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Press Release

April 12, 2015

SCPL iPad Giveaway In Full Swing

Schenectady County Public Library (SCPL) serves this county with our Central Branch located in downtown Schenectady, along with 8 satellite branches throughout. Our goal has always been to satisfy our community’s educational, informational, cultural and recreational needs by providing free and open access to a comprehensive range of materials, services and programs.

The week of April 12th has been designated National Library Week this year. In order to help bring light to the importance of our libraries and how we are constantly evolving to keep pace with the technologies that bind our world together, we are rolling out a massive promotion where we will be asking our patrons to update their registration information within our systems to provide us with their current email addresses and cell phone numbers.

This grand initiative is meant to do three very important things with our patron’s updated information:

Updated Security: Identity theft can occur on a scale much larger than anyone thinks. There is a constant battle going on within the library system of some individuals using other patrons’ library cards to take out materials and never returning them, hence causing the legitimate patron to incur late/lost fees. We take our patrons’ safety and privacy very seriously here and will do everything within our means to ensure this.

Immediate Contact: Things happen in life. People get sick, the weather takes a turn for the worse and things break. When these situations happen and we have to close a library branch or cancel a program, we need to let everyone who is going to be affected by this situation know. By having our patrons’ cell phone numbers, in the near future we will be able to send text alerts out to them at a moment’s notice to help them make arrangements if they planned on going to a certain branch.

Going Green: We are very concerned about paper waste in the world. That is why we are rolling out a Green Initiative to decrease the amount of mail we send out for items that are due or late, by instead sending helpful reminder emails and text messages to our patrons.

In order to get our patrons’ attention we really needed to pull out the stops, and what better way than to offer a great incentive. We wanted to give our patrons something that they could use in conjunction with our library services at SCPL. Something that they could use to read ebooks, magazines on Zinio, and stay up-to-date with all that is going on here at SCPL. So we naturally thought of an iPad.

From Sunday, April 12th through Sunday, May 31st, new patrons who sign up for an SCPL card and patrons who update their contact information with email and/or cell phone numbers will be given an entry form that they must fill out and placein the specially marked boxes at all SCPL branches. On Monday, June 1st, all of the entry forms from every SCPL branch will be gathered together where ONE entry form will be picked at random and contacted to verify identity. That lucky patron will be awarded a brand new iPad Air!

This is a wonderful, new and exciting direction for SCPL to be taking and we hope that our patrons think so as well!

For further information regarding this promotion, please contact:
Doug Bixler
Design and Communications
518.388.4524
dbixler@mvls.info

The mission of the Schenectady County Public Library is to satisfy our community's educational, informational, cultural and recreational needs by providing free and open access to a comprehensive range of materials, services and programs.