Celebrate National Library Week with us!

by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian

The theme for this year’s National Library Week is Libraries = Strong Communities.  I think many people in Litchfield would agree with that.  Starting before the original Carnegie library was built here shortly after the turn of the last century, and continuing to today, residents of Litchfield have worked hard to support the library and make it a cornerstone of the town. 

The library continues to help make Litchfield a strong community by serving people of all ages with a beautiful building, a wide variety of materials and programs to meet their needs and interests, and helpful staff.   I have even had people tell me that the library was one of the features of Litchfield that helped them decide that this would be a good place to live. 

The library actually serves people from all over Meeker County.  The operation of the Litchfield Library is jointly funded by the city of Litchfield and Meeker County.  People who live in or near Eden Valley, Watkins, Kingston, Dassel, Darwin, Cosmos, and Grove City use the Litchfield Library, as well as their smaller local libraries where there is one. 

Libraries play a vital role in communities across America, providing critical resources, programs, and expertise.  This includes school and college libraries.  Public libraries provide public spaces where all community members, regardless of age, culture, or income level, can come together to connect and learn.  Library staff strive to meet their community’s needs.

We’d like to invite you to join the National Library Week celebration.  On Tuesday, April 9, from 1:00-4:30 p.m., the Friends of the Litchfield Public Library will be hosting an open house for National Library Week.  We would love to see many members of our community there. 

The Friends will be serving light refreshments in the meeting room.  I will be there with them to answer any questions you may have about the library and its services, and I’d be glad to take you on a quick tour of the library.

The Litchfield Library has over 50,000 items on the shelves locally: books, CDs, DVDs, and magazines.  As a member of Pioneerland Library System, the library provides easy access to materials in 31 other libraries in west central Minnesota.  In fact, you can order materials from all over the state of Minnesota and have them delivered for you to check out at your local library, free of charge. 

Our library has twelve desktop computers, four laptops, and an iPad for public use, plus Wi-Fi.  These days the “card catalog” is a tablet computer mounted to the wall, where you can search the whole Pioneerland collection.  You can also search the library catalog from the comfort of home, as well as check out our e-books wherever you are.  Technology in the library changes as our world changes.

Libraries aren’t only about the books on the shelves.  They’re also about the people who are there with you.  You can participate in activities from storytimes to book clubs to arts and cultural programs at our local library, joining other members of the community to learn new things.  And remember that you can always ask library staff for help looking up information or finding a book.  You’re not expected to know how to do everything at the library; we are here to help. 

In the words of this year’s National Library Week honorary chair Melinda Gates, “In addition to providing communities with access to ideas and information, libraries play an important role in our public life by encouraging creativity, promoting equality, and serving as a source of empowerment.”  Join us at the library next Tuesday to celebrate!

National Library Week

by Jeanette Stottrup, President of Friends of the Litchfield Public Library

The Friends of the Litchfield Public Library would like to call attention to National Library Week which will be observed April 12-18, 2015, with the theme, Unlimited possibilities @ your library®. First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country, generally the second week each April. It is a time to celebrate the contributions of our nation's libraries and librarians and to promote library use and support. All types of libraries - school, public, academic and special libraries - participate.

Celebrations during National Library Week include National Library Workers Day, celebrated the Tuesday of National Library Week, a day to recognize the valuable contributions made by all library workers. The Friends of the Library will have an open house in honor of the library staff from 1-4 pm on the 14th in the library meeting room.  We invite the public to become acquainted with our staff, whose pictures and short bios will be available. Friends members will be on hand to serve refreshments. Information on joining the Friends group will also be available.

It takes a team effort and many hands to keep the library materials organized and available for checkout. Other hands are working to bring together programs to promote information and recreation for different segments of our community. There are others who help individuals locate materials and information. This team effort is expanded as all the libraries in the Pioneerland Library System work together to share their collections across our nine counties. Added to that is an electronic network of catalogs that tap the library resources of the whole state through MnLink.  Truly many dedicated and diverse workers are involved in providing our community with library services.

To close out National Library Week, the Litchfield Library and Friends will have a table at the Business and Community Showcase being held at the Civic Arena on Saturday, April 18^th, from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm. What better way to celebrate National Library Week than to represent our library at this community event?  Stop by our table, pick up some informational material, and register for a door prize.

This third Saturday of the month, April 18^th, is also a book sale day from the library’s opening at 10:00 am to 2:00 pm. This sale is sponsored by the Friends of the Library with the able help of the Litchfield Women’s Study Club who have been manning the cashier table for a good number of years now. We appreciate their service and dedication. Sale items are organized by author for fiction items and subject area for nonfiction items for easy access.

The Friends of the Litchfield Library support its efforts in making recreational and informational materials and programming available. Our Litchfield library staff is committed to serving our community. An American Library Association report states that 90 percent of the respondents in an independent national survey said that libraries are important to the community. I’m sure that our community will agree with that assessment.  The Friends are looking forward to seeing you at our open house the afternoon of the 14^th.

