Nancy Klingener, Community Affairs Manager for Monroe County Public Library, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on in the libraries.
The website for the libraries has had an overhaul.
Klingener said, “I and a couple of my colleagues from the library have been working on this for months, and we’re just so thrilled that it’s finally up and out there for everyone else to see and test out. Let us know what you think. It’s got all the same wonderful features that the last one had. Hopefully they’re easier to find, a little more clear navigation section, and there’s a conch shell on the top right hand corner, and that is the menus. Find what you’re looking for, the logo, the library logo on the top left hand corner will always take you back to the home page. One of the things that we’re most excited about is our new events calendar, which is entirely new, and I think is much more appealing and useful for people to find events at their local branch that they might be looking for and you can share them.”
There’s also a tab for the Florida Keys History Center as well.
Klingener said, “That’s a big one. If you click on that, you’ll see that it’s got basically its own home page now, and it’s got all the good stuff that we’ve always had, like our image library, our online image library, the Today in Keys History, the monthly Island Chronicles feature, but it also has an assortment of links along the bottom, and that’s places like the University of Florida has a great collection of newspapers from the Keys that have been digitized and are online. The Library of Congress has those Sanborn fire insurance maps that can show you how Key West developed over the years, all that good stuff. So we’re very excited about that. One of the big tabs along the homepage is 24/7 library. So if it’s an evening or weekend and you’re like, oh, how do I get to Libby for ebooks or Kanopy for movies, you can click on that 24/7 library and it’ll show you where to go.”
Kanopy is an app that is available to library card holding members that is free and includes more than 30,000 films.
Klingener said, “You get unlimited play for Kanopy kids. So that’s a pretty cool thing.”
There’s also book club in a bag.
Klingener said, “That’s a really neat service. We have these big tote bags, and they have 10 copies of the same book and a list of questions. So let’s say you have a book club, right? But it’s really hard for everybody to get the same book at the same time. This way, you just check out this bag. It’s a six week loan, and you can distribute the books to the members of your book club and we have a list of questions for suggested discussion with each bag, and we have dozens and dozens of titles to choose from.”
There is also a list of available books in the libraries.
Klingener said, “You can click on one of those and place a request and tell us where you want us to bring it, and we’ll do that. If you can’t make it into the library during the hours it’s open, there are pickup lockers at Bernstein Park on Stock Island, at the Marathon Library and at the Key Largo library. Down at the bottom of the website, there’s a Contact Us link, so you can do that if you have any questions and also an email newsletter sign up link, which is very good timing to do that right now, because we’ll be sending those out tomorrow for the March newsletters.”
Monroe County libraries are largely funded by the county.
Klingener said, “We do get a little bit of money from state aid, and we also have very generous support from our Friends of the Library groups for different branches. If you go to the locations page and pick your local branch, there’s a Friends of the Library link for each one of those on each of those locations.”
For more information, click here: https://www.keyslibraries.org/