Like to Read? Try LibraryLookup

Thanks to the Internet, I can live in Keene, New Hampshire, and earn my living everywhere. My company's home office is in San Francisco, but on any given day I work with people in Silicon Valley, New York, or even Brussells. Location just doesn't matter, and that's exhilarating but it's also kind of troubling. Will the technologies that bring us together in cyberspace weaken the already fragile ties that bind our local communities?

This is a valid concern, but it's not a foregone conclusion. Lately I've been exploring ways we can use the Internet to connect with neighbors as well as with distant colleagues. My favorite example is a project called LibraryLookup. I started it three years ago, and here's how it works. Suppose you're at amazon.com, thinking about buying a book. Before you reach for your credit card you click the LibraryLookup button on the browser's toolbar. A window pops up and tells you whether the book's available in your local library. If it is, you can get hold of the book sooner than Amazon can ship it. You can read it for free. And perhaps most importantly, you can take a walk down to the library, see friends and acquaintances, and hang out for a while in a pleasant community space.

Nowadays I'm at the Keene Public Library much more often than I used to be. I read a lot more books, and I spend a lot less money doing it.
But what matters most to me is the idea of reinvigorating one of our greatest local institutions. LibraryLookup doesn't only work in Keene.
It also works for thousands of libraries that use one of a dozen different kinds of catalog systems. As a result, people all around the world are spending more time in their community libraries. It's a nice example of how we can use the global Internet to act locally too.