National Library Week is coming up soon – it runs from April 10th through the 16th – and we’re all here to celebrate!
We know you love us – in October you voted to renew our funding, and you use our services more than ever. In-house visits are up 4%! Reference questions are up 11%! E-media usage is up 32% (hey, congratulations on finally figuring out that Kindle Fire you got for Christmas)!
But since we add new services all the time, and since every day someone is surprised by the things they can do at the library, we thought we’d let you know about everything one more time.
- PHYSICAL ITEMS (books, CDs, DVDs, BluRay, periodicals, archival collections, art prints, sculpture, Arduino (basic robotics) kits, and a telescope). We’ve got more than two million circulating items across our fourteen branches, and if we don’t have it, we can borrow it from somewhere else. If you like astronomy, go back and read the part about the telescope again – yup. After you take a basic instruction class (check this month’s Source for the next scheduled Telescope Training), you can check out the telescope and watch the stars in your own backyard.
- DIGITAL MEDIA (ebooks, e-magazines, streaming video, streaming music, comics, and writing advice). There are more than twenty-five resources in the “eBooks & Entertainment” category of our digital library. Go play!
- PROGRAMS. Y’all, this month there were so many things to do at the library that we briefly crashed our own events calendar. Enough said.
- COMPUTER CLASSES. Every branch of the library can help you learn basic computer skills…
- ONLINE EDUCATION. …which you can use to teach yourself other awesome skills in one of our eighteen Online Education-focused digital resources. We’ve got lots of specifically focused reference centers on topics like financial literacy and small engine repair, too!
- CAREER COUNSELING. We can literally make you money. Well, we can help you find someone else who will give you money in exchange for work. But! The wonderful humans in the Career Center can help with your resume, help you find a job, help you apply for the job, and finally, help you figure out what to say to get the person on the other end of the website to hire you.
- MEETING ROOMS. Approximately 52,000 people used the library meeting spaces in 2015. We’ve noticed, and we’re working to incorporate more small group meeting spaces in library design.
- 3-D PRINTING. Yeah! Yeah. That’s a thing now.
If any of these great resources was a surprise to you, clearly you need to visit us more. It’s okay; we won’t judge.
Happy National Library Week! Let us know on Facebook how you plan to celebrate!