Before you head outdoors, come into the Library and check out our resources for outdoor recreation, outdoor research, and outdoor careers. We have suggestions for all ages and interests:

• Outdoor activities for kids in Fort Wayne City
• Guides to Indiana State Parks, and National Parks
• Wildlife and woodlot management
• River, lakes, and wetlands ecology

Did you know that public parks are the sites of many, and various, research projects? Check out our showcase of articles, including studies of glaciers, slime molds, predator-prey ecology, erosion control, pest control, human behavior, health effects of outdoor recreation, and more.

You can access data from national parks by visiting the websites of the National Park Service. For photographs and other non-text artifacts, use https://museum.nps.gov For texts (research reports, teaching resources, maps, etc.) use the NPS Library website – it is clunky but has links out to all the parks.

A great new resource is the Open Parks Network. When complete, this database will link all the National Parks digitized collections; currently, representation is mostly from the southeast. Users can search in this one place to find collections of interest, rather than going to multiple websites. For example: Civil War maps from Fort Sumter, moths of Congaree National Park, political memorabilia from the Jimmy Carter National Historic site. Also linked are research reports by national parks staff.

Remember, our databases can be accessed 24/7/365 so you can take your reading with you to the beach, woods, or Indiana State Parks.

Books can be checked out when the library is open. Our summer semester hours are:

• Mondays-Thursdays 7:45 a.m. to 8:45 p.m.
• Fridays 7:45 a.m. to 4:45 p.m.

See you on the trails!