Friday, December 21, 2007

Highland County Public Library E-Newsletter December 2007

As 2007 winds down I wanted to share with you some of the highlights of the year at the library.

Our local author’s series has been a great success. We’ve had book readings and signings by Donald McCaig, Will Crisp, Paul Klein and Will Vaus. We look forward to continuing the series in the future. We welcome anyone in Highland County with a book being published to contact us and let us know.

Our Summer Reading Program was hugely successful. We had the most kids sign up ever. There were ninety-three participants. Attendance at the programs was also at record levels. Some of the wonderful programs we offered included a return engagement from Puppets With Pizzazz, live animals from the Wildlife Center of Virginia, storyteller Susan Clark, and a visit from Pat Sheridan, District Ranger from the Warm Springs Ranger District. We also offered a weekly film series with free popcorn and drinks which was very popular.

In July of this year patrons of the library set a record in the number of items checked out of the library. We had 3100 items checked out. We’ve also had record numbers of people using the computers this year, and those numbers don’t even cover the number of people who use Wi-Fi with their laptops in the library.

Our book sale in October was a great success too. We raised $4300 and offered tens of thousands of books for sale. We’ve concluded that we have plenty of books to sell, what we need is more people to come buy them. We’ll be working extra hard on getting the word out about our little gem of a sale next year.

Some improvements to the building have been made. We’ve replaced our old water fountain with a new, wheel chair accessible water fountain. We also replaced our old furnace, which had given us twenty good years, but was on its way out. In our computer section we replaced two internet access computers with new computers running the Windows Vista operating system.

All of the good things that happen at this library are due to the people who support it, by using it, by giving us their time, or by contributing money. We’d like to thank all the volunteers who help make this library the wonderful place that it is. We’d also like to thank the community organizations that helped us out this year, including the Monterey Lions Club, the Monterey Garden Club, the Highland Homemakers, the Highland Arts Council, the Mill Gap Ruritans, the Monterey Presbyterian Church, the Highland County Volunteer Fire Department, WVLS Allegheny Mountain Radio, and Marty Leech’s Civics class. Finally, we’d like to thank the Highland County Board of Supervisors, who recognize the value of the library and the services we provide.

If you’ll have some time on your hands after the Christmas rush passes we have some great new titles at the library for you to check out. We have Sue Grafton’s “T is for Trespass,” Nora Roberts’s “Creation in Death,” Denis Johnson’s “Tree of Smoke,” Dean Koontz’s “The Darkest Evening of the Year,” Diane Ackerman’s “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” Frank Delaney’s “Tipperary,” and the last two books in Conn Iggulden’s Emperor series “Field of Swords” and “The Gods of War.” In non-fiction we have two new biographies, Eric Clapton’s “Clapton, the Autobiography” and Steve Martin’s “Born Standing Up.”

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