NSLS Blogs

 Home » Blogs » Annotations

Annotations

July 11, 2006

Library Services in the News

An Associated Press article dated July 10, 2006 appeared in the Chicago Tribune and extolled the virtues of the services a group of libraries offer entreprenuers. I know many of your libraries offer similar services. Seems to me that the Trib owes area libraries equal time.

Read the article below and hopefully this will help provide you with some marketing ideas.

——————–
Entrepreneurs with questions can check out answers at the library
——————–

By Joyce M. Rosenberg
Associated Press

July 10, 2006

A small-business owner in Iowa or Missouri who needs help putting together a business plan can find it in states such as New York and Pennsylvania at libraries that are dedicated to serving entrepreneurs with their traditional catalogs of books and with extensive online resources.

At the Chester County Library System Web site (http://business.ccls.org), small-business owners can find lists of books on business broken down by topics, including “Starting a Small Business” and “Running a Small Business.” They’ll also find a long list of links to a variety of business-related sites, and they can access business databases that the library subscribes to.

And, if they live near the Exton, Pa.-based system, they can attend programs for business owners and entrepreneurs.

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh also has a big section devoted to business on its Web site (www.carnegielibrary.org/locations/downtown), with similar resources. The site also has a section dealing solely with business plans, a topic that sends many small-business owners in search of help.

Leslie Burger, president of the American Library Association, said many librarians have come to recognize the need to better serve businesses, largely because they are getting more requests for help from people who own small companies.

“Libraries are tailoring a lot of what they do specifically to what’s going on in their geographic areas in terms of economic development,” said Burger, who’s also the director of the Princeton Public Library in New Jersey.

“What we find very often is when we talk to people, they want to know not only about running [for example] a bakery, but how many bakers are in the area, how to develop a business plan, where they would go to get financing, can we put them in touch with people with similar experiences,” she said.

But Burger noted that the help is available well beyond a given library’s service area. The Internet means a library can serve business owners almost anywhere.

There are also online libraries such as the Internet Public Library at www.ipl.org, or the Small Business Administration library at www.sba.gov/lib/library.html. These tend to contain articles and primers that provide helpful overviews on a variety of topics that interest small-business owners, but they don’t offer a comprehensive collection like the more traditional library sites.

But online resources are just one part of what libraries have to offer. Burger noted that many business owners prefer to ask a librarian directly for help.

She noted that if a business owner found a book in a library that was hundreds or thousands of miles away, distance isn’t necessarily an impediment to borrowing the book. It’s possible to get an interlibrary loan, in which libraries ask each other if they have a certain book available. When they find the book, it can be mailed to a borrower.

However, don’t ask for a photocopy of a book, as the library is forbidden by copyright laws to do that.

Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune

posted by Anna at 1:20 pm |

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website