A LIBRARY CARD for the East Baton Rouge Parish libraries is more like a passport to a foreign land, a free ride to an art school, or your ticket to acing that job interview or earning that promotion. The resources available in-house and online are staggering, and your librarians want you to know that hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of unlimited courses, software and research are available—for free—to anyone with a library card.

Whether you want to use the Adobe Creative Cloud suite in the library’s technology lab, access a manual on small engine repair, explore your ancestry online or earn a project management certification, the library system has you covered. “It’s all in here, it’s for you, and if you use it, good things will happen!” Assistant Director Mary Stein says.

The latest arrow in the library’s quiver is LinkedIn company Lynda.com, high-end workplace training used worldwide by Fortune 500 companies. Stein says everyone from local businesses to millennials fresh out of college are utilizing the site’s courses and online classes, available by logging in with your library card number. A small business owner can take a four-hour course on accounting and QuickBooks, learn how to make her company show up in Google search engines by taking a two-hour class on AdWords Essential Training, and watch a half-hour video on successfully negotiating contracts with clients. A homeschooled student can teach himself all there is to know about the music business, including songwriting, composition, using virtual instruments, and even the do’s and don’ts of attending a music conference.  There are enough topics and courses on the site Lynda.com to exhaust anyone with a thirst for knowledge.

Meanwhile, back at the Main Library at Goodwood, “Numbers are up in every possible category,” Stein says. Last year, career coaching appointments were up 82% over the previous year, and the number of meeting rooms booked at the library was up 72.8%. Businesses and services like SCORE bring clients to the library for private mentoring and have monthly workshops in one of the building’s many available conference rooms. In 2014, librarians answered 163,299 reference questions at the Main Library; in 2015, that number increased to 254,687. Systemwide the number of reference questions topped one million in 2015. In addition, circulation as a whole was up 7.7%, rising to 2.76 million items circulated.

The Library’s continuous commitment to outstanding service and resources has helped it earn numerous awards, including the prestigious 5 Star Rating from the Library Journal’s America’s Star Libraries Award.  “We are very, very proud to be in the top 1% in the nation!” Stein says. “Starred libraries in Library Land are equivalent to the Blue Ribbon for schools,” she explains. Out of 7,663 libraries in the country, 261 made the list, and this year, EBRPL is the only library in the state to attain all five stars (up two stars from previous years).

“We are an award-winning library because of our patrons,” Stein says. They drive us, support us, and when we provide it to them, they use it. Our success directly corresponds with their quest for knowledge. Those five stars belong to the patrons,” she said.