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May 2, 2005

NorthStarNet serves as information beacon for suburbanites

Until I moved to suburban Chicago, I always lived in cities or towns. One of the first things I noticed about suburban life was that everything was spread out and sort of disconnected. None of the media, print or visual covered the whole area. Even the telephone book was just for the little burg where I lived. It was really hard to find information because there was no central source.


In 1995, when the Internet was new, we librarians decided to create something to meet this information need. NorthStarNet is now 10 years old and we're celebrating.


With 50 libraries serving more than 100 suburban communities from as far north as the Wisconsin border and as far south as I-30, NorthStarNet is a powerful community resource. It gets 4.6 million hits per month and any organization that is part of NorthStarNet comes up high in a Google search because it's such a big site.


Traditionally public libraries had gathered illusive information about local clubs, groups, organizations and government. Our thought was to use the power of the computer and the communication potential of the Internet to expand and organize and make all this information available. The North Suburban Library System (NSLS) contributed the hardware and software and four public libraries were willing to be pioneers in this area: Barrington Area Library, Ela Area Public Library District in Lake Zurich, Skokie Public Library and Warren Newport Public Library District in Gurnee. Staff from these libraries fanned out into the community and made presentations to groups such as school districts, park districts, Rotary Clubs, Girl Scout groups, garden clubs and even businesses. They offered to help representatives from these groups create Web pages that would be hosted on the NorthStarNet site.


Barbara Sugden, executive director of the Barrington Area Library said, “Before NorthStarNet, our staff had put a lot of work into a paper file of community groups. We had contacted every group we could think of and we were really proud of our work. We already had the community contacts; NorthStarNet was the next logical step. In l995, most organizations did not have a Web presence. Since we were able to offer training and free Web hosting, it really boosted the profile of the library in our community.”


Visit bakhome.northstarnet.org/ and view today's version of the Barrington site.


In l995, George Kalinka had just been appointed electronic resources librarian at the Ela Area Public Library. Reaching out to community groups to recruit them to NorthStarNet was one of his first tasks. “I initially focused on ‘keystone' organizations, such as school districts, fire departments, police departments, village government, etc. I got to know police officers from several different departments while helping them design and build their Web sites. I had wanted to develop an Internet safety class and I asked Pat Finlon from the Lake Zurich Police Department and Howard Mueller from the Hawthorn Woods Police Department for their assistance.. We presented several workshops together and found there was a real need for this type of information. Later, we received a grant and created an Internet Safety Web site at www.internet-safety.org. This site is visited on average approximately 2500 times per month. None of this would have happened if the library had not been involved with NorthStarNet.”


NorthStarNet is still on the cutting edge, with recent additions of a community calendar, blogs and RSS feeds. Tom Kern, director of the Wauconda Area Library, was one of the first to test the new “community-in-a-box” technology on the Wauconda Area's community information home page. “Our community just loves it. We adapted it so that it would be easily recognizable and user-friendly. The technology is simple — I actually created the entire community home page myself in a few hours with the software that NSLS provided. Everybody now knows to use our community calendar to see what's going on and to avoid overlap when planning future events. Best of all, each participating organization can update its own calendar information.” Visit waucondaarea.info to see what's happening in the Wauconda area today, this week, or this month.


Is your community on NorthStarNet? Visit www.northstarnet.org and click on “communities on NorthStarNet” to see. If your community is not represented, it could be under the auspices of your local public library. Talk to your librarian and discuss the possibilities. It's a wonderful 21st century tool for building community at a time when we need it more than ever. If every community in the entire Chicago area were on NorthStarNet, I would truly be able to find the information I need as a suburbanite.

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