The Access Piece in the Digital Literacy Puzzle

The Strathcona County Library in Alberta serves about 65,000 urban and 35,000 rural patrons. This wide urban-rural divide poses a unique challenge for the library to provide digital resources to patrons living in areas where internet access is extremely limited. We talked to Heather Nicholson, Assistant Manager of the Department of Adult Services at Strathcona County Library to learn about how StackMap is a vital tool for increasing access and digital literacy.

We are a suburb of a large city, so it’s not like we’re remote like Alaska, but a lot of our rural people actually don’t have access to the internet. It’s partly a service issue but it also has to do with topography that makes it really hard to get access. So, the library is really important in providing people with that connectivity. 

I definitely think that for our library and many other libraries, digital literacy has become a big part of the work we do. Especially as society moves forward, having some level of technological skill has become an absolute necessity. But there’s still that digital divide of people who don’t have access or skills to technology, and that’s a gap that libraries are trying to fill.

I think StackMap is a piece of a whole digital literacy puzzle. It’s part of ensuring that our staff’s tech skills are up to date so they can provide all kinds of tech assistance. StackMap is a piece of the bigger picture. It frees up staff to do other in-depth, intellectual work, like teaching patrons how to use technology rather than tending to the very simple ‘where’s the bathroom’ kind of question.

Like many libraries, prior to StackMap, we relied on large paper maps of our library. But nothing on those paper maps had been updated since 2010. A nice thing about a digital tool is that you can update it really quickly. Just yesterday, we had a small collection that got moved, and we updated StackMap the same day and now it’s accurate. Whereas the physical maps were such a complicated thing because we didn’t know how often to update them and how much it was going to cost us to print these large format signs. All of that stuff just became so complicated, but now we have StackMap which can be updated instantaneously. 

— Heather Nicholson, Assistant Manager of the Department of Adult Services at Strathcona County Library