Carolyn Longworth, Library Director, The Millicent Library
Although the building is closed, the Millicent Library provides lots of online resources to use during the Coronavirus lockdown. If you need something to read, watch, or listen to, or if you’re nervous about the present and the future and want to escape to the past, we have you covered.
We have increased our Overdrive & Hoopla budgets so that more items (movie, tv, audiobooks, ebooks) are available to more people. You can also get a Boston Public Library ecard for additional online resources by virtue of being a Mass. resident. Our newest offering, Acorn TV, is available to patrons with a Fairhaven library card.
In case you’ve already Googled everyone you know, we also have local resources to look up people, check out how many epidemics disrupted the town in the past, as well as to look at the old ads.
Our collection of Fairhaven High School Yearbooks 1923-2019 has just been digitized by the Boston Public Library as part of a project funded by a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant. This grant also funded putting the Fairhaven Town Reports online (beginning 1847). Our library school staff member, Sam Correira, scanned all the Barnacle newspapers covering the waterfront from 1990 to 1993.
Archivist Deb Charpentier and her volunteers maintain The Lost Fishermen Database and the Fairhaven Cemetery Database, both of which are constantly being updated. They also input the Fairhaven Vital Records 1844-1899, listing births, deaths and marriages. Several years ago we got a grant from the Community Preservation Act and digitized the run of the Fairhaven Star newspaper for 1879-1967.
State databases, including the Boston Globe are for everyone in Mass. There are network databases like Novelist (find book titles similar to your favorites). Subscriptions to Consumer Reports, Birds of the World online, 19th Century Newspapers, America’s Historical Newspapers 1690-1922 are also worth a look, but you will need a Fairhaven library card for these.
Please check our website www.millicentlibrary.org to see what the library has to offer including links to the above items and more. We also are gathering suggestions of links (a.k.a. Various and Sundry), some serious, some not, to help get you through this.
The Library is also looking to collect experiences of local people during this time of the Coronavirus. On our site is a link to a form with some ideas of what to include. Think of how interesting this will all be in 100 years when Facebook and social media are long gone. We would like notes, journals, photos, drawings, poems or any other format.
Thanks…we miss all of our patrons!
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