The Youth Services Staff is really excited about our new website and we hope you are too! We've redesigned our Parents and Kids pages to make information easy to find and highlight some things that maybe you didn't know about. Find the Parents and Kids pages under Guides at the top right of the page and we'll go ahead and start our brief tour. Please keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times and hold all questions until the end.

On the Parents page you'll learn about our Parent Collection that you'll find on the 2nd floor. The books here are all about issues that parents may face, from toilet training to difficult teens. Also highlighted is our Museum Pass program--you can get free passes to area museums with your Des Plaines Library card!

Of course, parents will find all sorts of other information on the website: downloadable materials (songs, magazines, and books), general library information, and discover new things like Frugal Friends and the DPPL Writing Group.

Next stop is the Kids page. Here are important things to know about the 2nd floor that kids might not know about, written in kid friendly language. For example, we have preloaded eReaders and tablets for all ages, homework help via our databases, and information about volunteering for 6th graders and older.

While you can find our calendar of events near the top of the screen, we include a link to kids events on the Kids page as well. Kids (and parents) might not realize that our downloadable materials, like ebooks and music, have desirable titles kids want like Rick Riordan's House of Hades or Newbery award winner Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo. So we mention that they can find cool ematerials for them in the Kids guide as well.

There are so many great aspects of the new website. I hope you take the time to explore everything. A great feature of each page is, if you have questions, you can contact the staff person responsible for it.

I hope you've enjoyed this tour and be sure to follow our blog for future posts related to kids and parents, and other great topics as well.