Is the Wake County library staff playing hard ball with the Wake County commissioners by offering the option of closing the Garner Library, SE Regional Library, and how would it impact your library usage? The story ran in the News and Observer, Tuesday, January 26, 2010. See: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/counties/wake_county/story/304181.html
I remember when that location first opened. It was exciting in Garner to have this very nice facility. I used to take our children there when they were little for story time and to check out books to take home to read. To close that library would be like a contradiction to all politicians who stand in front of a podium and chant that education is important. Giving children access to books and opportunities to learn to read seems like a very important investment in education. It should compiment the school system and not be considered just another government department.
Come work with the community owned and record setting Cleveland Library Wal-Mart grants to Cleveland already ensure a free Cleveland Library card to every child in Polenta and West View Elementaries. Cleveland has the first successful private library, designed to provide free to the public library service, launched in North Carolina in more than 20 years. It is one of six in the state. The five others, including those charging rental fees, subscriptions, and some with both local and county tax support, are not recognzed as public libraries by the State Library. In 17 months, the Cleveland collection grew to 65,000 or more than twice as large as any similar library in N.C. and the third largest in the county. The oldest is over 100 years old. The acquisition team already brought in four books for each resident in Cleveland Township, the same as the goal for the high user Chapel Hill Library. This is twice the state and county current holdings per resident. The next goal is to bring in eight per resident by 2014. When this second goal is made, the team will have saved local residents $4,200,000. This number, the same as that set by the forward thinking Chapel Hill board, will permit the library to serve surrounding areas. But this is the quickest and easiest task in building this library, since the team avoided the traditional practice of fundraising to purchase the book collection. Starting in early January, hundreds of volunteers from miles around have been coming to Cleveland to help build the community a library. In just three days, they put library ID labels and individual book bar codes on more than 8,000 new books. We have some labeling to go. Volunteers must now look each book up in a library catalog and identify the shelving location for it. Someone else must type a spine lable, add a genre label, and someone must tape over all. Someone else walks to shelve the book and someone comes along and adds it to the Cleveland catalog. This is the slow down and time consuming part of library building. The more educated volunteers, the faster the community gets its library improved.
