By By Gal Tziperman Lotan, News staff

The Boston Public Library is getting with the times.
The institution has a Facebook page, drawings dating back to the 19th century on its Flickr account, and 8,500 titles available for electronic checkout any time of day from anywhere in the world.
Not bad for a 161-year-old library.
Digitizing the art collection is a way to make the library more accessible, said Tom Blake, the library’s digital production manager.
‘ ‘When was the last time you walked into a library and used a Microfiche reader?’ Blake said. ‘In our minds, if it’s not digital, it doesn’t exist.’
Of the 15 million works in the library’s collection, 40,000 are digitized and 8,000 are publicly available on Flickr, he said.
Eventually, Blake said he hopes to put the entire collection online, though he did not know how long the process would take.
‘This is a drop in a bucket,’ he said.
The Flickr collection currently includes World War II-era posters, early 20th century photographs of Huntington Avenue and anti-slavery manuscripts written in the mid-19th century by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.
The images have been viewed 270,000 times since going online last March, Blake said. Every image is accompanied by a few sentences about the artist, time period and photo.
The images are available under a Creative Commons license, meaning they are in the public domain and may be used with minimal restrictions, Blake said.
Other libraries across the country, most notably the Library of Congress, have also been digitizing their collections in recent years.
Along with making the library’s content more accessible, Boston Public Library employees have also been working to bring more young people through its doors.
The Facebook page ‘was just a way to reach more people,’ said Michael Colford, manager of regional and statewide services, who created the visiting author series Facebook page in October. ‘It’s really easy and I could do it very quickly, which is one of the stumbling blocks for other advertising methods.’
Along with designing and printing out flyers to advertise the series, Colford created an event page on Facebook, invited his friends, and watched the number of fans grow to 152 as of press time.
‘It reaches people who don’t necessarily come into the library and see the flyer,’ he said.
Colford said he has noticed more young people have been attending the events, but is not sure if they come because they saw it on Facebook or because of the authors.
The library also offers free downloadable media:’ 8,500 books, movies and music that people with a library or virtual library cards can download onto their computers, iPods and other music players through a service called Overdrive at Overdrive.bpl.org. The number of titles checked out electronically has more than doubled in the past three years, from 33,444 in 2006 to 73,747 in 2008, because more titles became available and the service became popular through word-of-mouth, Colford said.
Anyone with a Massachusetts address can sign up for a virtual library card and immediately access the books, a service Colford said is particularly convenient for Massachusetts residents who do not have time to go into the city and for college students looking for reference books after-hours.
‘I think libraries in general have to change with the times, especially in this day and age,’ Colford said. ‘The technology is so accessible that if you want to stay relevant with younger community, you do need to get online.’