Tuesday, September 17, 2024
The Brown County Central Library will celebrate its 50th anniversary with a block party scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 14.
The event will commemorate five decades of the Central Library and its significant role in the
community since the doors of the 515 Pine St. location first opened its doors in 1974.
The event leans into the ‘70s, with attendees encouraged to wear their best ‘70s-themed attire and take advantage of a vintage library photo op station.
Keeping with the 50th anniversary theme, characters Huckle Cat and Lowly Worm from Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, which is also celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, will be in attendance at Saturday’s event, along with the Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Attendees are also invited to take part in a scavenger hunt to explore what’s old and what’s new inside the library.
In regards to what’s new, Central Library Manager Sandy Kallunki said the biggest change to the library and its operations since 1974 has been in the tools available to help the library serve the community.
“One of the biggest changes has been technology,” she said. “Libraries have traditionally been information places where people can go to get access to information on a big variety of topics. Nowadays, a lot of that information is available digitally — sometimes that’s the only way that it’s available. So, over the years, we have shifted to moving towards using technology to provide information to people. People can still call us, they can email us or they can walk in to ask questions. We still have info on a big variety of topics, but we also have technology in the building. We’ve got internet access and computers that the public can use to do their own research, but we also have staff available that can help people use that technology and find reliable sources of information.”
The changes in technology, though, hasn’t impacted the way community members utilize the library, Kallunki said.
“The part of it that hasn’t changed is there we will always have some members of the public that can afford to buy all the books they want and have all the technology for information access that they want, but we will also always have other people in the community who can afford very little of that… Through sharing those resources, whether we’re talking print material or digital material, it really saves them a lot of money and it makes sense to make use of the public library for that purpose… It’s kind of like the traditional [library] concept, but the tools that are used in terms of technology have certainly evolved a lot over the years.”
Looking towards the library’s next 50 years, Kallunki said she would expect the role of the Central Library to remain largely the same, even with the addition of branch libraries throughout the county.
“In Brown County, we’ve been making investments in branch libraries, but also recognize the importance of the Central Library to the downtown area and as a county-wide resource,” she said. “We’re here to support all of those branches so that they don’t need to duplicate everything that we’ve got. That’s one of the benefits of having an integrated county public library system as opposed to each municipality having to duplicate those things… So that role for the Central Library will continue and we are just kind of taking things one step at a time as we evolve and continue to look towards how we can work with other organizations to better serve the community in a collaborative way and work with the branch libraries to serve the community in a collaborative way. How that exactly will look is kind of hard to predict, but the main reason for being will be the same… Like some things are the same and some things are different from 50 years ago, I think 50 years from now it’ll be the same thing — some things will be basically the same but we’ll also have some new things that we really can’t anticipate right now.”
Learn more about the Central Library’s 50th Anniversary Block Party at browncountylibrary.org.
