“November is National Adoption Month, a time to raise awareness about the adoption of children and youth from foster care. This year’s initiative focuses on building capacity of adoption professionals to recruit and retain parents for the 107,000 children and youth waiting for permanent families in the U.S. foster care system. This year’s theme is: Build Capacity to Make Lasting Change.”

See our page of links to learn more about adoption.

If you’re one of the increasing number of people borrowing audiobooks and ebooks through the mobile version of NOBLE’s OverDrive site, you’ll appreciate the improvements just added to the site.

You can now browse by format or subject, and then search within that group and limit to books that are available for checkout. The Advanced Search lets you search by title, author, keyword, publisher, format, awards, and even how recently books were added to our collection to find what’s new.

You can also select your own loan period when you check out a book. Your options are 7, 14 or 21 days. This is especially important for audiobooks, because there’s no way to return them early and you can only have four books checked out at a time. If you know you can finish the book quickly, use a shorter loan period so you’ll be able to borrow more books.

The mobile version of the website works with the OverDrive Media Console app and lets you search, download and enjoy audiobooks and ebooks in the epub format. To read ebooks on your smartphone or other mobile device using Kindle apps, you should use the full version of the site to select and checkout books in the Kindle format, and transfer them to your Amazon Kindle account and then send them to your device.

Want to know more? Go to NOBLE’s OverDrive site and click on My Help to get started!

Halloween Guide — Halloween is celebrated on October 31. It has roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Christian holiday All Saints’ Day, and is celebrated with Jack O’Lanterns, costumes, candy, trick-or-treating, and scary stories about witches, ghosts and goblins.

Booklists linked to the library catalog:

• Halloween Books for Kids — Scary stories and holiday favorites for young readers
• Halloween Craft Books — There’s still time to get crafty and make some Hallowe’en decorations!

National Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month has been observed annually in November since 1983, when President Ronald Reagan declared this month-long observance as a way to focus national attention on this disease. See our page of links for more information and resources related to Alzheimer’s Disease.

Native American Heritage Month, also known as National American Indian Heritage Month, National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month and American Indian Heritage Month will be celebrated throughout November. Here’s a page with links to more information and resources for learning about Native American history, traditions and culture.

International Observe the Moon Night was created to encourage everyone “to take notice of the Moon’s beauty and share that experience with one another” and to “instill in the public a sense of wonderment and curiosity about our Moon.” This Saturday, look skyward and take a good long look at our moon.