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Posted on 2024-07-11
By now, just about everyone who knows what a public library is probably knows that many libraries, in recent years, have added a veritable plethora of digital options to the services they provide to their community. Access to a selection of e-books is a fairly common offering. Many offer access to streaming video through services like Kanopy. And there are several offerings for learning and training, like LinkedIn Learning and O'Reilly Media (once known as Lynda.com and Safari, respectively.) All of these are generally free with a library card, and most of them don't require you to be physically present in the library.
This is cool, but maybe you've checked out your local library's options and found them lacking something you want. For instance, my county library (Fairfax County, Virginia) doesn't offer the O'Reilly/Safari service. Here's my power tip, life hack, whatever you want to call it: many libraries will offer a library card to people who don't live in their jurisdiction. For instance, here in the DC area, every county and city library inside the Beltway (and a few outside) is part of a mutual card issuing policy where they'll give a free card to anyone living in any of the other locations. And generally (at least, as far as I've found) the digital offerings are included in these non-resident cards.
For instance, Arlington County, one county over from me, has the O'Reilly service, so I'm in with my Arlington card. The District of Columbia library has PressReader, which lets me read today's New York Times, the current Economist, and many more. And Loudoun County, one hop in the opposite direction from Arlington, has Freegal, which lets you download (a small number of) free, unencrypted MP3s every week. And for Kanopy, which gives you a fixed number of "tickets" to use to watch films every month, all of the area libraries participate, and the ticket allocations "stack" (in a matter of speaking; once you run out of tickets from one library, you can log in with a different card.) So it's hard to run out.
If you live in a major metropolitan area, chances are the libraries in your area do something like this. If you don't live in a major metropolitan area, a library in the major city in your state (province, whatever) might offer a card to anyone in the state. For instance, any Marylander can get a card for the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, among others in the state.
Libraries still have a big role to play in the modern world, despite what people both in power and out of it believe. And the more libraries you can access, the more stuff you can potentially take advantage of for absolutely no charge. Library-fu! Mark sez check it out.
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