The Multi-Faceted Culpeper County Library

Culpeper Chamber of Commerce

Business Article

Culpeper Star Exponent

March 23, 2015

My mother-in-law, the late Alcidie Stohlman, was an avid reader.  She always had a stack of books sitting on a shelf next to her reading chair waiting to reveal their stories.  Having grown up during the great depression, she learned to rely on her neighborhood library to satisfy her insatiable "guilty pleasure".  Weekly visits to the library were the norm throughout her entire life. She was quick to point out that she had travelled the globe, visited the most inaccessible of places, and carried out conversations with many of the world’s famous and infamous -- simply by turning pages.  She was quick to exclaim that "My ‘library book shelf’ (as she called it) could never support my passion for books!”

I consulted Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as I was drafting this week’s column to find a definition. I’m sure you have a mental image of that book if you have attained a certain chronological advancement in life, but this time I used the online version found on the Culpeper Library’s website, www.cclva.org.  Merriam-Webster defines “library” as “a place in which literary, musical, artistic, or reference materials are kept for use but not for sale”. Certainly this is a traditional definition that my mother-in-law’s generation would have considered accurate.  But does it truly reflect the mission of a modern 21st century “library” such as what we have here in Culpeper?

I’ve had the pleasure of serving on the board of directors for the Friends of the Culpeper Library.  During my tenure, I learned that the widely used and simple definition of “library” is far too narrow to fully describe the programs available to Culpeper’s residents through our local library.  In addition to the 400,000 books checked out in 2014 over 9,100 people participated in a wide range of adult and children’s programs and more than 33,000 people took full advantage of the internet and computers available without charge. Recently, our library completed a renovation project which added additional study rooms, computer terminals, and improved their used book store.

21st century libraries are more than just book repositories.  They are important to the quality of life in any community and are another ingredient in the virtual gumbo called economic development.  Locally, the Culpeper County Library supports students, assists job-seekers with connection to potential employers, while transporting armchair travelers to far-flung and exotic places.  Our library also helps us understand and appreciate the rich diversity of the region we call home through the breadth and depth of the available programs.

We have quite the resource here in Culpeper. I recommend you stop in sometime soon to explore the library’s offerings.  My mother-in-law would surely endorse it’s quality, and as I see it, that says a lot.  I’m also pretty sure she’d be asking my father-in-law to build her another “library book shelf” next to her reading chair.