Robert S. Martin

This valuable book shows how to get your community behind your library by making it an essential part of community life and demonstrating its benefit to all members of the community.Evolving technologies and the changing social landscape have put pressure on public libraries to shift their service values and methods in order to maintain funding opportunities. The challenge is substantial: library managers today must adopt a new mindset in order to perform a broad spectrum of activities and attract new users who are not traditional library patrons. Small Libraries, Big Impact: How to Better Serve Your Community in the Digital Age helps readers to meet the challenge of serving diverse users via a community-centered library.Based on an intensive review of literature on serving library users in smaller libraries as well as the author's own research findings gained from interviewing 55 library directors, this book provides conceptual and practical tools for serving 21st-century users, gaining wider community support, programming dynamic events, and planning rewarding technology learning. Beyond supplying actionable advice, the book will also review relevant concepts and theoretical frameworks, such as community outreach and partnership, social justice and social inclusion, technology and social transition, cultural diversity and the digital divide, entrepreneurship, outreach, best practices for marketing libraries, and library space design.

This is a collection of poems about affirmation and spirit: poems that speak to the beauty and joy of who we are or who we may become. These poems celebrate and affirm our journey, for in each day, in each moment, in our walk, and in our talk, in our silence, and in each and every breath we take, there is a poem.

This is a collection of poems about my wife, Julie. It is a collection about our journey together, and how we play and laugh and love and cry much the same way your family does. It is how I make the world pause so I can savor what is going on in my world, and my world moves around Julie.

Writing is a dance, and my partner is the moment. It is the music I hear, the layer of emotion I feel as I move through, and I never really know where a moment will lead. What it will reveal. The moment I've captured with my words that pour from my heart to the page that forms the poem-the poem that becomes my trail, my history, my photograph into the moment. Writing is my time machine, and through writing I capture moments. I collect moments. I hoard moments, and when I have captured enough moments, I make a book.