Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL)

Are you looking for a job? Perhaps you feel ready for a career change, were laid off, or realize that you retired too early and want—or need—to get back into the workforce doing... something...

If you’re over 60, maybe 50, or even 40 you might find the prospect of a job search daunting, especially when you see 20- and 30-somethings competing for the same positions. Well, take heart: there’s a lot of help out there for you. The following are a few information-packed books I found at Job Search Central at the Science, Industry and Business Library.

Finding a Job After 50: Reinvent Yourself for the 21st Century (2007), by Jeannette Woodward. I like the author’s friendly style, and her emphasis on preparing yourself psychologically, emotionally and physically for a new job.
 
 
 
Reworking Retirement: A Practical Guide for Retirees Returning to the Workplace (2008), by Allyn I. Freeman and Robert E. Gorman. Includes profiles of dozens of people who switched careers after 50 to follow their dreams, and how you can do the same.
 
 
 
Rewired, Rehired, or Retired?: A Global Guide for the Experienced Worker (2002), by Robert K. Critchley. Critchley encourages readers to look inside to discover what kind of future work will give them the greatest satisfaction in the years ahead.
 
 
 
Too Young to Retire: 101 Ways to Start the Rest of Your Life (2002), by Marika and Howard Stone. The authors, who are cofounders of 2young2retire.com, an online community of retirement alternatives, will get you thinking outside the box when pondering what may lie ahead for you.
 
 
How to Find a Job After 50: From Part-Time to Full-Time, from Career Moves to New Careers (2005), by Betsy Cummings. Cummings inspires readers by emphasizing the value of older workers in the workforce, and gives a crash course in networking.
 
 
 
Working After Retirement for Dummies (2007), by Lita Epstein. A financial expert with several books on the topic under her belt, Epstein gives wise advice on topics such as managing your money and determining when to start collecting social security, while delivering the user-friendly, comprehensive subject treatment we’ve come to expect in the Dummies books. This title is also available to borrow from your home computer as an e-book.

Smart Women Don’t Retire—They Break Free: From Working Full-Time to Living Full-Time (2008), by The Transition Network and Gail Rentsch. Rentsch, a founding member of The Transition Network, touches all the bases in this super-charged volume for women wondering whether retirement is right for them—and what to do if it’s not. Her resource list includes dozens of the best websites and a superb bibliography for further reading.

Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life (2008), by Marc Freedman. A social entrepreneur and the founder of Civic Ventures, Freedman is leading the charge to get people who are midlife or older to get (or stay) working in ways that can solve the big social problems of our world. He very articulately expresses how this can be done, and why it must be done.
 
 
Don’t Retire, REWIRE! 5 Steps to Fulfilling Work that Fuels your Passion, Suits your Personality, and Fills your Pocket, 2nd ed. (2007), by Jeri Sedlar and Rick Miners. This book, gives you all the tools you need to find the right job for the years ahead. Jeri Sedlar is Senior Advisor to The Conference Board on the Mature Workforce and the former editor-at-large of Working Woman magazine.

These and many more titles are available at NYPL’s Job Search Central. You’ll also find specialized career databases; classes, programs, and workshops; career coaching and small business consulting there. And take a look at their outstanding collection of links related to small businesses.

AARP gives awards each year to the Best Employers for Workers over 50. Look at the AARP Foundation’s Worksearch website for a whole suite of customizable tools to help you along the road to finding the right job for you.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been doing so much sewing at home in recent weeks (and therefore spending lots of time shopping for fabrics), but I’ve been feeling awfully textile-centric as of late. Or perhaps it’s because I’ve been I’ve been spending time getting to know a textile industry periodical called American Fabrics at the Library.

American Fabrics (and its successor, American Fabrics and Fashions), together cover decades and decades of the twentieth century. This magazine was “dedicated to the belief that Fashion begins with the Fabric…that the American textile industry casts a major influence on the economic and social aspects of the world in which we live…that American textiledom has attained the world’s pinnacle from which it can never be dislodged.”

While I’m uncertain about such heady braggadocio, I am sure about the wealth of design and pattern inspiration to be found within the Library’s back issues. American Fabrics holds fabric swatches, tipped-in brochures and promotional flyers for fabric companies, and informative articles about the industry. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the full color ads offer amazing and vivid details on period aesthetics. Taken together, they open a unique window into fashion, taste, and fabric in post World War II America.

On quitting his classes at Harvard in 1927, Edwin Land moved to New York and became a regular user of the library’s Science Division. His goal: the manufacture of a polarizing light filter, the basic idea behind Polaroid sunglasses. Between the library and a variety of makeshift labs, he eventually figured out how to embed microscopic crystals of “herapathite” in molten sheets of plastic and align them all in one direction. He named the invention Polaroid, and used the name again when he invented his instant photography. Land had discovered the identity of the crucial polarizing crystal while reading an 1852 article by the British doctor-scientist William Herapath, itself referenced in a book by Sir David Brewster on the kaleidoscope. Both book and article are still in our collection.

In the 1930s Chester Carlson was a physics graduate in a dull patents job in Manhattan, unhappily married and living with in-laws in Jackson Heights. His escape was the science reading room of The New York Public Library, researching his ideas for a document-copying machine. His breakthrough came when he read the book Photoelectric Phenomena and discovered Einstein’s paper on the photoelectric effect, published 30 years previously. Carlson eventually demonstrated his copy machine in Astoria, Queens in 1938. Every photocopier and laser printer made since that time depends on the discovery he made in this library; you may have heard of his company, it is called Xerox.  read more »

With new technologies that can make images of molecules, biology has been returning to its origins as a visual science, according to Moselio Schaechter, writing on his blog Small Things Considered. Biologists can now “see” how an enzyme works or how macromolecules interact with molecules large and small, and the revolution is leading to a specialist field called Structural Biology.
The visual origins of biology are abundantly illustrated in the holdings of The New York Public Library, including original and facsimile editions of Robert Hooke’s beautifully illustrated Micrographia. This flea is reminiscent of Hooke's famous illustration, but actually appeared in Harper's Magazine of 1859.

New York artist Julie Rauer has been making drawings at SIBL inspired by Charles Darwin’s illustrations of barnacles, adding textual information, or making lovely colored versions that stand on their own as fine art. As is common with any user seeking to access rare or valuable items, she gets to sit in a special area behind our delivery desk, making it her temporary studio during her visits. We visited her there recently to find out about the latest illustrations, which she hopes to publish as a book, Barnacle Codex.

A project based at Cambridge University is providing online access to Darwin’s personal archives of writings and publications, including high-quality images from his work. The barnacles that Rauer is working on are particularly well represented and can be found here.

← Daniel Boone's cabin" (NYPL Digital Gallery)

Folk singer Pete Seeger looked up 'log cabin' at The New York Public Library when he wanted to build a home in upstate New York, according to a recent New Yorker interview*. Curious, I repeated his query in the CATNYP catalog starting with a simple search for "log cabin*" (the asterisk wildcard finds both singular and plural). Now I've posted a guide to these resources, attached below and downloadable from the library's web site.

I wonder if Seeger learned his cabin craft from How to Build Your Home in the Woods (1952). More recent, The Science Industry and Business Library has Log Cabin Construction (1975), Building a Log Home from Scratch or Kit (1983), or the muscular-sounding Building the Hewn Log House (1978). A modern-day Seeger with a current library card could borrow Cottage, Cabin & Vacation Home Plans (2007) from SIBL's first-floor Branch Library.  read more »