In the spirit of the 1950s folk music revival, the AADL Library Songsters program brings folk musicians, storytellers and dancers into our public schools to teach these traditional arts to students. This year Banjo Betsy Beckerman taught fourth graders at Angell and Pattengill how to write Michigan history songs; Glen Morningstar Jr. brought "Dancing Through American History" to Burns Park, and Lee Knight showed storytelling to sixth graders at Slauson. At the end of each three-day residency, students came to the library to perform their creations for each other or parents. They had a good time learning history, and some go to hear live folk music at places like The Ark or Crazy Wisdom Tea Room. AADL has a excellent collection of folk music recordings, histories and songbooks.

Learn where to look for a job, how to create a resume and beef it up, and how to ace the job interview. Join us in the multipurpose room of the Downtown Library this Sunday, March 4 from Noon to 4 p.m. Refreshments will be served.

Register at the Downtown Youth desk or call 327-8301.

Don’t miss Duct Tape! Re-Mix at Pittsfield Tuesday, Feb. 27 from 1-3 p.m. We’ll provide the tape - in a bunch of colors from camouflage to pink - and you do the rest. Make what you want and meet other tapeheads. We’ll have duct tape books like Got Tape?: Roll out the fun with duct tape on hand for inspiration.

You can now find all your favorite Mystery, Sci-Fi, or Fantasy authors all in one place at the Downtown Library. The formally all paperback section is now interfiled with the hardbound books. Romance and Western books are now interfiled in the general fiction area and can be identified by a label on the book spine. We hope you enjoy the ease of browsing these collections.

Please visit our book display on the 2nd floor reference section of our Downtown location. Throughout the month of February, browse our book display of titles representing the history of African Americans in the U.S. All books from the display can be borrowed for your reading pleasure.

Americans are not accustomed to designing single-family homes for the probability that someone close to them will have mobility problems in the future. At a recent meeting of Senior Advocates of Washtenaw (SAW), a workgroup of Blueprint for Aging, Carolyn Grawi, Sue Hart and David Esau introduced the concept of visitablility. The goal is for anyone living in or visiting your home to be able to enter, move about, and use the bathroom.

AADL is barrier-free, and has books that address this concept: Design for Assisted Living, Design for Dignity, Beautiful Barrier-Free, and Building Design for Handicapped and Aged Persons. Go to concretechange.org for more information.

The Nonprofit Resources Center is a new collection at AADL that focuses on nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit expertise in the areas of fundraising, governance, administration, and employment is now collected together and available for circulation. The Nonprofit Resources Center contains approximately 400 items and is located on the 2nd floor of the Downtown Library. The Nonprofit Resources Center is a collaboration between the NEW Center and Ann Arbor District Library to facilitate the use of these books and to make them available to the widest audience possible. We wish to thank Borders which generously made these materials available.

This month Proyecto Avance: Latino Mentoring Association, or PALMA, will begin holding English language tutoring sessions at the Downtown Library. PALMA is the brainchild of Cristhian Espinoza, a Spanish professor at the University of Michigan’s Residential College. The organization pairs UM students with native Spanish speakers in the community who are interested in learning English. Participants range in age from infants and preschoolers to adults, and many attend as families.

While PALMA currently has a waiting list, the library has lots of materials for patrons looking to learn English, from DVDs and CDs to books written specifically for adult English learners.

Please join us in welcoming PALMA to the Ann Arbor District Library!

One of the Ann Arbor District Library's outreach programs is Library Songsters, where a musician teaches K-12 students to how to write songs using information they learn in history or geography class. The students start to understand why the traditional songs they grew up singing are still popular a century or two after they were written.

There are whole books about one song: the seasonal White Christmas, the early American tune, Yankee Doodle, the ballad of a St. Louis barroom brawl, Stagolee, the folk/blues classic John Henry. New York, our most famous city, has more songs written about it than any other metropolis in America. The folk process itself is examined in volumes like American Roots Music and Making People's Music.

The concept of seniority has changed a lot in recent decades, one result of far fewer Americans belonging to labor unions. In Aged by Culture, Margaret Gullette recounts that in the six years her son worked for a temporary employment agency, after graduating from Harvard, he received 1099 forms from more than one hundred companies, none of which paid Social Security, health or pension benefits. She states that thirty percent of Americans are now doing similar kinds of nonstandard work. Other implications of aging in a global economy, are addressed in several books at the Ann Arbor District Library, such as Gray Dawn, Aging and Old Age, Age Power, and My Life in the Middle Ages.