2023-24 Successes and Fall Plans
Well, with Summer ending and the school year once again on the horizon, your Library is hard at work shifting gears to our Fall plans.
Not that we didn’t have a very good summer! We had a great time at the Garrett County Fair meeting people (over 2,300 of them!), giving things out with our prize wheel, and having conversations about the cool things the Library does for everyone - like I say, no matter who you are or what you like there’s something for you at the Library. We also had a great Summer Reading Club full of events involving birds, reptiles, horses, rock climbing, cooking, gardening, nighttime critters (thanks Kevin Dodge!) - and, of course, books for all of the above and more! We’ve got a lot planned this fall as well on top of our Storytime events, Lego Club, book clubs and STEAM Kids activities for younger folks, and book clubs, needlecraft groups, Mahjongg, “Let’s Talk” discussion series and board gaming for adults.
The Library’s fiscal year has ended as well, and it’s at this time each year that we look back on our statistics to see how effective our efforts are - and we had a heck of a year! We offered 1,144 programs over this year - up over 57% from the year before - and saw over 29,000 people participate - up over 91%! This is partially due to the big increases across the board in our Summer Reading participation in 2023, where we doubled the number of programs offered and had 60% more people come overall, with 27% more signups than the previous year. Two new partnerships also made a huge difference this year. The County (thanks to the leadership of Cheryl DeBerry and Nathaniel Watkins) acquired a grant enabling us to distribute Chromebooks free to income-qualified households in the community – initial response was staggering at our distribution events and we continued to give them out over the course of the year, a role we were proud to fill. We also began a very productive partnership with the Maryland Food Bank, serving as host sites for their Mobile Market in Grantsville and Friendsville. Our Hoopla and Palace apps are seeing heavy use, with 15.8% more people checking out e-books this year – and yes, our paper book checkouts are up as well, as Garrett County is very much a community of readers! Best of all, we also saw over 1,200 new library cards made this year and are proud and honored to be reaching so many folks throughout the communities that make up the County!
Our digitization project continues, with the vast majority of Northern High School and Southern High School’s yearbooks now available, as well as Garrett County’s Vacation Guides dating back to the 1950s – all thanks to partnerships with Garrett County Public Schools, the Garrett County Historical Society and the Deep Creek Lake Property Owners’ Association. Visit our website and see them for yourself!
It is also the time of year when we celebrate the “One Maryland, One Book” event put on annually by Maryland Humanities, where a title is selected for state-wide book discussion. This year’s title is “What Storm, What Thunder” by Myriam J. A. Chancy, and it’s a real eye-opener that tells the story of a wide array of personalities dealing with a catastrophic event - the real life 2010 earthquake that leveled large parts of Haiti, killing a quarter million people. It’s a hard-hitting book that encompasses survival, loss, despair, new beginnings and peoples’ ability (or inability) to cope with all of these things. Stop by your local branch and sign up for a discussion and you can get a copy for yourself to keep!
There’s a lot of excitement in the air, too, with some major projects making great progress! Thanks to the Master Gardeners and our own Diane, Kitzmiller Library now has an awesome Community Garden for people to enjoy. The Friends of the Library started a scholarship for both high schools awarding graduating seniors interested in Library-adjacent careers. And, of course, the Friendsville Library continues to progress – design is completed, bidding is open, and we look forward to groundbreaking this October. In the meantime, we’ll be sharing quarters with the generous folks at the Senior Center at our usual hours!
