In this season of gift giving, the New York Public Library has just added a wonderful new resource — lynda.com — for New Yorkers who need the top of the line in online software training. NYPL's business library, SIBL, has entered into a year long pilot to provide free access to the continuously expanding library of 1,500 online training videos.

As soon as your holiday reveling has wound down, head to SIBL and plunk yourself down at one of the nine dedicated lynda.com workstations or at any of the other database workstations scattered throughout the library.

A leader in online learning, lynda.com is known across industry, government agencies, and college campuses as a provider of clear and accessible instructional videos that meet the needs of ambitious and enterprising New Yorkers who might want to:

• Hone Office skills to get ahead at their workplace
• Learn MS Word Power Shortcuts or Mail Merge to make their small business more efficient
• Use Power Point to create presentations for a class or pitch to clients or funders
• Ace Photoshop to make gifts for grandkids or take an ex's photo out of a family portrait
• Plug holes in their resumes or learn salary negotiation tips during their job search

Here's just a sampling of lynda.com's software application offerings: MS Excel, Windows 8, Quickbooks, Twitter for Business, Web Graphics, Photoshop, Digital Photography, Creating Mobile Apps for iPad and Android, Video Editing, Audio Editing, iPad Music Production. Also Digital Publishing, Logo Design, WordPress, Drupal, 3-D, Dreamweaver and more! And remember, too, that lynda.com has courses on crucial job search and business skills from resume revision and salary negotiation to sales and project management.

And there's more!

• lynda.com training requires no registration or personal data input.
• lynda.com does require headphones. You can bring your own or buy a set at SIBL for $1.00.
• You can take a tutorial or full course multiple times. There is no time limit to lynda.com use.
• Options include completing a full course or just specific modules within a course.
• Laptop owners — Mac users in particular — can bring their laptop to practice with exercise files while taking lynda.com courses on SIBL’s public workstations.

See you soon at SIBL! Get the training you need at your own pace.