Winter is a notoriously slow time for events and activities, but there is one exception: your local library.
The public perception of libraries as stodgy, boring, whisper-quiet dead zones for book geeks is all wrong. If you haven’t set foot in a library in years, you honestly don’t know what you’ve been missing. Modern public libraries are a best-kept secret in terms of free resources to entertain and educate you and your family, as well as engage with your local community.
Libraries aren’t good at marketing. They don’t have budgets to advertise their offerings. Their online presence is typically rudimentary. Their social-media activity is straightforward. In a digital world, there’s a sense that libraries have fallen behind. Books? They’re so 20th century.
In reality, this attitude is patently incorrect. Not only have libraries adapted to the digital age, they are thriving in it. And to say that libraries are about books and not much else only means you haven’t been to a library in a while.
Don’t take my word for it. Just head down to your local library, sign up for a free library card and their email list, and you will soon see why the public library might just be the smartest expenditure of tax dollars in the 21st century.
If you’re still unmotivated to visit, allow me fill in the marketing gap with the top six reasons to visit one of the 21 libraries in Ulster County:
Libraries are much more than books
I had to put this point first because I know there are a lot of folks out there that simply don’t read that many books. No judgment.
Maybe you’re more of a magazine or newspaper reader. Libraries have a ton of subscriptions to both local and national publications. Each one basically contains a free newsstand. Why pay ridiculous prices for magazines that are full of paid advertisements? Spend 30 minutes at your local library every month reading only the good stuff, and you just saved serious bank.
Oh, you prefer comics, graphic novels, manga, that sort of thing? Librarians haven’t ignored the massive visual storytelling trend taking place in youth and young-adult culture. You might be surprised to find a whole comic shop’s worth of releases at your local library.
Maybe you’re not much of a reader at all. Well, books aren’t all reading. There’s cookbooks, indoor gardening guides, activities, games … books aren’t just for cozying up to on a winter’s day. Some are gateways to real-world activities that don’t involve much reading at all.
The printed word may be the backbone of libraries, but their beating heart is their event calendars. The larger the library, the more events, with some offering multiple things to do every day of the week.
Our local libraries are important spaces for free public events, and you’d be surprised at how much is on offer these days: Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, guitar lessons, yoga, crafting, board games, video games, LEGOs, knitting, tech support, meditation and networking, to name a few. Book clubs and story hours still abound, but local libraries have really gone out of their way to offer a multitude of things to do for every age group and interest.
And don’t forget the DVDs and CDs. Sure, they’re easy to overlook in the streaming era, but they’re free! Our area libraries are stocked up on the most popular releases.
There’s an app for that
The myLIBRO app is perhaps the single most exciting innovation to happen to the local public library system in the last decade.
On the surface, it seems obvious: Why wouldn’t there be an app you could use to search for and reserve books? Remember, we’re talking about a publicly-funded entity here. It’s no small task to digitally catalog all the books, keep track of where they are, and easily allow users to search through hundreds of thousands of titles.
Is the myLIBRO app as slick as Google? No, it’s fairly rudimentary. Though it has its fair share of glitches, it works well enough to perform what feels like a magic trick: Search for a book, reserve the book, and it will be waiting for you to pick up when you next visit the library. The magic also works with digital books and resources.
Do you hear that, Dewey Decimal System? We don’t need ya anymore!
Your local library is actually over 66 libraries
The myLIBRO app fits book-in-dust jacket with the Mid-Hudson Library System (MHLS), a network of over 66 libraries across our region, all pooling their catalogs that come together like Voltron to form a mega-library to which the public has full and free access.
With so many libraries at your disposal, there’s a really good chance you’ll find what you’re looking for. The MHLS simply blew my mind when I discovered it. Why doesn’t everyone know about this? Through your local Ulster County library, you can take out books from dozens of libraries across our area. This is a game-changer.
Libraries are a life hack for cash-strapped parents
My local library (Kingston Library) literally changed my life as a parent. With a voracious young reader in the house (and two avid adult readers), we have saved – no joke – over $10,000 on taking books out from the public library versus buying them. Of course, I don’t have that kind of money to buy books (I write articles on public libraries, after all). But the library has enabled me to act as though I can afford any and all books I want, and our child has benefited tremendously from having tens of thousands of books to choose from, with no limit.
But again, the library isn’t just books. There are computers for kids to play games on and use the Internet, the aforementioned DVDs and CDs for entertainment (there’s typically a whole kid’s section), and plenty of special activities and events are provided.
Whether you pop in and out, saving thousands, or take an hour or two to hang out, parents should always have the local library in their boredom-fighting, life-enriching arsenal.
Knowledge is power
What’s your screen time looking like lately?
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Libraries are unpopular in large part because they struggle to compete with smartphones, streaming video, and video games.
There’s just one catch – knowledge of who won the latest season of Survivor is not power. Knowledge of how to defeat the final boss of a role-playing game is not power. The kind of knowledge that equals power doesn’t come exclusively in books by any means, but it is where it is concentrated.
Don’t take my word for it. Most people who succeed wildly in their goals are at least in part propelled by reading books relevant to their pursuits. The simple act of focusing one’s mind like a sponge to soak up information related to what you’re looking to do in life – even if that’s escaping into a world of fiction – has little rival to books, even in the digital age. Artificial intelligence will increasingly challenge and ultimately usurp the ultimate power of the book to impart knowledge, but at least for now, books are perhaps the best way to access new realms of possibility within your life.
You don’t have to read every word
Here’s something I learned too late in life: You don’t have to read a book cover to cover. In fact, most of the time it’s not even a good idea, and it might be why lots of people dislike reading books.
I didn’t realize this until I became a regular library user. When you’re getting every book for free, suddenly the pressure is off with regard to reading it. Don’t like the first few pages? Who cares? Put the book down and move on to the next one. The library will let you take out huge stacks of books.
Buy, borrow or be gifted a book and you’re instantly under pressure to enjoy it. Having this freedom to acquire as many books as you want enables you to read only as much of each book as makes sense. It saves you time and allows you to experience a greater variety of authors and styles.
And if you’re feeling ambitious about saving even more time, look into learning the basics of speed reading. Just by watching a few YouTube videos on the subject, you can develop skills to not just read more quickly, but to read at hyper-speed.
This is particularly great for non-fiction enthusiasts like myself who will often encounter passages that are already familiar or somewhat irrelevant. Speed-reading through those pages allows for basic comprehension of the material while advancing at ten times your normal reading speed. You can always slow down if something catches your eye.
Whether you’re reading selectively or speedily, the library enables both more than any other resource on the planet.
For information and to get your free library card, visit discover.midhudsonlibraries.org.
Join the family! 
