Why Libraries are Important (to me).

I grew up in libraries. As a toddler I went to story hours. I got my first library card when I was around 6 (before then, I was checking out books on my parents' cards), and by age 8, I was checking out books from the "adult" section. I volunteered in my town library in high school, and later (also in high school) worked there as a Page.

In college, I spent a lot of time in my school's library, researching for papers, finding quiet areas to study. As a young adult living in Boston, the library was my safe haven. It was the place I could go to write. It was the place I could to knit, or participate in community activities (including knitting groups). I have gone for movie nights, and book/author talks, and to see history collections, and art collections. (The Boston Public Library, especially, had a tiny gallery inside.)

When I moved to Pittsburgh, libraries were the first places I sought out. Among the very first people met, before even I started work at the new job and met my co-workers, I went to a knit/crochet group at a local library, one I am still going to at least 3x a month. I will be hosting/DMing an all female D&D group at a local library starting in April. I've hung out to write.

And yes. I check out books. DVDs. CDs. Ebooks. I love inter-library-loan. But a library is not, and never has been, just about the books for me.

Libraries offer that sense of a "third place" for so many; a place that is not your home, and not your work or school, but a third place you can go to relax, to connect (or disconnect, as the case may be), to be part of a community. A library has always been a place of community for me.

Yes, I am also a Librarian for a living. For all the reasons I detailed above. And even as I do not work in a public or academic libraries, the very ones I have sought and seek out continually, I use those resources they offer every single day. In work and in personal research and reading. Through inter-library-loan, I am borrowing theses and papers. In searching catalogs and databases, I am accessing journals.

Regardless, of how you use libraries, they are important. Let's not cut funding for them. Let's not risk this pillar of so many lives and so many communities.