EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is awarding its 2017 EBSCO Solar grant to the Athens-Clarke County Library in Athens, Georgia and The Indian Trails Public Library in Wheeling, Illinois. The grants will provide each library with $100,000 to pay for the installation of a solar array. The grant offsets the cost of installing solar panels and allows libraries to reduce their electricity expenditures.
The Athens-Clarke County Library is the headquarters of the 5-county Athens Regional Library System. The library plans to install a ‘Sunshine Garden’ solar garden, a ground-installed array, on its campus. The library has hosted a variety of sustainability-related events in the past, such as the annual ‘Green Life Expo,’ which seeks to educate local businesses and families about how to reduce their carbon footprint. As part of the grant, the library plans to partner with local schools to create a STEM solar lab to demonstrate solar energy to children, as well as host a seminar for adults on retrofitting homes with solar panels in conjunction with the library’s ‘Reflecting, Sharing, Learning’ programming.
The Indian Trails Public Library, located in Wheeling, Illinois, serves many communities in the northern Chicago suburbs. Since moving into a new building earlier this year, the library has created plans to start a Giving Garden for children to learn about sustainable farming practices. Along with the solar array, the library is planning programming that will include lectures and an exhibit from the Illinois Solar Energy Association, children’s workshops such as UV Energy with UV Beads; Solar Oven Building, a community-wide sustainability fair focused on educating families on how to reduce their carbon footprint; and a career fair in sustainable technologies.
EBSCO received 90 submissions from 15 countries for the 2017 grant. Austin Community College (ACC) District’s Highland Campus was the 2016 EBSCO Solar Grant winner which was a single award for $150,000.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a world-leading provider of metadata services, abstraction, indexing, entity extraction and knowledge organisation models (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies).
