the National Medal for Museum and Library Services is the nation's highest
honor for libraries and museums that are serving their communities and
exceptional ways now to read a public library director Paul Palladino and
community member jamie Fulbright traveled to Washington from not a rita
colorado to receive the national medal and spoke to IMLS about how the library
impacts the community our community in nat arena is very small there's 546
people very very small and most people come to the library for internet
purposes job searching it's the gathering place for the community it's
situated right centrally in town and across the street from the elementary
school the post office and the grocery store so people come into town to do all
of their business and connect with the library as well when we were looking for
sites proximity to to the center of town was important we actually purchased an
old auto parts store and with the intent of using it but turned out that we had
to scrape the site and build the building entirely from scratch the old
library was less than 500 square feet the new libraries 4400 it has a meeting
room they had one computer before they have six for the public now it's used
constantly I mean this is an area that has twenty percent of the people don't
have phone service of any kind so of course they don't have you know more
don't have internet access this is their only access to the outside world my job
at the library I'm a youth services librarian so I actually do the program
for the literacy for little ones it's that the early literacy for small
children age zero through five we focus on reading
writing playing and we really have this great method it's called pyramid method
we keep our friends safe ourselves safe and our things safe I really like the
children's programming because when my kids are there they don't even they
don't realize they're learning they're just having fun Jamie's early literacy
program really it's designed on a national program every child ready to
read that came out of the American Library Association a number of years
ago we use stories we use literature to teach concepts such as writing letter
recognition and color recognition and studies keep showing that it's very
important that children from birth to age three is when their brains are
really the most receptive and they're they're the most formative so part a big
part of the program and a big part of what Jamie does is she teaches the
parents how to interact with their kids and how to teach their kids so parents
can then go home and work with their kids throughout the week I feel it's
very important to involve children and parents in the program it's kind of
reinforcing so the kids don't forget what they've learned and it's just
reinforcing it throughout the week so that they come back with oh this is what
we did last week and we're going to transition into this this week and
having the parents back that is just amazing we do a wonderful summer reading
program and throughout the year the older kids have programming to during
the week because we don't have school on Fridays
because the school district couldn't afford it so we kind of stepped up and
provided programming on Fridays for children to get the extra education
Friday programming is geared for ages 2nd grade through 8th grade and we do
gear towards reading math science any anywhere that we see in the school that
they need extra help were there to put it in the library does play a huge part
in our community that's our circulation of books has went up two hundred and six
percent we've issued 800 new library cards and that's more people than we
have in our community so people from outside of our area are coming to our
library as well libraries like other public institutions are suffering for
resources but we're we're managing to grow and to put money into creative and
finding niches to fill and focusing all of our efforts on on what works and what
improves the lives of our customers and they come back and they support us