National Library Week, April 14-20

by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian

Next week, libraries in schools, on campuses, and in communities around the United States will be celebrating National LibraryWeek.  This year’s theme is “Communities matter @ your library”.  Caroline Kennedy is the honorary chair. 

Libraries today are more than repositories for books.  They are important community centers where people gather, study, work, and find the information and resources that they need.

Librarians work with elected officials, teachers, students, small business owners, and other members of the public to find out what the community’s needs are and meet them.  Whether offering programs for early literacy, internet access for job seekers, materials for English-language learners, or assistance with e-books, librarians listen to the community they serve and respond to its needs.

The Litchfield Public Library serves Litchfield and all of Meeker County by providing story times for teaching pre-literacy skills to young children and their parents; book clubs for encouraging reading and discussion among older children, teens, and adults; and 4-H-led educational activities for elementary students.  The library’s knitting and gaming groups bring together groups of people interested in particular hobbies.  The library staff helps people of all ages find information they need and locate books, movies, and music they want to find. 

Our local library collection includes board books for babies, picture books, children’s chapter books, informational books for kids, young adult novels for teens, and a wide range of fiction and nonfiction books for adults, from the latest bestselling novel to cookbooks, health, and politics.  The library also offers more than print books: our collection includes audiobooks on CD and cassette, downloadable e-books and audiobooks, popular movies and documentaries on DVD and VHS, music CDs, newspapers,   magazines and e-magazines.  Through an online database called America’s News, our library provides a way to search the past ten years of the Litchfield Independent Review and years of other newspapers from throughout the country.

With the cooperative efforts of libraries around the state of Minnesota, a library card can give everyone access to a vast variety of books and other materials that their local libraries could never hold.  The Litchfield Library brings in three deliveries a week of items that customers order from other libraries in Pioneerland Library System and from libraries all around the state.  Library staff provides one-on-one help in placing these orders to those who need it, or customers can use the library website to request materials themselves. 

Our library has 17 computers that the public can use to create a resume, type a letter, send an email, or use the internet to do all of the things that have to be done online today.  Local residents who don’t have high-speed internet access at home, or even a computer, use the library computers to do homework, banking, shopping, research, job hunting, and social networking.  Others come in with laptops and mobile devices to use the library’s WiFi to work, study, and access the internet. 

Service to the community has always been the focus of the library.  While this has never changed, libraries have evolved in how they provide for the needs of their communities.  Visit our website at litchlibrary.blogspot.com to learn more about what the library can do for you.

Going Home, Going Home

 By Jan Pease

You can go home again. Recently, I was privileged to visit the library in Clarion, Iowa that was my first real job. I shelved books, straightened shelves, filed catalog cards, and one memorable, snowy winter, worked the front desk at the Morgan Everts Public Library. The grand old building is in great shape, and an expansion project has doubled its original size and updated it in many ways. The new addition is about 2 ½ years old, matches the brick outside very well, and is a wonderful improvement. Nola Waddingham succeeded the librarian I worked for, Marian Gannon, in 1996, and continues to be head librarian today. Clarion is a town of 2,671 people, located in Wright County, some of the best farming country you’ll ever see.

As we walked in the door, the smell of old oak and books was the same that I remembered, even though the building has been modernized. The children’s department has been moved to the basement, and there is an elevator which was installed in the early 1980s, long after my time. Linda, the staff person who spoke to me, was kind and friendly. She mentioned that they had recently gone onto a new automated system and are now doing more interlibrary loans. I was a little surprised to see that they have no regular story times for young children. They do outreach to preschools in the community and schedule several special story times through the year. The total circulation in 2010 was 35,483. I would expect that number to become higher as the new addition brings in more patrons and interlibrary loans increase.

The first part of our trip was a stay in Arkansas for a family wedding in Siloam Springs, Benton County, Arkansas. As of 2011, Siloam Springs's population is 15,039. Since 2000, it has had a population growth of 35.44 percent. My husband indulged me with a visit to the public library, an interesting experience for both of us. The friendly staff, Trish and Ivy, welcomed me and did their best to answer my somewhat random questions. Like the new head librarian, and many of the people we met, they had moved to the area from “somewhere else.”

The library is an independent city library, and the staff are city employees. The library is completely supported by city tax dollars, and a fee is charged to users who live outside the city limits. I found it interesting that users are limited to six books checked out per card, or six books per person on a family card. The library offers preschool and afterschool programs every week, plus a matinee movie at 4:00 every Tuesday. The library was closed two days for Easter, and they close for the annual Dogwood Festival. Interlibrary loan service is available, according to Ivy and Trish, but I couldn’t find any information about it on their website. I also couldn’t find a total circulation figure, and Ivy and Trish weren’t sure about that.

For comparison, in Litchfield, our population is 6,125, down 6.66% since 2000. Library users from outside of the city limits receive their first library card free of charge. Users may check out only six dvds per card, but the number of books, magazines and audio books is practically unlimited. Our library circulation in 2010 was 102,118. We provide three story hour opportunities, each week, plus monthly afterschool activities for children grades K through Middle School. It was really interesting to visit two completely different libraries, but I love our library here in Litchfield. Ya’ll stop in soon!