How about a picture essay! Let's take a virtual swing around the David A. Howe Public Library in Wellsville, Allegany County, New York--my mother's hometown library and social and intellectual incubator. (Hi, Mom.)
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| The 76-year-old building is full of beautiful architectural touches and accessories. |
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| The spacious reading room and research area is studded with helpful little pamphlets, like this one spelling out the library system's online catalog... |
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| ...and this one about the Dewey Decimal System. I haven't seen a resource in quite this user-friendly format before! Maybe in academic libraries, but not public, in my experience. |
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| A lot of nice 'soft programming' (I just made that up, I think)-- |
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| --invitations to the community to interact with the collection and intellectual material in self-directed, meaningful ways. |
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| The children's room is the heart of the building. Those chairs, that table, the toys and posters...all original from the 30s. What an amazing place to learn to read. |
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| Nice touches of local flavor abound, like this painting in a meeting room showing the famous Wellsville Balloon Rally. |
There are lots of things that make this a perfectly fabulous library. It seems distinctly suited to serving the needs of its community--quiet yet active, with a lot of focus on its sizable print collection (the above photo underscoring the collection of photo books, for instance, or a daily-shifting author birthday display near the front door that shakes occasionally-dusty classics to the top of browsers' considerations). On the other side of things, the Howe seems dedicated to ensuring its patrons come along with its 21st-century advancements through its handy pamphlets and guides to technology. All in all, the building carries a sedate, weighty presence appropriate to its position as a local landmark; and yet there's a vibrancy to the proceedings as well, between its sprightly children's room complete with Batman action figure and the full-size theatre in the basement. My grandmother once staged a full-scale production of an original kids' play there--my earliest experience with some seriously non-traditional library service. (Perhaps I have her and the David A. Howe Library to thank for my interest in such things!)
If you find yourself in the southern Tier, consider taking a look around this great institution. And if that's not in the plan, why not poke around the library website instead?
