We will have grab bags for kids to pick up for Earth Day week and Mother’s Day week.

Each bag will have crayons, coloring sheets, an activities packet and stickers. It will be one bag per child, and each child will get a free book.

Adults will also be able to get a free book, a packet of coloring sheets and word game sheets.

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The last spring basket raffle will end 1 p.m. April 23. We will draw our winners April 24 and call to let them know. If you win, you will have a week to pick up your basket.

Basket themes include gardening, cozy time, family movie night, COVID-19, author book-stacks and more. There are 25 baskets on display on the tables inside the front door.

Thank you to all of the patrons who have donated items, purchased tickets and supported the library. We will do more raffles in the fall.

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The weekly interactive Zoom story time will continue 11 a.m. Tuesdays until May 25. At that time, we will decide whether or not we should continue or postpone. All are welcome to attend, though the stories will be geared toward toddlers through second-graders.

Contact Mrs. Santaliz at santaliz.l@whitehallpl.org to receive the Zoom links. These will be available every Thursday before the following Tuesday’s storytime.

Additionally, the Teen Advisory Board records a storytime for young patrons every other month. You can find April’s storytime on our website, whitehallpl.org.

Thank you to the teens for helping us this past year with the online storytimes.

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We are working on the summer reading schedule to see if it can be done safely. Keep an eye out for more information about the Tails and Tales summer reading program.

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Since we can’t have our annual book sale, we’re selling brown bags full of new or gently used books. The exact books will be a surprise, but each bag has five to 10 books and has a card on it giving the theme of the bag, such as James Patterson, Civil War, romance, cooking, etc.

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All of the children’s, adult and family programs have been canceled or postponed until at least June 1.

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Patrons may come in for one hour to browse the collection, select items to check out and use our copier. No loitering is allowed. You can come in for two hours to use one of the public computers. You must sign up at the front desk.

All patrons must wear masks or other facial coverings unless medical reasons prevent it, use gloves or hand sanitizer, which are available inside the library, and maintain social distancing. We also encourage you to only touch materials you plan to check out.

The library hours, for now, will be 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays, 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays and 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Fridays.

We will do curbside pickup only 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturdays. The library will be closed to patrons on Saturdays and completely closed Sundays.

At this time, we will be staying with these temporary hours. We hope to expand hours in June.

We are following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Office of Commonwealth Libraries guidelines to protect our staff and patrons during this pandemic.

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All library items need to be returned to the yellow drop boxes in our parking lot. No materials will be accepted at the front desk.

After they are returned, we put everything in a two-day quarantine before we check it in. We use the date you returned it as the check in date.

Fines will be waived from March 14, 2020, to Sept. 6. You will need to pay for lost or damaged items.

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The OverDrive digital library is a digital collection of e-books, audiobooks and magazines that is always open. Each library builds its individual digital collection from a catalog of millions of titles from more than 30,000 publishers. OverDrive uses the app called Libby. OverDrive now includes eMagazines, which used to be on our RBDigital database (and Zinio before that).

Your purple LCLC library card gets you access to all of this, plus much more. Check out our website, whitehallpl.org, or stop by and the staff will help you!

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If you have questions or need help with a database, I can help you. I check my emails daily at vahey.p@whitehallpl.org.