My first year anniversary as director has just passed and I am pleased to be offering many new services for the Lopez Island community.

In the past year, we’ve added a teen reading group (the Rebel Book Club), poetry nights, a radio show, free movie showings, free computers classes, library support for LOHO, and more outreach to the community. Technology has been enhanced with new computers, fiber optics connections for faster internet speed, color printing, a scanning service, and three wireless laptops for checkout in the library. We also have a portable low-vision reader for month-long checkouts and a Kindle Amazon electronic reader capable of holding up to 200 books in its 10 oz. casing – a real help to readers who can’t hold traditional books.

As always, we want to support our island community’s educational, recreational and business needs. To this end, we’ve added two new databases this month that are available from the library’s web page (www.lopezlibrary.org). ReferenceUSA™ is one of the leading business directory databases available. Why use a business directory? Job searching! It’s a simple fact. When you know the contact name, you can get your foot in the door. Take time to look at the management directory. It’s your fast track past the gatekeeper. Want to know more about someone you just met? Or a business you drove by? Use Quick Search to search by name, company, city or state. Conduct research about industries and companies. Find executives, corporate families and company descriptions. Conduct powerful market research. Select a location and do a radius search to look up the number of similar businesses in the area. Common uses are finding businesses based on employee size, sales volume, type of business and location. Students can use this tool, as well. Find news articles for research on businesses and perform searches for papers and class projects.

HeritageQuest, our new geneology database, includes all of the images, and extensive indexing, from the 1790 – 1930 U.S. federal censuses. It offers more than 20,000 book titles, including nearly 8,000 family histories and over 12,000 local histories. Additionally, there are more than 250 primary-source documents such as tax lists, city directories, probate records, and more. We’ll be offering classes in how to search these databases. Check out the calendar for dates and times. If your group or organization would like a demo, give a us a call.

All of these services would not be available without the help of your library staff: Karen Rogers, assistant librarian and cataloger/teen librarian; Rosie Sumner, children’s coordinator and ILL guru; Judy Welker, office manager and webmaster and Lou Pray, head librarian and collection selector. Hannah Garcia, Breanne Ward, Moira Crawford, and Lyra Dalton contribute energy, teen collection ideas and lots of shelving time as our student assistants. Last but not least, our beloved volunteers generously devote their time and expertise to keep the library running smoothly.

Thanks for a wonderful year.