By Jill Fuller
Every week, a group from St. Coletta’s of Wisconsin gathers around the tables and on the couches in the Jefferson Public Library, reading and checking out books.
“Their visit is one of my favorite parts of my week,” said Julia Birch, a librarian at the library. “Their smiles and conversations are emblematic of what the library is to a community: a place for gathering.”
As author Zadie Smith once wrote, “What a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.”
While so much has gone digital these days, the value of free spaces to connect with those who live and work alongside us is crucial to the success of our communities. Libraries are one of the few physical places that offer this opportunity in our society. A work-from-home spot. A teen hangout space. A study room. These physical areas are as necessary as the books on the shelves.
The examples abound. At the Dwight Foster Public Library in Fort Atkinson, local organizations including a veteran’s support group, Women’s Club, scouts, 4-H, and more all use the library’s meeting room to get together. A student Rocketry Club in Jefferson had no place to meet on Saturdays until they started gathering at the Jefferson Public Library. Madison Area Technical College uses meeting space at the Karl Junginger Memorial Library in Waterloo to work with local migrant Latinx workers who are studying for their GED tests.
Ensuring that busy and often historic buildings are accessible for library users on a tight budget is an ongoing concern for library staff. In the last few years, public libraries in the Bridges Library System have completed accessibility scans to determine barriers to access.
“Libraries are for people,” said Angela Meyers, Inclusive Services Coordinator of the Bridges Library System, “and we must ensure we are doing everything we can to make them readily accessible to everyone.”
The Watertown Public Library building went through an extensive transformation in the last year. Besides the new Talk Read Play Center, study rooms, and teen gaming space, the library provides office space to Watertown Family Connections, a non-profit that connects families to essential resources.
When it comes to the impact of physical library spaces, quality matters just as much as quantity. It truly is the individual stories of how and why people come to the library that mean the most. In the past two years, more young adults have been using the Dwight Foster Public Library as a work-from-home spot, to the point where monthly Wi-Fi use has quadrupled.
According to library director Eric Robinson, one patron “thanked us repeatedly for having space and Wi-Fi for him to work, as working from home is challenging with small children. At one point he was concerned about losing his job because of slow performance when he had to work from his home.”
Thankfully, he had the library.
Jill Fuller is marketing and communications librarian at the Bridges Library System, of which public libraries in Jefferson and Waukesha counties are members.
Jill Fuller
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