Are you someone who is always learning, but have struggled to fit learning in around your life or business? Do you need to upskill in a particular area but are still boot-strapping with no training budget? Struggle no more! Tauranga City Library is joining the mission close to the heart and purpose of Venture Centre – to digitally enable the people in our city – by adding Lynda.com to their suite of tools available for residents to use, for free. We spoke to Daniel Petersen, from the Tauranga Libraries team, about Lynda.com and why this is good for people in Tauranga.
Can you please explain what Lynda is and why people should use it?
Lynda.com is an online learning platform that helps users learn technology, creative, business and software skills at their own pace. From programming to video-editing courses to interior design in CAD. Our library staff have had a lot of fun browsing the range of videos that Lynda.com offers. Prior to having access to Lynda.com, personally I used YouTube videos whenever I found myself stuck on a project. The problem is the quality of YouTube videos varies radically and it's difficult to find specific useful content. Lynda.com’s like YouTube, but with a laser-focus on high-quality, professional learning support videos – no more trudging through amateur tutorials and no more distracting cat videos!
Tauranga Library’s team has been instrumental in making Lynda available to all library card-holders. Why did the library do this?
The library's ambition for all things is the democratisation of knowledge. I remember having access to Lynda.com as a university student many years ago. It was an incredibly useful tool for me, as a developing graphic designer, but I lost access to it once I left university. Lynda.com is great, but it's not cheap for an individual subscription and I just couldn't afford it. Our staff enjoyed trialling Lynda and recognised immediately the potential it had for our library users and wanted it to be accessible to everyone. Personally, I'm really glad that I have access to Lynda again and it excites me to think that easy-to-follow, highly regarded tutorials are available to those who wouldn't normally have access to this kind of thing.
What is the library's ambition with Lynda.com?
We can't wait to see all the ways that Lynda.com improves our library user's lives and especially all of the great things that our library users create! We've received enough feedback already to know that we're on to something pretty special and I'm sure that a great musician, artist or video-game creator will get support 24/7 thanks to this library resource. Here at the library we're pretty excited about the possibilities!
Anything else you'd like to add?
Access to Lynda.com is free for library users and library memberships are free as well - there's no reason not to give Lynda.com a go and you'll be glad you did!
Venture Centre works to connect people on enterprising journeys - with each other and the mindset, skillset, toolsets, networks and resources they need - to build an ecosystem that delivers real-world, learn-by-doing events, activities, projects and experiences, and more... This would not be possible without the support of Tauranga City and Western Bay of Plenty District councils.
