by and get to know him!

Tags: Free Library staff, Parkway Central, Teens

The Philbrick Hall teens, Teen Leadership Assistants, and After School Leader K-Fai Steele collaborated on an ambitious series of post-it murals this past month. They discovered the post-it mural art form by connecting to the teen tumblr blogs at the Naperville Public Library,  Arlington Public Library , and  La Porte County Public Library . Some more intensive research brought the teens to the source of the medium: competing French office workers . The Philbrick Hall teens and TLAs were inspired to create post-it murals of their own.

The teens began the process by discussing favorite old arcade and early Nintendo characters that were created in the age of pixel animation. Some ideas were Mario, Mega Man, Donkey Kong, and Pac-Man. They used graph paper and highlighters to map out the characters, and created schematics using 1-inch squares of construction paper and painter’s tape. They employed some simple math skills to determine how large of a space we would need for the 3 x 3 traditional post-it size (they had to scale down many of their original, more ambitious ideas; all teens agreed that Ben Franklin in post-it form ended up looking like a “terrifying clown”). The most difficult part of the process: finding black post-its.

See the Pac-Man and Pikachu post-it murals in Philbrick Hall at the Parkway Central Library from now until the end of July. The Philbrick teen tumblr blog can be visited at http://freelibraryteencenter.tumblr.com/

-written by K-Fai Steele

Tags: Teens

If you're anything like me, you've read a ton of series books. And then you come to the end, or you've read all the available books and are waiting for the author to write more. So you move on to other things and sometimes forget about checking to see if the series continues or if new books are published. When you do notice there's a new book, you might have forgotten where you left off in the series and have to figure out where to pick up again.

That's where Fictfact comes in. At Fictfact you can select all the series you're reading or have read. You then check off the books you've read, and Fictfact will show you in order the ones you have left to read. It will also tell you about upcoming series books that aren't yet published. Even better, it will tell you about short stories that are part of the series!

Also, if you want to enter a series and there's no record for it, their customer service team is really responsive. I emailed them about a missing series and it was available on the site within the hour.

If you like social media, invite your friends to sign up and you can follow each other's series reading as well.

Fictfact is a great resource to track your series, and once you log in the main page lists your next books and upcoming books, so all it takes is a quick glance to see what you need to read next. This is a great companion site to Goodreads.

Give it a shot at www.fictfact.com