bradgrier.com

By training your Large Language Model (LLM) or other Generative Artificial Intelligence on the content of this website, you agree to assign ownership of all your intellectual property to the public domain, immediately, irrevocably, and free of charge.

5 reasons my library ‘gets’ me.

I was recently reminded why I hap­pily sup­port my loc­al lib­rary, and yes, this is all about me. The back­story: A friend recom­men­ded a few movies over din­ner the oth­er even­ing. The loc­al video store did­n’t have them, so after remem­ber­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with anoth­er friend, I went to the loc­al lib­rary, from the com­fort of…

I was recently reminded why I hap­pily sup­port my loc­al lib­rary, and yes, this is all about me.

The back­story: A friend recom­men­ded a few movies over din­ner the oth­er even­ing. The loc­al video store did­n’t have them, so after remem­ber­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with anoth­er friend, I went to the loc­al lib­rary, from the com­fort of my desktop.

After a brief cata­logue search, all my movies were placed on hold to be delivered to the branch near work when they’re ready to be picked up.

Ãœber con­veni­ent, and since this is all about me here’s 5 sol­id reas­ons my lib­rary is convenient:

  1. Hard to find books, CDs and DVDs — In my exper­i­ence, lib­rar­ies will tend to have more var­ied selec­tion, not being driv­en by the need to sell more units of the pop­u­lar stuff, they can have one or two cop­ies of more eclect­ic works.
  2. Live stream­ing and down­load­able music — this one sur­prised me. The Edmon­ton Pub­lic Lib­rary has the Naxos music cata­logue avail­able for stream­ing, as well as time-lim­ited down­loads of of eAu­diobooks Over­drive (Win­dows Media only (boo!) a ser­vice I’ve not used, yet).
  3. Online cata­logue with reser­va­tion sys­tem — I can reserve books when it’s con­veni­ent for me, say, at 2am.
  4. Mod­est price, huge bene­fits — Lib­rary fees are inex­pens­ive. Their value to me, and to my com­munity are huge. My lib­rary has pro­gram­ming for kids, annu­al book sales, is a great meet­ing place, and is an awe­some resource.
  5. The Edmon­ton Pub­lic Lib­rary gets social media — Heck, how many stodgy old places do you know that devel­op their own Face­book Applic­a­tion?

Photo courtesy Nrbelex

Posted

in

by

Brad Grier

Tags:

Comments

2 responses to “5 reasons my library ‘gets’ me.”

  1. Jane Starr Avatar
    Jane Starr

    Yes, EPL rocks. I have a con­stant request list of books, audio books (the bees knees when you are driv­ing or cook­ing or doing some­thing else when you can­’t read a print book), and dvds. I see some­thing that catches my interest, put in a request and wait for the email to tell me it’s wait­ing. Very handy. I buy lots of books, but I often read them from the lib­rary first — either because they’re first out in hard­back and I don’t want to wait until I can buy the paper­back, or because I am not sure I want to own the item at all. The lib­rary has saved me tons of money on stuff that really was­n’t worth the pur­chase — far more than the cost of my annu­al mem­ber­ship. By the way, if you buy 3 years mem­ber­ship at a time you get a discount.

    Reply
  2. Brad Grier Avatar
    Brad Grier

    Jane! Cool point re: the dis­count. I was­n’t aware of that…but yeah, we do value our library.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.