This book explains how librarians can capitalize on the growing interest and need of patrons for help with technology by expanding their library’s tech services to build community engagement and support.

Keeping up with technology is more critical and difficult than ever. This challenge exists not only for library staff but for their patrons as well. Today’s librarians are often barraged with increasingly complex questions from their patrons about technology-from loading eBooks onto their readers to helping resurrect dead laptops. Why not capitalize on this opportunity and transform your library into a first-stop, go-to resource for your community’s tech needs?

Raising the Tech Bar at Your Library: Improving Services to Meet User Needs demonstrates a variety of ways to expand library services to better serve your community, including how to establish tech bars and tech centers, provide tech training and one-on-one tech help, host drop-in demos, and create a coding dojo. The book covers after-school programs, makerspaces, and embedded librarianship as well. The authors draw on their personal experience to offer a practical blueprint for launching your tech initiative, starting with the preliminary steps of evaluating community needs and getting administrative and public buy-in to obtaining funding, training non-tech staff, setting up and launching your program, and evaluating the services you’ve established. The book ends with a look to the future that supplies provocative and exciting ideas of how libraries with innovative, tech-focused leadership can push the edge even further. This book serves a wide audience-all public librarians as well as library administrators, those who work in IT departments as well as adult or youth services, and reference librarians who are interested in expanding into this important and exciting area.

Offers librarians a new way to meet diverse users’ needs and build community support

Provides librarians with a variety of ways-suited to different sizes and types of libraries-to expand their tech services

Presents practical guidelines that lead readers through a step-by-step process to reach their goals

Supplies guidance derived from the authors’ personal experiences and those of their colleagues that illustrate the directives and clearly identify both what to do and mistakes to avoid