National Library Week--April 14 - 20

April 14-20 is National Library Week here in the U.S. I love libraries. The small town I grew up in didn't have any bookstores so the library in our town was very precious to us. Some of my earliest memories are going to the library with my mother. I remember the children's section was in the basement. I was thrilled when I finally came upstairs and looked for books in the adult section! In those days there weren't any young adult books though looking back a lot of the books I read were pretty much young adult--Mary Stewart, Andre Norton and some of Robert Heinlein, for example.

I loved spending a Saturday morning browsing through the adult section at the library. In those days I read a lot of mysteries and science fiction and it was wonderful just to pull books from the shelves and look through them to decide if I wanted to check them out. My mother read a lot, read to me when I was younger and when I was a teenager we read a lot of the same books. It was wonderful for us to go to the library and each check out books and then trade books part way through the two week check out period. Even after I became an adult and moved away we each continued to use libraries and continued to talk about books and share favorite authors.

You can check out the graphic below at this site:

This graphic illustrates how important libraries are today. They have evolved and stayed relevant in this Internet age. I still love to browse the shelves in a library, but today I also check to see if my library is offering e-books or DVDs. When my husband and I travel we often find a library we can go to use the Internet. When we moved to Maryland one of the first things we did was visit the library so we could find out more about the area we were moving to.

What about you? Do you use libraries? Have they been important in your life?