See Santa & Mrs. Claus at the Library!
Save the date: the Bethany Lions Club will be bringing everyone’s favorite holiday elves to Clark Memorial Library on December 5th, from 4:30 – 6:30 PM. Visit with Santa and Mrs. Claus, and join members of the Lions Club and your local librarians at the makerspace table!
Add the things you’re thankful for to our Thanksgiving Tree!
The Thanksgiving Tree will be on display in the Friends of the Library nook at the bottom of the main staircase, along with paper leaves in a variety of colors and shapes, sharpies, and paperclip hooks. To take part, just write out something you’re thankful for on a leaf and hang it from one of the branches using a hook! We hope to have a beautiful display that showcases all the good things in our staff and patrons’ lives by the end of the season.
A Historical Walk Through Bethany: First Photo Scanning Day
November 23, 2:00 – 3:30 PM
The Library is hosting Photo Scanning Days in collaboration with the Bethany Historical Society to collect images for the upcoming “A Historical Walk Through Bethany” exhibit! Bethany residents are invited bring in photos that show everyday life in Bethany through the past decades. Members of the Historical Society in the downstairs Community Room will scan the photos to create digital copies for the exhibit and return the originals.
Photos can also be dropped off at the Library during our hours of operation, at the Town Clerk’s office, or at a Bethany Historical Society event; please bring them in an enclosed envelope labeled with your name and contact information so that they can be returned to you once they have been scanned.
For more information, contact Linda Wooster
at ljwooster@gmail.com or 203-393-1832.
November is both National Novel Writing Month (also known as NaNoWriMo) and National Memoir Writing Month. In honor of these celebrations of creative and nonfiction writing, we’ve filled our displays with books about the writing process, authorship, and storytelling in general, as well as the tales of people both real and fictional who either write themselves or are involved in the publishing industry. Learn about a favorite author or discover a new one when you stop by the Library this month!
The Library will continue to close at 3:00 PM on Fridays until further notice; we hope to return to our usual hours as soon as possible, but do not have a date in place at the moment. We apologize again for any inconvenience the shortened hours causes.
Have You Tested Your Water Lately?
Even if your water tastes and smells fine, that doesn’t always mean it’s safe to drink…
UConn Extension is providing reduced-cost well testing for residents of Bethany and the surrounding areas. Normally $350 or more, tests will be provided for $200!
Please sign up by November 11th. If you miss the deadline to register, we will have sample kits to distribute at the event. Kits will need to be returned the day of or brought back to the UConn main campus at a later date.
Where: Clark Memorial Library, 538 Amity Road, Bethany, CT 06524
When: November 16th, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Visit s.uconn.edu/bethany-well-testing to register
Contact alec.janis@uconn.edu with questions
Celebrate Halloween in the Makerspace!
With Halloween on the horizon, we’re offering a whole assortment of spooky crafts in the Makerspace! Visitors can create a stand-up paper witch, a beaded pipe cleaner pumpkin, a custom Halloween bookmark, or a paper ghost on a stick – or choose from a selection of holiday-themed coloring and activity sheets. There’s something for everyone!
The Library’s video streaming service, Kanopy, is celebrating the approach of Halloween with Fright Fest, a collection of themed watchlists featuring dozens of eerie tales and supernatural adventures! You can use your library card number to access these lists, as well as hundreds of other classic and indie films, TV shows, and documentaries. New media and curated watchlists are added on a regular basis. For a quick walkthrough of how to set up and use a Kanopy account, visit their Getting Started webpage; if you already have an account, just sign in and enjoy!
Clark Memorial Library and the Bethany Historical Society are working together to create A Historical Walk Through Bethany, an exhibit highlighting the visual history of the town of Bethany through the years. The exhibit will feature photos shared by the community, which will be scanned, enlarged, matted, and arranged by decade in the Library’s Community Room, allowing visitors to “walk through” the everyday lives of Bethany residents.
A few photos have already been collected, and are on display across from the glass display cabinets outside the Community Room! Be sure to stop by and get a glimpse of how life in Bethany has changed over time.
The Library will be hosting Photo Scanning Days on November 23 and December 10 to collect images for the final exhibit. For more information about these events, and the exhibit as a whole, see the Library’s Calendar of Events.
An artist reception will be held on November 16th, 3:00 – 4:30 PM for the local artist featured in our Arts@Clark! exhibits for October and November, Roberta Scott. Her work will be shown in the Community Room and the downstairs display cabinets from Tuesday, October 8th, until Friday, December 6th.
Roberta is, in her own words, “a maker of fine art and not so fine art.”
She grew up in the Four Corners area of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, on and off the Navajo reservation and military bases. After high school, she went to work for the Forest Service, served 5 years in the Navy working as an aviation mechanic, and worked locally at Sikorsky Aircraft. She received a BFA in Sculpture at Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, a college of the University of New Haven, and is currently a technical writer for Sikorsky, a mother, and a “fair weather artist.”