50 ways to use your library

The week of April 10-16 is National Library Week. Here are 50 ways to take advantage of all your library has to offer you.

1. Scare yourself with a mystery.

2. Reserve a book.

3. Trace a friend in an out-of-state telephone book.

4. Prepare for your job interview.

5. Pick up a book on cassette or CD and listen to it in your car as you drive home.

6. Read stories published in the newspaper on the day you were born.

7. Spruce up the house with ideas from the latest books on interior design.

8. Get a schedule of classes for CSU, Chico, or Butte College.

9. Find out what happened during the Great Depression.

10. Sit at a quiet table with your children and help them with their homework.

11. Get your own free copy of the Butte County Recycling Directory.

12. Find answers to legal questions in books and on the Internet.

13. Learn how to repair your 1982 Camaro by using a Mitchell manual.

14. Find your favorite celebrity in Who’s Who in America.

15. Learn how to plan a drought resistant garden.

16. Trek to another planet in a sci-fi novel.

17. Find out where to send a consumer complaint.

18. Learn how to clean ink stains from a marble counter.

19. Buy a book at the weekly book sale—or donate a book for the sale.

20. Discover who said, “The truth shall make you free.” (Did you bet it was Abraham Lincoln? It wasn’t.)

21. Decide with the aid of consumer guides which DVD player to buy.

22. Locate Butte County demographic information.

23. Reserve the conference room for your next meeting.

24. Bring a toddler to the Spanish story time.

25. Sit down, relax, and read a newspaper or magazine.

26. Enjoy the library’s changing exhibits.

27. Type a letter or resume.

28. Carve a pumpkin at the Fall Festival.

29. Read a large-type book without wearing your glasses.

30. Learn how to write a bibliography for your report.

31. Spend nostalgic hours looking at back issues of Life magazine.

32. Check out a musical CD.

33. Get help with filling out your tax forms.

34. Learn about the library literacy program.

35. Make photocopies.

36. Request an inter-library loan from a library in another city.

37. Research your investments on Valueline.

38. Enroll your child in the Library’s Summer Reading Program.

39. Ask a staff member to give a talk to your service organization.

40. Use Infotrac to find magazine articles on any subject.

41. Borrow a set of audiocassettes or CDs that teach you how to speak another language.

42. Find out who was featured at the first Monterey Jazz Festival.

43. Learn what the Galileo Orbiter saw just before it crashed on the planet Jupiter.

44. Finish your homework on a computer in the Teen Center.

45. Plan your wedding and reception.

46. Check your e-mail on a library public-access computer.

47. Learn who won the America’s Cup in 1901.

48. Get started on tracing your family’s history.

49. Let your child choose an armload of read-aloud stories.

50. Rembrandt? Take a look at his pictures in the library.