If this impromptu survey of local business owners is any indication, I think it’s pretty clear that libraries have a great opportunity in front of them to help their local businesses work with digital media. Even if you start with just one digital media station and start providing this kind of service, you’re providing something that many business owners need and, I would say, even hunger for. To many small business owners, interest in something like YouTube is way beyond the point of personal interest or enjoying funny viral videos and really more about survival. Why wouldn’t public libraries want to meet the needs of these local community members?

What do you think your local business owners would benefit from learning? What tools could help them in their quest to make their businesses succeed?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m working on a new series of classes called “Business Bytes.” The basic idea is to help local business owners learn more about ways to use technology and the internet. Tonight, I taught the very first one in the series, providing an introduction to Google Places and the benefits of verifying your businesses’ listing.

Even though it was my first time making my way through this presentation, I think it went fairly well. Hearing people talk about their struggles with keeping up with technology and the intimidation that they often feel reminded me of my own parents, who have been small business owners for over 30 years. Owning one’s own business obviously comes with an ongoing set of challenges and frustrations, and I grew up seeing these first-hand at home. Tonight, I feel like I helped people like my parents, and that felt really good. Not to sound too sappy, but it’s moments like this that really make being a public librarian a total joy.

They’ll be held in our remodeled Business Center, which is turning out to be a great place for people to get work done, catch up on investment news and analysis, and attend a business or job-related program. We recently added a large flat-screen monitor to have business and financial channels like CNBC running throughout the day.

If you’ve got suggestions on what topics we should be offering for future workshops in this series, please let me know. Here’s one presentation (voted one of the year’s best on Slideshare) that I will definitely be using for inspiration!