Closing at 2 p.m. Wednesday

The Litchfield Library will be closing at 2:00 p.m. on  Wednesday, January 30, due to the weather.

Closing at 6:00 tonight

The Litchfield Library will be closing tonight at 6 p.m. due to the weather.

Closed for New Year's

The library will be closing at 5 p.m. on New Year's Eve.  It will be closed all day on New Year's Day.  Have a happy and safe new year!

Holiday hours

We will be closed all day on Monday, December 24, and Tuesday, December 25, for Christmas.  We will be open normal hours the rest of the week.

We will be closing at 5 p.m. on Monday, December 31, for New Year's Eve.  We will be closed on Tuesday, January 1.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the staff of the Litchfield Public Library!

Closed for Labor Day

Pioneerland libraries, including Litchfield, will be closed on Monday, September 3, for Labor Day.  Enjoy the holiday!

Curl Up with a Movie Over the Holidays

by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian

Are you ready for the holidays? Gifts purchased, treats made, house ready? I’m sorry to say that I am not. This is the first Christmas season that I’ve been working full-time since my children were born, and I’m in grad school, too. I took a class on collection development this semester, so I’ve been spending my November and December evenings and weekends evaluating Litchfield Library’s parenting collection in detail and creating a presentation on ebooks in public libraries. I just may be out with the shoppers on Christmas Eve Day this year.

Library closed for holidays

Our library will be closed all day on Christmas Eve, Saturday, December 24. We will also be closed on Monday, December 26, for our Christmas holiday. We will be open on New Year’s Eve Day, but we’ll be closed again on Monday, January 2. This will be the case in all Pioneerland libraries, so if you visit Grove City’s, Dassel’s, or Hutchinson’s libraries, you’ll find the same holiday closures.

Check out a movie

Because we’ll be closed for that span of days, if you check out movies on Thursday, December 22, or Friday, December 23, you’ll be able to keep them until we open again the following Tuesday. Maybe you’d like to get a few movies to keep the kids busy while you wrap presents or to watch when things quiet down on Christmas Day or the days between Christmas and New Year’s. We’ve gotten some new DVDs for you to choose from:

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. If you missed it on TV or want to watch it again, you can check it out from us.

Cars 2. This sequel to the wildly popular Pixar movie Cars has Lightning McQueen and Mater headed for the world Grand Prix.

Mr. Popper’s Penguins. This adaptation of the award-winning, classic children’s book stars Jim Carrey as a New York businessman who inherits six penguins who turn his apartment into a winter wonderland.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part 2. This final installment brings the series to an epic finale at Hogwarts. This was one of the few movies I saw in the theater this year, and I loved it. It’s on my Christmas list.

Fiddler on the Roof. If you’re thinking about trying out for next summer’s community theater production, check out the movie starring Topol as Tevye, a poor Russian Jewish man with five unmarried daughters. We have the soundtrack on CD, too, so you can learn the songs. The 1971 movie is rated G.

We’ve also just gotten Firebreather from the Cartoon Network, Top Hat, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, A Night at the Opera, starring the Marx Brothers, and Super 8.  I've heard rave reviews of the last one and plan to check it out myself.

I hope you’ll find something among our new movies that you’ll enjoy. Have a merry Christmas!

Closed for Thanksgiving

We will be closed on Thursday, November 24, for Thanksgiving.  We will be open on Friday, November 25.

Story times will take place as usual on Wednesday at 10:15 a.m. and Friday at 10 a.m. Thursday evening's story time will be cancelled.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I Am So Thankful

by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian

At the Litchfield Public Library, those of us on the staff are so thankful to work in our wonderful library. Thanks to the efforts and generosity of many, we have a beautiful library building in our community. People who visit from out of town often look around with wide eyes and say, “You have a beautiful library. Is it new?” It truly is something to be proud of, even ten years after it opened.

We are also thankful for the talented people from our community who come in to share their gifts with us. A few weeks ago, we hosted Herbert Chilstrom for a book event. Mr. Chilstrom grew up in Litchfield and is the retired bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Members of his graduating class donated a copy of his new book, A Journey of Grace: The Formation of a Leader and a Church, to our library. When it returns from processing, it will be available for you to check out.

On Monday, November 28, we will be hosting Litchfield author Nancy Paddock in our meeting room at 7 p.m. Nancy’s new book, A Song at Twilight: Of Alzheimer’s and Love, has gotten quite a lot of attention on the Minnesota literary scene. The memoir has been reviewed favorably, even glowingly, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press. The Star Tribune reviewer described it as “lyrically powerful” and a “beautiful, fragile and unforgettably open-hearted effort”. Nancy has been interviewed about the book on Minnesota Public Radio and has made multiple appearances in the Twin Cities, including one at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. We are thankful to claim Nancy as a member of our local arts community and to have her kick off our new round of Legacy programming. I hope you’ll join us the Monday evening after Thanksgiving to hear Nancy discuss her book and, if you’d like, have a copy signed. Our library owns a copy, as well.

