Books and Things

The Collections The Ester library has approximately 6,000 items on the shelves and another 15,000 in storage. The collection includes books, audiobooks, movies, puzzles, and board games. It also includes the Growing Ester’s Biodiversity program seed library, a collection of flower, fruit, and vegetable seeds. Almost the entire collection has been donated by local residents. Some books have been donated by libraries around the state or by government agencies. We are also quite proud that we feature many books that have been banned or have suffered attempts at banning in libraries and schools. Ideas are revolutionary things and upset the status quo, expand the minds of their thinkers, and generally cause a ruckus. The librarians feel that this is a good thing. Our Catalog Our catalog is online! The Calypso Resource Library and the JTEL currently share catalogs but separate them via a drop-down menu on LibraryThing, our online catalog.
  • Searching for a specific book: Click  here to search for the title, author, or subject that interests you.
  • Accessing the catalog: Click here. In the upper left corner (under LibraryThing) is a drop-down menu. These are the meanings of each menu item:
    • Your Library: This includes books at the Clausen Cabin, and in storage inside the “White Building”. If you wish to have a book retrieved from storage, please contact us at info@esterlibrary.org.
    • Clausen Cabin: Books that can be immediately retrieved from the main library building.
    • Calypso Resource Library: Calypso Farm’s catalog of farming and gardening books.
    • Wish list: Books that may round out a specific collection or are otherwise needed at the library. Please contact us if you have a book that you wish to donate from this list.
  • Search by tags: To the right of the collections drop down menu is the tag menu. In addition to subject tags, we also have tags that identify donors of large collections. To date, these include Bowling, Guinn, Helfferich, Koponen, Mull, Four Winds, UAF Women’s Center, Hadley, Chesnut, and Trigg.
Browsing our books We are open at least a few hours nearly every day of the week, so come on down and browse our collection of books, games and puzzles! These are a few of the sections that we have:
  • Juvenile Picture Books — picture books, read-alouds, and beginning reader books, in tubs arranged by first letter of author’s last name.
  • Young Readers — juvenile literature through 6th grade, alphabetically by author
  • Young Adult — fiction for teens and young adults, alphabetically by author
  • Fiction — Adults and general fiction, alphabetically by author
  • Poetry — alphabetically by author
  • Nonfiction — separated into Alaska/Yukon and general nonfiction, catalogued by Dewey Decimal numbers
  • Puzzles
  • Games
Book Donations For now, we are requesting that folks hold off on donating books, unless you have any books on our wish list (see above section “Our Catalog”), as we still do not have enough space for them all. Our new building will be able to accommodate many more books, but until that library is constructed, we just don’t have the space. Thank you for your patience! For our volunteers: if you are a collections volunteer, click here for instructions on adding books to our collection.