Achieve Your New Year's Resolutions at the Library

Resolutions are always made with the best of intentions, and when they lead to even partial success, that’s a win. But many people find it tough to turn good intentions into positive changes once the glow of New Year’s Eve celebrations fades and the cold reality that January 1 is, quite often, just another day—the first of 365 to come before your next resolution.

Getting some support and guidance early on can help you gain traction on making a hopeful resolution into a workable new hobby or habit. Your library has resources to help with that through our Digital Library.

Have you thought about researching your family history but find the idea of doing “genealogy” daunting? Our “Ancestry: Library Edition” gives you free, remote access to many of the basic features of the full Ancestry.com site, including the very intuitive “Build A Family Tree” feature, which many professional genealogists recommend as a first step when beginning your family history journey.

Or maybe you’ve wanted to take up knitting, or crochet, or some other craft that allows to find joy in making your own gifts? Creativebug has hundreds of videos, classes, and other resources for learning new crafts or developing your skills further.

Hoping to entertain and looking for a way to expand your culinary horizons? AtoZ World Foods is an excellent resource for recipes from around the world, organized by region, country, and ingredient and type of food.

Do you want to take charge of your personal finances by being more hands-on with your retirement investments? Morningstar Investment Research Center is a great resource for researching mutual funds and ETFs, and Value Line Investment Survey is an equally valuable tool for researching individual stocks. Between the two resources, you can search for new investments or audit your existing holdings.

If you think 2023 should be the año de aprender un nuevo idioma (“year of learning a new language” in Spanish), we have two easy-to-use language learning digital resources—Pronunciator and Transparent Languages. Both have their strengths, so whichever platform is more intuitive and easier to use will work fine. Start learning with either one, so in 12 months, you’ll be ready to ring in 2024 in more than one language.

New Years Resolutions are all about the ends—don’t let the means be what keeps you from meeting your self-improvement goal. Your library has many tools to help you get from “good intention” to “satisfying outcome.” Get started at pwcva.gov/digitallibrary.

- Written by Kirk Johnson, Materials Services Division