Personally, I’m thankful for the challenges and opportunities of my new job as head librarian this year. I am constantly learning new things, meeting new people, and looking for new ways to serve the community. This runs the gamut from the very serious information request to the entertaining community event. I hope you’ll join me for something new and fun: game night at the library. Starting on December 5th, we’ll have a series of game nights on Mondays from 6:30 to 8 p.m. We’ll start with chess on December 5th in the meeting room. Bring your own chess set and meet up with others who want to play. It’s open to all ages and ability levels, and you can come and go as your schedule allows. I’m planning to do evenings of card games, board games, Yu-Gi-Oh, Dungeons & Dragons, Wii Sports, Wii Rock Band, and any other likely candidates. If you have a request, let me know.

Finally, I know that many of us are thankful when new books come in. It’s like Christmas every time we get a delivery of new books, movies, or music. As you prepare your Thanksgiving dinners or make your Christmas baking and entertaining plans, take a look at some of the new resources we have available to you:

• Essential Pepin: More than 700 All-Time Favorites from My Life in Food by Jacques Pepin

• The Best of the Farmer’s Wife Cookbook: Over 400 Blue-Ribbon Recipes

• Mad About Macarons: Make Macarons Like the French by Jill Colonna

• Whoopies! Fabulous Mix-and-Match Recipes for Whoopie Pies by Susanna Tee

• The Apple Lover’s Cookbook by Amy Traverso

• Bite by Bite: 100 Stylish Little Plates You Can Make for Any Party by Peter Callahan

• Heartland: The Cookbook by Judith Fertig



Our library will be closed on Thanksgiving Day, but we will be open again on Friday and Saturday. Happy Thanksgiving!

We Prepare for Inventory and I Attend a Library Conference

by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian


The Litchfield Public Library will be closed for inventory for three days at the beginning of November: November 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. It has been about ten years since our last inventory, and it desperately needs to be done. We have to close because no items can be checked in or out while the records are being updated. All the same, we know it will be very inconvenient to our customers for us to be closed.

I hope that you’ll be able to plan ahead for the things you’ll need on those days. We’ll be open on Monday, October 31st, and again on Friday, November 4th. The meetings scheduled for the large meeting room will still take place Tuesday through Thursday, because we can close the lobby gates and make just the meeting room accessible to the public. The rest of the library will be unavailable, including our computers. Wednesday morning’s toddler story time and Thursday evening’s family story time will be cancelled for November 2nd and 3rd, but we will have preschool story hour on Friday morning, November 4th.

You will still be able to return your books and other items in our outside book drop. When we open on Friday the 4th, the things that have been returned during the days we're closed will be checked in as though they were returned on Monday the 31st. This will actually give you a few extra days on your items that week. In fact, I plan to be liberal with due dates and movie check-out limits a few days ahead of inventory; the more that we have checked out and the fewer returns that are waiting in stacks for us to return to normal business that Friday, the better.

Other Pioneerland libraries will be open while we’re closed, so you could use the Grove City, Dassel, or Hutchinson libraries that week. If you plan to check out movies at those other libraries, return your Litchfield movies to them so that you don't go over your 6-movie limit.  And of course, you can also use our e-books and downloadable audiobooks while our building is closed.

The library stayed open, obviously, and ran smoothly while I was away at the Minnesota Library Association (MLA) conference from October 12th to 14th. This was the first time I’ve attended this conference, and it was wonderful. Librarians from public, academic, and special libraries throughout the state came together in Duluth for professional development. I attended sessions on summer reading programs, teaching computer skills to older adults, e-books, customer-focused library design, MLA’s leadership development program, and great new books to recommend to patrons. I learned so much.

One keynote speaker spoke about the influence that children’s books have on people’s lives. Another talked about gaming at the library, which has inspired me to consider a series of gaming nights here; I also happened to get a request for such a thing from a patron the same week. Our closing keynote speaker was William Kent Krueger, one of our best Minnesota authors. In the midst of all of this, I got a bit of an orientation to the MLA organization, attended a meeting of rural librarians, met some Minnesota mystery authors, and listened to some potential Legacy performers. One of the best things about attending the conference was the opportunity to talk with librarians from all over the state and find out how they’re handling some of the same issues we face. When we share ideas, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel to improve our services.

Because of the high level of unemployment in Meeker County, and because of their efforts in applying, one library staff member from Grove City and one from Dassel won scholarships to MLA from Project Compass. They both attended workshops on meeting the needs of our communities during this economic downturn, helping job seekers, and supporting small business development. They’ll be sharing this training with the rest of the library staff in Meeker County and probably with all of Pioneerland Library System. I’m hopeful that this will be beneficial to all of our communities.