We are happy to announce that Salinas Public Library is one of the ten recipients of the PLP Innovation and Technology Opportunity Grant for 2017/18 in the amount of $15,000. Each fiscal year, the Pacific Library Partnership, through a competitive process, awards grants to PLP libraries to support innovation and technology. These grants are highly competitive and the winners represent the most innovative ideas for improving communities through accessible technology. 

The library will be implementing a new program called "Tech for Teens." Building upon a recent collaboration with a design thinking class that sought to solve the riddle around why so many students after middle school stop returning to the Library. The project will seek to create a concept app that brings together several key motivations that could inspire teens to return to the Library and remain regular users. The Library intends to hire an instructor to build out the concept for the app by teaching teens how to develop it. Once developed, the library hopes the app can be used by other libraries to attract teens to their library. We also will build a toolkit for other libraries on teaching teens how to develop apps (particularly apps that serve literacy and library use.)

For more information, please contact Eric Howard at (831) 758-7419. You can also view a list of all the recipients here.