New and improved Santa Maria Library system to provide enhanced services and added resources

SANTA MARIA, Calif. -- The Santa Maria Public Library is currently in the process of improving its operating system and is undergoing a realignment that will ultimately provide community members with enhanced services and added resources.

The City of Santa Maria has announced the library will continue to participate in the Black Gold Cooperative Library System, which ties in with several other local libraries.

The network is now being upgraded in an effort to provide a more community-focused approach to its services.

"As members of the Black Gold consortium, the consortium is going to a new product," said librarian Joanne Britton-Holland. "We've already implemented their discovery layer, which allows us to search the catalog, our databases, our ebooks, lots of content in one single search, so now we're implementing the back end of that."

Britton-Holland added that once the new software is fully functional, it will benefit library patrons both now and in the future.

"It gives us an opportunity to focus more on providing more collections that they want and need and to better provide better programming and resources that they want," said Britton-Holland and it will also enable to provide more resources our community here in Santa Maria and the branches that we serve in Cuyama, Los Alamos, Guadalupe and Orcutt."

According to the city, the upgrade will result in a number of changes in service over the next several weeks, including:

• As of Tuesday, March 1st, all renewals, including automatic renewals, on borrowed
  materials are suspended temporarily to allow time for materials to be returned to
  their owning libraries.
• Beginning Tuesday, April 19th, new holds will be suspended temporarily to allow
  for the migration of data to new Library circulation software.
• Beginning Monday, April 25th, Black Gold Cooperative Library System card holders
  will have access to the customized catalogs of the remaining members of the Black
  Gold Cooperative System. The members of Black Gold Cooperative include the
  City of Santa Maria Public Library, Paso Robles City Library, Lompoc Public
  Library System, Goleta and Santa Ynez Valley Library System, Blanchard
  Community Library, and the Carpinteria Community Library
• San Luis Obispo County libraries and the Santa Barbara Library System
  discontinued holds requests from the Black Gold member libraries on January 24th
  .

For more information on the Santa Maria Public Library, click here.