Last month, the Murrysville American Association of University Women was about to cancel its monthly speaker, Flight 93 Memorial Superintendent Stephen Clark, after finding out covid restrictions did not permit him to visit for a presentation on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Luckily, a local family’s donation and the innovative mind of Murrysville library trustee Chuck Greenberg helped not just to salvage the meeting but also to introduce a new library feature: the TechNook.

It is a streaming station and sitting area that offers library staff the chance to bring in speakers from anywhere in the world — as long as they have a decent internet connection.

Greenberg said his frustration with a couple of previous attempts at livestreaming led to the development of the TechNook.

“I wanted to connect with the San Francisco author of a book we were discussing,” Greenberg said. “Murrysville’s tech specialist, Mike Hiler, sort of jerry-rigged a way to do it, but we couldn’t keep him on the video.”

In 2017, Greenberg was hoping to stream NASA content for library visitors during the solar eclipse. Technical problems torpedoed his plans.

“I’m a product development guy,” Greenberg said. “That’s what I did at PPG, so I started thinking about how to design a product that would work for this.”

When the library received a memorial donation from the Murrysville family of Kathleen Smolenski, who died in 2015, Greenberg reached out to Bill Snyder at Design 3 Architecture in Monroeville.

“Bill designed our children’s room at the library, and he ended up designing the TechNook as well,” Greenberg said. “He’s been great in donating the in-kind services of his firm over the years.”

The TechNook has displaced the library’s East Suburban Artists League monthly gallery, which has been moved to a new location. Greenberg said it already has proven to be well worth the investment.

“When we were initially planning this, we weren’t thinking about coronavirus at all,” he said. “But it’s the perfect tool right now.”

For more, visit Murrysville Library.org.

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