Cooking/Recipes Apps for Ipads and Andriods

For the Ipad I found a couple of good apps to help with cooking and the first one is called Yummly Recipes and Shopping List for Ipad.  What it does is brings you every recipe in the world right to your Ipad. You can collect, save and organize your favorite recipes in your own digital recipe box. How cool is that?!  No more writing things down and later losing them or unable to read them. You also get Discover Recipe Recommendations just for you and it automatically categorizes your shopping list to make your trip to the store a snap!

Another one is called Timer +. Now you can set multiple timers at once! Time by the second, minute or hour and has 9 alarms available. Great for when you have something in the oven and and the stove top and only have one timer available. You can use it for other things as well!

One of the cooking apps I found for the Android is called My Cookbook: Cooking Tips.  This will be great for those of us (me) that have troubles in the cooking department (haha). It gives you general cooking tips, information on sauces and seasonings, barbecuing, meat and poultry, fruits and vegetables, pasta, rice and potatoes, baking and how to manage your leftovers. Sometimes we can all use a little help. :)

The other one I found was called Cooking Conversions and it is for those of us that have problems with conversions in the kitchen. It converts units of measure by volume and weight. You can scale a recipe from x servings to y servings. You can convert between Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures. Also, helps with substituting an ingredient you may have run out of. I think this app is going to very useful in my kitchen!

How to place a hold on Axis 360

To place a hold on a book in Axis 360 you will first want to go to the site and you can access it through our home page www.aberdeen.sd.us/library. When you click on the box that says Axis 360 you will see a screen like this: 

This is the log in screen. You will enter your library card number with no spaces and the password is your last name. Once you get logged in you will be on the main home page called the Magic Wall. This is where you will see the different categories of books available and what isn't available. To place the hold you will choose the book you want that is checked out and your screen should look like this:

You can hover over the book picture and place the hold that way or click on the picture of the book and then click on the place hold icon. You will be asked to enter your email address just for the first time you place a hold and when you have done that you are all set. When the book comes in for you, you will receive an email telling it is available for pick up. Watch the video below to see how to place a hold on a book that is checked out.

The one thing most patrons always ask help on is how to print.  They can never seem to know where the button is or how to do it. Most of the programs you can go to file, click and go down to print. That is where you will select how many copies you want and then click print.

This is an example of what the print screen may look like.  Printing is not as hard as some people make it out to be. But am always glad to help when needed.

Wrap Up

I would say I didn't have a big discovery on just one thing -- I hadn't used a lot of these sites and it was a great learning experience for me.  I hadn't realized how much there was to learn about each site - I use World Cat all the time here at work and didn't know you could look for more things on the site and how to look up different items different ways. 


At our library we already have patrons that use the Ancestry site and some others to look up family things. Also when do school tours we show the kids the different Sirs and World Book sites.  I would recommend the different sites to our patrons if they need to know about history or do some research.

Again this challenge was a challenge for me...I am grateful I have great co-workers that can help me with different things I didn't understand and they did.  I do enjoy these challenges - it is a great thing to learn what is out there for us to use and for our patrons to use that I didn't know existed.

Sanborn Maps

Since I am originally not from SD I don't know many of the towns or what used to be here, so I did end up picking Big Stone City - I lived there for a couple of months and started school there. The date of the map is March 1904 - I know today there isn't as many business open as what is on the map.  The only I could recognize was the school.  Kind of hard to tell if the school is in the same place now as where it was then.  I did also check the February 1927 map and the school is still in the same place and so is the Methodist Church -- I believe I know where that is located...hard for me to tell by the streets.  This would be something I see people using if they are looking for an old business or church from a specific time and place.  Kind of interesting to know there is something like this available to look at. 

Heritage Quest

I looked at all the different things you can go into and what I found was you need to make sure you know names, places and spellings of everything.  I did try a search for a MN county for history and got some stuff had no clue what it was.  Plus did a search to check an obituary and couldn't find the person I was looking for.  I find this site kind of confusing and a little challenging but maybe if worked with it more or had help from someone who has used to show me the way through it I might enjoy it.  It has a lot of different search ways - I like the Revolutionary War search - that would be interesting to know if had family that fought in it.

AncestryLibrary

I am kind of excited for this one since I haven't done much family history and haven't used these sites. When searching myself I found my name, date of birth, parents names and also showed when I lived in Browns Valley, MN.  I thought that was pretty cool!! 

When searching for the grandparent I thought I might have a hard time since couldn't remember when my grandpa was born and forgot he had a middle name since had 2 first names lol.  But it came up with information which surprised me.  It showed his death information, my mom's birth information and her 2 youngest brothers birth information.  I was surprised it didn't show her older sister or her other brother. I think I might use this to do further checking on my ancestors...wonder if can find my grandfather's birth parents..who knows.

Wow when you put in South Dakota you get all kind of different things, famous baseball players, Library of Congress photos which are of different town in SD and WWI solider photos.  When you hover your cursor over the information it provides a more detailed information tab.  That is kinda cool.  This is an interesting site!