At their meeting on July 10, the MBLC announced LSTA grant awards for FY 2004. All grants are contingent upon the final authorization and availability of FY 2004 LSTA funding. NMRLS member recipients are:

Abbot Public Library, Marblehead — Customer Service
Chelmsford Public Schools, Chelmsford — After School Reading
Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library — On the Same Page
Memorial Hall Library, Andover — Serving People with Disabilities
Memorial Middle School, Beverly — School Library Incentive
Massachusetts Trial Court Libraries, Lawrence — Community Languages
McQuade Library, Merrimack College — Customer Service
Peabody Institute Library, Danvers — Information Literacy
Peabody Institute Library, Peabody — Information Literacy
Swampscott Public Library — Discovery Kits
Topsfield Town Library — Customer Service
Wilmington Memorial Library — On the Same Page

NMRLS received two LSTA grants (contingent upon FY 2004 federal funds) to begin in October 2003. Under the program topic Digitizing Historical Resources, we will expand upon the work done in the ECHOES exhibit, http://www.nmrls.org/enha/exhibit, funded with help from the Essex National Heritage Area. Dubbed "Imagining History," this two-year project will add 3,500 images from eight member libraries to the Northeast Massachusetts Digital Library. Scott Kehoe will act as grants manager. All scanning, digitization, text conversion, and metadata work will be outsourced to Access Imagery of Orem, Utah.

The participating member libraries are: Beverly High School, Essex Agricultural and Technical High School, Lawrence Public Library, Lowell National Historic Park, Lynn Public Library, Peabody Institute Library (Peabody), Saugus Public Library, and the Stephen Phillips Trust House (Salem). Collections are disparate in nature and content. They present a broad range of the rich resources of the North Shore and the Merrimack Valley and include personal and family memoir, industry and labor history, women's history, education, and immigration.

As part of the Library Service for the Future grant topic, NMRLS' second project is "The Library Experience: Older Citizens." Working in partnership with Libraries for the Future http://www.lff.org, a national non-profit whose mission is to strengthen the role of American libraries, NMRLS will help members develop and plan for the present and future needs of their older, active adult population. As the Baby Boomer generation ages, the older adult population in Massachusetts will grow from 14% in 2000 to 21% in 2025. For this demographic, the library can be a place of rich resources and services to supplement their lives, providing a distinctive "library experience," which will include opportunities for civic engagement. Libraries for the Future will organize professional development for librarians to build their outreach skills to connect with their older populations and the local community groups who serve them. The end product will be a web site clearinghouse of information to help libraries design programs and services.