Are your kids always telling you last minute that they have a project on a Mission and when you get to the library all the books are checked out? Worry no more! The Missions of California Books are available in digital format online at sjpl.org. Go to our catalog and do a keyword search for "missions of california." Then click the link on the mission your child has to do report for then type "missions" for username and password and you're set. All the same information online ready for you at anytime.

Are you working on an in-depth historical research project? Take the War of 1812 for example; it is a topic that the HathiTrust can provide invaluable research material. The HathiTrust is a huge repository of free digitized content (books, periodicals, historic documents) from numerous research libraries including works digitized via the massive Google Books project. HathiTrust was founded in October 2008 by the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California. The partnership includes over 50 research libraries across the United States and Europe, and is based on a shared governance structure. As of September 2011, HathiTrust comprises over 9.6 million volumes, over 2.6 million (27%) of which are in the public domain. HathiTrust provides a number of discovery and access services, notably, full-text search across the entire repository. For those with inquiring minds, Hathi is the Hindi word for elephant, an animal famed for its long-term memory. (source: Wikipedia).