Library fosters learning

Some people say, why should the library be a community center? We don’t need it. But it’s not a community center — it’s a community center of learning. And we do need it.

There’s something uniquely stimulating about standing in a room, surrounded on all sides floor to ceiling by books, their titles and pictures jumping out at you. I feel it. My kids feel it. Each of the three of them has their own library card. As a family we checked out probably a hundred books in 2017. Some of these we took a chance on because they grabbed our imagination in the library lobby. Others we requested specifically through the Mid-York Library inter-library loan system.

My youngest, at 5 years old, loves being able to pick out whatever she wants from the children’s room without having to ask her mom and dad for once. And she’s not alone. There were almost 57,000 items checked out of the library in 2016 — more than 156 per day. Kids in the OPL district made more than 2,500 visits to the summer reading program — more than the 1,500 summer reading visits to the Cazenovia library or the 1,350 summer reading visits to the Rome library. All this while the OPL has the lowest cost per population of any library in the area.

The library holds hundreds of programs each year for children and adults such as story hours, concerts, a Lego robotics camp, and book clubs. These are opportunities for inspiration as well as education, many of them that parents or grandparents and children can do together — and it’s all free to use. That’s important in our district, which is 54 percent economically disadvantaged.

The Oneida Public Library is a vital, vibrant center of learning in our community. I urge everyone to vote yes on the library operating budget on Tuesday March 6.