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This Week at the Library

 

This week at the Library, you can join us for

Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture Series: Author Ibram X. KendiMonday, Feb 15 \ 6 - 7:30 p.m.

We are honored to partner with the Division of Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Missouri, Kansas City on their annual Martin Luther King Jr. lecture series. The lecture series honors Martin Luther King's tremendous contributions to furthering civil rights by featuring national thought leaders, who provide insight and advocacy to current civil rights issues of education, economic and justice system inequalities.

Body Talk: Rebekah Taussig in Conversation with Charlesia McKinney – Tuesday, Feb. 16 \ 6:30 - 7:30 p.m.

Rebekah Taussig, author of Sitting Pretty: the View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body and Charlesia McKinney, Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Composition with an interest in fat studies, will discuss what it means to live in their particular female bodies.

Disability as Space for Imagination – Wednesday, Feb. 17 \ 6:30 – 7:30

In this lecture, Rebekah Taussig, author of Sitting Pretty: the View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, will explore the powerful connection between the cultural narratives around our physical selves and the world we live in, from physical spaces and economic opportunities to social roles and interpersonal relationships.

Virtual City Cycling – Thursday, Feb. 18 \ Noon to 1:30 p.m.

And much more

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"Little Central" Opens Monday, Feb. 15

Little Central will open in a portion of our front lobby on Monday, February 15, offering limited services.

Services available at Central during construction include:

  • Holds pick-up and self-check.
  • Materials return inside the building (for exterior book drops, we recommend patrons use a nearby location such as Oak Park, Leawood, or Corinth).
  • Nine public PCs
  • Public printing / copying / scanning
  • Access to public restrooms
  • Community information, including tax forms

Modified services during construction:

  • The Black & Veatch Makerspace. The Makerspace staff are working temporarily at another location and offering online programming. We anticipate bringing them back to Central in summer 2021, depending on construction and/or public health conditions at that time.
  • The Genealogy desk will continue to offer virtual hours for patron access. Many online databases will continue to be available remotely.

For more details and answers to your questions, check out our Central Resource Library Construction FAQs.

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Our Librarian Josh's Favorite Table Top Games

During this pandemic, board games have been a valuable pastime for many people, whether it's breaking some out with the family and friends or learning how to play games on new online platforms. At Johnson County Library, our Table Top Games Committee has been trying to think of ways that we can share our passion with our patrons even if we can’t meet in person. Join us each month for a virtual Table Top Games event!

Our Librarian Josh's Table Top Games Journey

Hi! I'm Josh. Like Katy, I remember playing games with my family starting at a young age: Sorry, Trouble, Monopoly, Clue, and more. My brother and I almost came to blows when our dad taught us how to play Risk. (To be fair, I did make an alliance with him, only to attack one of his countries a few turns later. But even now that we're adults, I'm not going to invite him to play Munchkin with me.) I was also an imaginative kid, playing Make Believe and Let's Pretend on my own or with friends, making up stories with Star Wars action figures or pretending to be superheroes on the playground during recess. That primed me for getting into tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons at the same time I was getting bored with traditional board games. It was through the online RPG community that I learned of "Euro-style" tabletop games. I bought Ticket to Ride out of curiosity and LOVED it. Soon after, Wil Wheaton launched his YouTube series TableTop, showing the diversity of new games and, as Katy said, that there was a growing community of players of these new games. So when she asked me if I wanted to help running a monthly tabletop program, I gave her an enthusiastic "YES!" (This earned both of us high fives from Wil when we talked with him at Planet Comicon one year. #humblebrag) I can't wait for this pandemic to be over so I can go back to playing games with people in person. And no, I haven't played the game Pandemic at all this year.

Josh's favorite games: Ticket to Ride, Pirate's Cove, Munchkin, Smash Up, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, Fate, 7th Sea, Mage: The Ascension, Trinity Continuum.

