September is Library Card Sign-up Month, a time when the Milford Public Library joins with the American Library Association and public libraries nationwide to make sure that our students have the most import school supply of all – a free library card.

Resources at the Milford Public Library are available to anyone who has a library card. Students can turn to the library for materials, programs and services that support academic achievement. The library has books marked for Accelerated Reader!

Students can use their library cards from home, too. Milford Library offers access to important educational resources, like e-books, Freegal Music to download, online homework help, online databases, and renew or put a hold on items on your library card.

“Our library provides all types of students with the tools they need to succeed,” says Julie Frew, director. “We provide students with exciting and engaging programs that make learning fun and resources that they can access from the library or from home – all with a free library card. It is for these reasons that a library card is most important school supply of all.”

Throughout the course of the month, anyone registering for a new library card will have their name entered into a drawing for a gift card at a local restaurant. Winners will be drawn Oct. 1.

For more information on how to sign up for a library card, visit the Milford Public Library  in person or visit the library online at www.milford.lib.in.us.

After School is Cool! Tuesdays
Everyone is invited to come to the Milford Public Library on Tuesdays at 3:30 p.m. for special events each week.

Scrapbooking Club
Do you have your photographs sorted but need help displaying them in an album where they’ll be available for your family and friends to look at and admire?  Why put it off any longer? Bring your photos and supplies to the library and have Miss Mim and the scrapbookinggroup help you put your pictures together in a book. You will cherish the memories for a life time.

Coming to Overdrive/ebooks
Attention eBook and digital audiobook users: OverDrive Media Console v3.0 is for iOS and Android users! You’ll now be able to sync bookmarks and reading progress across multiple devices, use variable playback speed for audiobooks on iOS and use a one-stop reorganized menu!

Geocaching…Using Multi-Million Dollar Satellites to find Tupperware in the Woods Sound intriguing?  Wendi Rummel and Jill VanSickle have been “caching” for over seven years.

A patient of Ms. Rummel’s introduced her to this “treasure hunting” one day while they were discussing his son’s boy scouting activities. It sounded like fun, so Rummel logged on to www.geocaching.com and learned how to do it.

To geocache you only need two things: a GPS device or a smartphone and a sense of adventure.
Geocaches are everywhere. They can be as large as a toolbox to as small as a thumbnail. Literally thousands upon thousands worldwide. These locations can be quite diverse. They might be at your local park, at the end of a long hike, underwater, or on the side of a city street. The cache owner hides his cache, takes the coordinates and logs it into geocaching.com, then once it’s approved it is posted for others to find.

So what’s so fun about finding a cache? Well, for one thing, you never know what awesome place a cache owner will take you to that place a regular person never knew existed. Ms. Rummel found a cache on the back side of a stop sign at the corner of Hollywood and Vine.

Another cool thing about finding a cache is opening up to see what’s inside. Cache owners usually fill the cache with trinkets of some sort for trading. This is what makes it great fun for little children. You may take something out, if you put something back in exchange. Except for travel bugs. The cache hidden at Rummel’s workplace is generally filled with toothbrushes, paste and floss.

Bugs?? Bugs are not put in the cache on purpose. Actually people like to find and leave travel bugs and geo-coins. These are known as Trackables. A Trackable is a sort of physical geocaching “game piece.”  Each Trackable is etched with a unique code that can be used to log its movements on geocaching.com as it travels in the real world. Some of these items have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles thanks to geocachers who move them from cache to cache!

Each Trackable can be looked up on geocaching.com by its number to see if it has a goal and to see how many miles it has traveled.

If geocaching piques your interest, please join Wendi Rummel and Jill VanSickle for Geocaching 101 at the Milford Public Library on Sept. 27, at 3:30 p.m. for an after school program. If you have access to a GPS device or smartphone, bring it along to find the cache that is hidden at the library. Children under 10 years of age should probably bring an adult to help them. This program is for all ages. Log into www.geocaching.com or search the cgeo app for your smartphone.

Voting for the 2013 Teens’ Top 10 Now Open!
Every year at this time YALSA asks teens everywhere what their favorite books of the current year have been. Teens can now vote for their favorite titles of the 2013 Teens’ Top 10. This year there are 28 nominees.

Milford Library has all the nominees in our teen collection. Selecting a Teens’ Top 10 is part of the Teen Read Week celebration, this year Oct. 13-19. Vote now through Oct. 19. The top 10 titles with the most votes will be named the official titles of the 2013 Teens’ Top 10.

Winners will be announced the week of Oct. 21.