Morristown library offering patrons tech help

MORRISTOWN – Anyone left to their own devices—electronic ones, that is—can have questions about how they work. Now they can get answers, for free, at The Morristown and Morris Township Library.

After a soft launch last year, the reference department is announcing Tech Time One On One, which offers people 30-minute sessions on a tech topic of their choice, according to Mary Lynn Becza, department head.

“We focus on using devices, setting them up and troubleshooting software,” she said. “We’re not the Geek Squad. We don’t get involved with hardware.”

The program is available to anyone in the general public, not just Morris County residents, and to people of all skill levels.

During the soft launch, the staff even found that it can work through language barriers. For instance, Becza installed Facebook on a smartphone, in Spanish, for a man who spoke no English.

Unlike the library’s popular one-hour computer classes—covering Google Drive, Word, Pinterest, Excel, Gmail and a host of other topics—Tech Time One On One sessions are personalized. A librarian will instruct a user on one skill: How do I text? Set up email on my iPad? Download audiobooks onto my smartphone? Save a document on a flash drive?

Here’s how it works: people reach out by emailing or calling the library, using the words “Tech Time.” (See accompanying box)

“Then I start an interview process,” said Reference Librarian Stephen Brunskill, the point person for Tech Time One On One, although his seven colleagues in the department also participate.

His goal is to pinpoint a need to address, or question to answer, in a 30-minute block of time.

“The idea is that they can take the knowledge they learn in that session and start applying it,” Brunskill explained. “If, at the end of the session, they need more help, I can get them a book to take home or show them tutorials available online.”

Virginia Anderson of Morris Township was one a few dozen people to use the program during the soft launch. Through the Tech Time program, she learned to use a Kindle, a Nook and an iPad.

“I’m an older gal who worked long enough to have some rudimentary appreciation of computers. I retired in 2001 and I’ve had to find my way around, so to speak,” Anderson said. “When I wanted to write a family journal, I took my laptop there. They helped me lay it all out and showed me which program to use.

“Everyone is very kind,” she added, “and, if they don’t know something, they get the answer somehow.”

The need for the Tech Time One on One program reflects the times.

Back in the late 1980s, when the Internet was in its infancy, Brunskill used a computer to identify a book in the catalog that would answer the first question he was ever posed as a professional librarian: How long does it take to cook a spaghetti squash in a microwave oven? Nowadays, there are questions about technology itself.

That’s just the way things are. The Pew Internet Project reported last year that 58 percent of Americans have a smartphone while 32 percent own an e-reader and 42 percent a tablet computer.

That The Morristown and Morris Township Library is keeping pace with the times is no surprise. It’s been doing so since 1792 when, according to a library booklet on its own history, the town’s first association for the circulation of books was organized. At the time, there were 97 members and 96 books.

Indeed the reference desk itself is evolving. These days, people tend to become reference librarians as second careers, according to Becza, who added that those who currently work on the library’s desk come from a variety of backgrounds ranging from law enforcement to teaching to copywriting.

“The profession is more technology oriented now,” she said, “and a lot of people who are interested in the field work not only for libraries but for places like Yahoo or Google—any place that needs to organize its information.”

The Morristown and Morris Township Library also provides a variety of media materials for its patrons, including downloadable audiobooks, downloadable ebooks, DVD/book sets to learn a foreign language, and online reference books, available through its website and accessible with a library card.

Lorraine Ash: 973-428-6660; lash@njpressmedia.com

Learn more

For details on the Tech Time One On One program and the Winter-Spring 2015 computer class programs at The Morristown and Morris Township Library, visit www.jfpl.org/ComputerClasses.cfm , call 973-538-2592, or email info@jfpl.org