Ah, the library

Thursday, March 11, 2010

And you thought the Merrimack Public Library was just about books or CDs or DVDs.

Ha.

At the height of our most recent power outage, the library was all about helping the community.

As our Hattie Bernstein wrote, the library “was transformed into a shelter, community center and library all rolled into one.”

And many of you used it as a place to get some coffee and stay warm. Fantastic.

A library can be the hub of a community, but in these days of the Internet and the Kindle, too many of us forget it’s there until we get a chance to vote against a warrant item for library funding of one kind or another. It’s a sad reality that technology has rendered libraries almost an afterthought.

Need some information? Hit Google.

Need a book? Buy a Kindle.

But libraries are more than just things. Libraries are people and that was manifestly evident during the power outage. Hey, the people who developed the Kindle didn’t provide you with hot coffee, and Google didn’t provide you with Internet access. The people who run the library did that.

As Bernstein wrote, Joanne Marston, the library’s administrative assistant, said officials began planning for the next power outage following the December 2008 ice storm.

Marston told our reporter, “Once we got our power back, we met and asked ourselves, ‘What could we have done differently to help the public?’ We wanted to be a central place for e-mails, paying bills and more.”

Well, they succeeded, that’s for sure.

And we shouldn’t be surprised. The whole idea of a library is “helpful” in concept. Before the Internet, it was to the reference librarian that we turned for help in writing term papers, for instance. People don’t become librarians because they like to sit in a warm building and ignore the public. The library is, in essence, a service industry and people who become librarians understand that serving is a great part of what they do.

Well, they did it again during the power outage and they deserve our thanks.