The Importance of Our Library: My Young Adult Perspective

    The other day, I was thinking about how crazy it was that I was approaching five years since I first started volunteering for the library. It was crazy to me that I have been volunteering longer than some people have been working there. I have seen so many different librarians throughout the years, and I can confidently say that, although my volunteering has let me see and work with many different librarians, they all have the goal of bettering the community and almost nothing else. I have seen time and time again how, although the faces may change, they never lose sight of the fact that they are here to serve the community and make it a better place overall. 

    I’ve realized that I can’t understate how important our library is in serving our community. I don’t think there is much I can say that won’t convince you of the library’s importance in our community. Our library continues to create more and more opportunities for connection within our community. One prime example of this is how they started a knitting program just to try and get a small section of our community in the door and get them to build new relationships with our library. Our librarians continue to bring new opportunities to our community to build a stronger relationship with the community.

The library continues to expand and grow the programs that it hosts to try to bring more and more people into the library. The library’s ultimate goal is to help the community, and the single most effective way to do that is to get people into the library and use it as the resource it is meant to be. If people aren’t in the library, then there is no reason to have that library. The library wants people to come in and explore what it has to offer.

To get people in the door, the library tries to throw fun events like getting the Berenstain Bears to come to our small town in order to greet the community. Although the Berenstain Bears coming to Bremen wasn’t necessarily targeted to our Young Adult community, it shows the library cares. The library cares enough to put the time and effort in to get fun characters like the Berenstain Bears into the town just so people start associating the library with the community. The library wants to start associating itself with fun and excitement and less of the boring and mundane that people may unfortunately think when it comes to the library. We rewrite the old age stigma that you can’t find a good time within the confines of a library. 

As you may guess, the library’s quest to involve more and more of the community doesn’t stop with only the adult and children departments, it involves us, the young adults. The library has continued to expand its outreach into getting more and more young adults through the door and start using the library’s resources and to not lose the desire to go to the library. The library tries to create these connections through actions like having me, a fellow young adult in the community they are trying to serve, start writing for the blog in order to show us that they are willing to hear our voices and care about what we have to say. The library also expanded what where we can go by building a dedicated part of the library for a place for our people to be and hang out. The library continues to try to push more and more of the young adult community through the door. 

Even after the library was renovated to give us in the young adult community a dedicated space, the library still strives to provide more for us. As some of you may know, the library recently hired Ryan Calhoun to act as the dedicated young adult librarian. In Ryan’s time here so far, he has created many new programs and clubs built around the interests he sees in the young adult community. 

Coming from a string of different libraries, Ryan has experience when it comes to creating programs for the young adult community. In his time here, Ryan has set up clubs like the anime club that brings in people in our young adult community on every Thursday to watch a predetermined anime each month. Ryan has also done things like create the grapix book club in order to bring more young adults with an interest with graphic novels into the library. All around, people like Ryan try their hardest to bring more people from the community into the library.

If the library, and librarians, weren’t a part of our small community, then our community would be worse off. Some people, young adults especially, don’t have a full view of how important the library is in creating a sense of community. The library has stood strong throughout the years, and it continues to try to bring people together in order to strengthen the sense of community as the community gets larger. This is a major portion of why the library wanted to undergo a huge renovation. The library wants people to see the good that it does, and renovating creates greater opportunities for gathering and grows our feeling of community. The library works for the people and people need to rediscover the fact that the library is here to serve. 

This writing brought to you by BPL Student Advisor, Braden Unruh

Library Renovations: Progress and What We Can Expect Soon

 It is hard to believe it has been nearly 7 months since I first foretold what the library's renovation would bring to the YA community. As the library moves into phase two of the renovation project, I would like to take a journey into the progress we have made thus far and what progress we've made into creating a dedicated space for our YA community.

The first place we'll look at the library's progress is the outside. Over the last couple of months, renovators have been hard at work to create an extension of the library. This new addition of the library comes at the cost of the house the library owned next to us, but this small detail is worth the addition we get to our library.

This extension is where a new meeting space will be. This new addition is also going to be connected by the new YA area and will allow for a lot more options when it comes to the community. The new space will give everyone in the community the chance to meet, and won't be restricted to one age group or another. The outside landscape around the library is in its golden age of change, and it is vastly different from what it looked like at the beginning of the project.

Ad the library continues to grow through its renovation, the outside will be the most telling of what progress we have made.

Another place in the library that has changed greatly since the beginning of the renovations is the downstairs area. From having multiple pieces of hard drywall quartering off the renovations down there, there is now a thin tarp blocking from sight the extent of the progress that has been made. The evolution of the downstairs space has been grueling, but it had to be made so we could reap the true benefits of the renovation.

A prime example of how much the downstairs had changed throughout the entire renovation cycle is how when I first started to take photos for this blog, the front porch downstairs had not been built, but when I started to actually write the blog, the front porch was already completed. The speed that the renovators have when it comes to the library's renovation is impressive. The speed that the children's department has had when it comes to their continual adaptation to the situation is equally impressive in my eyes.

The place that has changed the most, by far, is the adult department. To kick off the renovations, half of the adult department, and the entire YA collection, was moved so that we could start renovations on the first half of the building. If you came into the library within the last 5-6 months, then you have seen a massive, semi-opaque, barrier keeping you confined to one half of the building. This barrier is what kept people from seeing the true progress that was being made, but that barrier is gone now, and you can see what we have done. The biggest addition that came was the completion of the fireplace. Although we thought supply shortages could delay its completion, we managed to get the fireplace done before we moved onto phase 2 of the renovation. For phase 2, the plan is to renovate the staff work area mostly and to let patrons use the other half of the building. We plan to make the other half of the building look as new as the side that is renovated.