Read our other Table Top Games Committee members' stories and favorite games »

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TBT: Chinese New Year and Old Years

Chinese New Year 2021 begins tomorrow, Friday, February 12th, 2021! It's the Year of the Ox. In the Chinese zodiac, the Ox is known for its honest nature, diligence, dependability, strength and determination. The Ox has a significant place in Asian culture

The words that describe the Ox seem appropriate for Chinese immigrants who have come to call Johnson County home. Dig into a little of their experience at jocohistory.org. There you'll find the photograph seen here of students of the Chinese school, oral histories like Lihui Xiong - New Immigrants and the American Dream Exhibit, advertisements for Chinese businesses in publications like The County Squire, The Johnson County Leader, The Village Squire, and more when using the search term: "Chinese History."  

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Black Women Making History

We are celebrating the 2021 theme for Black History Month, The Black Family: Representation, Identity and Diversity, with historic firsts. This week we're highlighting a few Black women making history.

First we have Vice President Kamala Harris, with her book The Truths We Hold, An American Journey.

Another first, The Legend, The Bessie Coleman Story, a documentary about the first Black and first Native American woman to hold a pilot’s license. Bessie Coleman was a celebrity pilot performing in airshows throughout the country until her untimely death testing out a new airplane.

And a local biography: Cathy Williams, From Slave to Female Buffalo Soldier. Williams was a former slave from Independence, MO who went on to disguise herself as a man and fight with the Buffalo soldiers during the Civil war.

Johnson County Library has so many resources, it might be hard to choose which to read, listen to or participate in, so if you’d like more during the month-long celebration of Black History, we've gathered more for you to enjoy »

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Axis 360's "Dyslexia Font"

Pssst! I have a secret to share. I'm a librarian who doesn't like to read.

I mean, I love to read, for pleasure. But it pains me to read anything that doesn't fascinate me. Instructions. Guides. Textbooks. Nonfiction: unless it's about something salacious or it otherwise piques my interest. I'm one of those people where, when I'm forced to read something I don't want to read, I finish a paragraph and realize I have no idea what's going on. So I re-read the paragraph. Same. No idea. It takes me forever to read through anything that is not absolutely fascinating.

It's not the end of the world. I love audiobooks, for instance. But not everything is available in audio format, and sometimes my fourteen-year-old is not in the mood to read to me. (Ungrateful! Think of all the years I spent reading to her! Although, I admit, I never read her things like income tax form instructions like I have asked her to read to me.)

All this is to say, I'm extremely excited to have discovered something new today that might help me focus on my "required reading." Johnson County Library's eBook service, Baker and Taylor's Axis 360, has a "dyslexia font." Right now this font is only available by reading on the website itself, which I can still access from my iPhone, just through the Safari browser instead of the Axis 360 app. Just change the font in the browser reader. It works with many titles, although not quite all. The dyslexia font is coming to the app in early 2021 in the next update.

I don't know if I have dyslexia. I've never been tested. And when I do find something to read that excites me, I generally plow through it and remember it for years, if not decades. However, I probably do have ADHD, so maybe the dyslexia font works for all sorts of neurodiverse readers. I've tried it out today and I love it so far.

If you know someone who struggles with "required reading" let them know about this feature. And let us know if you have any questions. We'd love to hear how it works for you!

 

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This Week at the Library

This week at the Library, you can join us for

Online Storytime - Monday, Feb. 8 \ 10 -10:30 AM
The whole family will enjoy this flexible Storytime. Hearing stories is a great way to spend time with your kids and help them foster a love of reading. Stories, songs, fingerplays and movement activities foster pre-reading skills. Fun for the whole family.

One-on-One Genealogy Help  - Tuesday, Feb. 9 \ 9 a.m. – 1 p.m.

Book Party - Wednesday, Feb. 10 \ 2-2:30 p.m.

Intro to 3D Modeling-TinkerCAD - Friday, Feb. 12 \ 12 – 1 p.m.

And much more ...

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Super Books about the Super Bowl!

There's just something about the Super Bowl. Each year the National Football League's championship is like an engrossing movie, but nowhere as predictable as our box office favorites. Each one lives on in American folklore. Heroes are discovered. Who will seize the day? It's like a national holiday. 

If you just can't get enough football this time of year, we have all the books and other items in our catalog about the Super Bowl.