New little library opens in Garland County

The Cutter Morning Star Administration Building is now home to the Garland County Library’s newest lending library, an exchange system where books are free to give or take.

The Garland County Library has two other lending libraries, located in Jessieville and near Mountain View Heights, where both children and adults are encouraged to pick up books. Butch Smith, the library’s design and facilities manager, said the little library will be registered and placed on the Little Free Library map.

The Little Free Library is a nonprofit organization with over 100,000 little libraries worldwide. There are eight other little libraries shown on the map in Hot Springs.

The goal of these little libraries is to promote reading throughout the community. The CMS branch has around 30 books intended for various age groups. No library card is required to pick out a book from the little library and it’s open 24 hours every day.

“It works a little bit differently than a regular library in that you just keep it,” Smith said. “If you really fall in love with it, give it to your friends and let them read it and just pass it around.”

“If it takes you a month to read it, then so be it,” said Heather Slay, the media specialist at Cutter Morning Star High School. “If you didn’t like it, bring it back and get something new.”

Slay said she became interested in little libraries after reading about them in an issue of Library Journal. She then got in touch with the Garland County Library and requested to have a little library set up near the school.

She said one of the big reasons for this little library was to make books more accessible to students, especially when the school is closed.

“It’s very visible from the street,” she said. “Parents could cruise up here even on the weekend, pick up a book, take it home and have something for their kids to read.”

Smith said the Garland County Library will stop by and fill up the little library every once in a while. He said he usually puts as many books as he can fit into the little library’s box.

“The one we put up in Jessieville was our first one and after about a month, we kind of came back and checked on it again and it was completely full of books and absolutely none of them were any of the ones that we had originally put in there,” he said.

Smith said The Friends of the Garland County Library, a nonprofit organization focused on increasing library services, donated the funds that help provide the little libraries.

The Garland County Library has three little libraries for now, but Smith said they were working on establishing more, and plan to put one in Buckville next.

“We’re hoping to put a really large one out there,” he said.

The Little Free Library map can be found at littlefreelibrary.org or on the downloadable app called Little Free Library.