And finally, on to the progress on the new YA area. Throughout the entirety of phase 1, the place where the YA area will be, the current non-fiction, has not been touched. This has changed, however, now that we are moving onto phase 2 of the renovations. Now with phase two, we see this area's much needed coronation of it being quartered off. Like the beginning of the downstairs renovation, the YA area is being quartered off by drywall to help mitigate the dust that comes with large scale renovations.

Although this space is currently bare, I believe that by the end of this phase of the renovation, you won't be able to believe that it was ever bare before. You can feel the potential this space has. This, right here, right now, is historical. This is one the stepping stones that will lead to the YA community feeling more involved in the library's everyday activities. This space purely represents opportunity for Young Adults, and me thinking about what can happen when we use this space is very exciting.

We've reached a place in the renovations where we finally are able to start to comprehend what good these renovations can bring to us in our YA community. We now have the opportunity to see, first-hand, what steps are being taken to give us the much needed space we all fee we deserve. When I first started to volunteer, I remember seeing many people in my age group take advantage of the computers at the library in order to unwind after a long day at school. This image of people choosing to go to the library to have fun and keeping away the responsibility of everyday life sticks in my mind to this day.

This image drives my excitement about this new space. Embracing the fact that if people start associating the library with fun and excitement, I feel this new space must be made. We want everyone to enjoy and take advantage of the library, and getting everyone to do so means we should have a space that allows the YA community to meet and have fun. My hope is that creating this space will have a domino effect in the YA community and will encourage more people to come to the library.

The library has always lacked a true space that the YA could take advantage of. Whenever I saw people in my age group having fun at the library, they always had to deal with them either being in the children's department or the adult department - there was never a space where they could just have fun without risking being too loud for the place they were in. This space creates so many possibilities and my only hope is that more people will learn about this space and will take advantage of it in the future.

- This writing brought to you by BPL Student Advisor, Braden Unruh

Library Renovations: New Opportunities to the Young Adults

With Marshall County approving the grant for the library's renovation, there are important questions to ask. "What does this mean for the Young Adults in the Bremen area? What new services/opportunities can Young Adults start looking forward to?"

A big change the renovation brings is the creation of a space dedicated to the Young Adult clientele. This space is one of many new spaces the library plans to create that allows people in the community to gather and not need to be turned away because of space limitations. The great thing about this creation of new spaces is that the Young Adult community will get an entire meeting space to use for their own purposes. As it is currently planned, this Young Adult space will be where the current non-fiction area is. This space will have the library's YA collection, a few computer stations, and a television. This is not the only space the Young Adult community will be able to take advantage of. The library renovation brings three separate smaller study areas, in contrast to having only one larger one now, and an expansion to the media lab. These new study spaces will also bring flexibility. Although they are distinctively three different study spaces, two of these study spaces will have a removable divider, which will allow for these two different smaller study spaces to turn into one bigger study space.

Ask yourself, "As a Young Adult, what is there to do in Bremen on any given day?" Nowadays, an answer to this question is few and far between; there simply isn't much to do that is entertaining to a Young Adult audience. The dedicated YA space will bring many new entertainment opportunities to the Young Adult community. When discussing possibilities for the YA space, the consensus is that there are numerous options when it comes to possible programs the space can host. Programming ideas that have been discussed is using the YA space for programs that are very practical to the Young Adult community. Practical programs would be the SAT prep, trade profession talks, and other educational programs. These practical programs would help the Young Adult community tremendously. 

Of course, this won't be the only thing the space will be used for. Another great idea on using this space for movies to be played on the TV in the space. Mentioned earlier, this new space will have a TV, giving an entire new world of possibilities when it comes to entertainment in this space. Currently, there is no space in the library that has a TV, or larger screen in general, dedicated to any one demographic. This new YA space's TV simply creates so many more opportunities than what the library can currently offer. This TV can be used to play movies or maybe have some game console hooked up to it. In the past, the library has seen how much fun the community can have when playing on a video game console. This community involvement over video game programs like these warrants an exploration of how the Young Adult community might respond if they have access to game consoles in their dedicated space. This TV, paired with the new computers stationed in the space, will be a game changer when it comes to entertainment options the Young Adult community has.

This YA space won't be totally unsupervised. This space will have a librarian stationed near the door, and there will be windows that allows staff a direct line of sight inside the room from their workroom. These steps are taken to ensure that the space is being used appropriately, and to ensure that the people in the space are safe and secure. The idea of this space is to give the Young Adult community of Bremen a safe and fun environment to hang out or make new friends at. This space is being made with the idea of community involvement in mind. When the space gets made, the library wants Young Adults to use the space; the space is made for them. The belief we at the library hold is that if we get the peoples' feet in the door, they will want to stay. This is why the space is being created, to get peoples' feet in the door, and make sure they realize what the library has to offer. So if you are a Young Adult in Bremen when the renovations are done -- optimistically less than a year -- then come down to the space that is, literally, made for you.

"If we create this space, then they will come." - Chris Scandling, Library Director

This writing brought to you by BPL volunteer and Student Advisor, Braden Unruh