National Library Week: A History

Started by the American Library Association in 1958, National Library Week is meant to promote every library in America. Before that, states had their own "state library weeks." The goal is, and has always been to give libraries, especially smaller libraries with smaller budgets, a central theme and marketing materials to increase awareness of Libraries. It is also meant to celebrate the accomplishments of librarians and libraries.

Libraries have celebrated with many different events: open houses, movie screenings, book discussions, raffles, scavenger hunts and more. Heck, a few years ago we had an after hours rock concert!

The choice of themes has been interesting. In 1958 it was, "Wake up and Read," which was used the following year, then slightly adapted in 1960 to, "Open wonderful new worlds...wake up and read." The theme seems to be altered slightly each year. By 1974 it had morphed into,"Information Power," which bred the following year's awkwardly worded, "Information Power at the library? At the Library." The Internet finally made its influence known in 1997 with the inclusion of the @ symbol. "Kids connect @ the Library." The @ symbol has been used in every theme since then.

This year's theme is "Worlds Connect @ Your Library."

In 2003 it was decided that each Tuesday of National Library Week would be designated as National Library Worker's Day. Hey that's today! I for one am glad I get to work with everyone here at the library. You couldn't ask for a better bunch of co-workers. Thanks guys (and gals)! More on National Library Worker's Day later...

Thanks to these online resources: Library History Buff, RensSearch, American Library Association

A Real Gem From the Past

Earlier this week, a book was returned to the Missoula Public Library that had been checked out in 1905. It made it's way from California to the Midwest actually I learned it traveled from Missoula to New York City, then somewhere in California, then Seattle and finally back to Missoula. stopping at all points in between. Now, in 2009 it finally made it back to it's home (even though the library has moved since then). The book is called Gems for the Fireside or, Casket of Diamonds.

The book is beautifully illustrated and was originally published in 1883. You can take a look at the book in it's entirety thanks to the lovely folks from Google. From the looks of it, the copy they scanned comes from a later version, since the library date stamp is from 1939. Our copy was the tenth book EVER to be included in our collection.

The book is going to be re-cataloged and added to our historical collection in the Audra Browman room, where we keep our genealogical books and other historical finds.

We'd love to hear more about the travels of this book, as we didn't get the full story when it was returned, so if you happen to know who it was that returned it, we would love to have a chat with them so we could fully document this fantastic story.

Well Worn Countertop

Our current checkout desk is slated to be demolished in the very near future. This desk was fairly new when I started working here, but as you can see quite a few books have passed over the counter since then.

We don't have a set date for when this desk is going to give up the ghost, but rest assured it is not long for this world. Once it disappears we'll have to scramble to get you checked out until we get our new accounts desk up. We're looking at some contingency plans now, which we'll tell you about in greater detail once they're all worked out.

12 Years Overdue

Well...not necessarily. We found this 12 year old checkout receipt in the book "Cavalier in Buckskin" today during our afternoon bookdrop. Click the picture for a larger view. According to the receipt we were actually open on New Year's Day in 1996.

Since our resident library historian Vaun is off today, I couldn't ask when we abandoned the dot matrix receipt printers, but it had to be within a year or so of this receipt by my calculations. We have some ancient computer equipment in storage around the tech offices, but no printers capable of producing this.

You never know exactly what will fall out of a book when you pick it up here in the library. The really interesting part is that since we re-barcoded the book it has been checked out 29 times. That means that at least 29 people have seen this, maybe used it as a bookmark, and returned it with the book. Pretty amazing when you think about it.

The scent of old books

Ah, the history in Missoula Public Library. This book card pocket was removed from one of our books today. My how we've changed. Today I had fun doing a tour of the library for some 4th and 5th graders. One of my favorite parts is taking them to the Audra Browman room where we keep lots of really old things that impress our younger patrons. We also usually have some folks in there doing research for writing a book or tracing their genealogy, also very impressive. The students and teacher all thought the 1911 Missoula directory was really neat and I think they enjoyed seeing our collection of historical photographs of the library and its staff. So, although we have lots of new books coming in daily to add to our shelves we still have lots of older books. And although we have a new computer lab and an online catalog we still have plenty of those dusty tomes and vintage magazines for those that have a more historical bent.

And by the way, our current checkout period is four weeks for most items, 10 days for new fiction, and our fines are up to 10 cents a day.