What’s happening this week
 Tuesday at 6:30 pm Recipe Swap – Join us for Recipe Swap and share your favorite recipe with fellow patrons who share your passion — cooking! Every month is a different theme! This month’s theme is “Mexican Food”.
- Tuesday at 6 pm Storytime – If you can’t make it to the morning storytime on Thursday, you can come to the evening Tuesday one instead.
- Thursday at 11:15 am Storytime – Listen to stories, sing songs, and do a craft. Storytimes are open to children of all ages.
- Friday at 2:00 pm Movie Day – There is no school on Friday, so come to the library to watch a fun movie with your friends. Enjoy free popcorn and lemonade.
- Saturday at 1:00 pm El día de los niños / El día de los libros (Children’s Day / Book Day) – Make a craft, listen to stories, and play games! Plus, take a book home to keep! Sign up on our website at http://lmlibrary.libcal.com/event/3263765
 El día de los niños / El día de los libros (Children’s Day / Book Day) is a nationally recognized celebration that emphasizes the importance of literacy for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
Drawing Contest
Teens, don’t forget to turn in your entries for the drawing contest. Entries are due this Friday.
Create your own manga or anime character to enter the contest. Drawing, painting, and other methods are welcome, but you can only use one sheet of paper. Write your name, age, and phone number on a separate sheet of paper. Only one entry per person.
Either bring your artwork to the front desk of the library, or you can mail it to the library. Prizes will be awarded, and winners will be announced at our annual Comic-Con on May 6.
Join our Friends
The Friends of the Liberal Memorial Library is a volunteer organization dedicated to the active promotion and support of the Liberal Memorial Library.
Among other things, the Friends group holds two large book sales every year. They were able to raise more than $500 from the annual Spring Book Sale held earlier this month.
One of the benefits of becoming a member of the Friends group is the chance to shop early and get first choice of anything in the book sale.
It costs just $5.00 a year for an individual to become a member and $10.00 a year for a family membership.
As an added incentive to becoming a Friend of the Library, the Friends group offers free G-Suite (Google Apps) accounts to its current members, courtesy of Google for Nonprofits. These Services include Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Drive, Docs and more. Each account includes 30GB of storage space for use with Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos.
Now it’s easier than ever to become a friend of the library. On the Friends website http://friends.lmlibrary.org, you can fill out a membership application and pay your annual membership dues online. The Friends website now accepts debit, credit, and PayPal payments for membership dues and donations.
Membership Form
Contact Us
Friends of the Library
c/o Liberal Memorial Library
519 N Kansas Ave
Liberal KS 67901
One of the fun things about my first year of being director here at the Liberal Memorial Library is watching the rebirth of our Friends of the Liberal Memorial Library group. Established long ago, the group had dwindled in membership, and as with most groups you lose a couple of key people and it gets hard to keep things together.
Friends groups are an excellent way for community members who want to volunteer or give back to the library to participate in the energy that the library generates. Friends are wonderful advocates for what is going on at the library and spreading the message about what the current library has to offer. As advocates they are essential. As I am oft to say, as employees we get paid to make sure the library is an awesome place, as trustees we are appointed to make sure the library is awesome place, but friends volunteer to make the library an awesome place. They give of their time and money to bring about enhancements and to fund special projects that are not always in our budget.
In my first meeting with the Library Board it became a topic of discussion that we would like to see the Friends group up and going. So we set about the task of making it happen. Luckily even without a club being active, the previous director had kept the group’s tax status in place and the group still had an active savings account. Now just to find the people!
We sent out invitations, printed up brochures, and began pounding the pavement looking for members. Within a few short months we had a small nucleus of people willing to put the time and effort into getting the group off the ground. A big thanks to Sheila Wells and Amy Thompson for their effort in this regards. With their help and enthusiasm our friends group is now up to about 50 members.
With the Friends group in place it was decided that what we needed was a project that would help the community. The first project that the Friends of the Liberal Memorial Library has taken on is called “A Baby’s Bookshelf.” The idea behinds A Baby’s Bookshelf is that parents who have recently had a child can come into the library every two months for two years and pick up a free book for their child. At the end of the two years they would theoretically have 12 books. Studies show that having physical contact with books and reading materials greatly increase the chances that a child will learn to read at an early age. The books that we purchase through money generated by the activities of the Friends touch on the different aspects of pre-literacy skills that positively position children to learn how to read.
The Friends group has two avenues of generating income to fund these special projects. The first is through membership dues. At $5.00 for individuals and $10.00 for families this is a pretty good deal. Just one individual membership in the Friends group helps to purchase two books for the baby’s bookshelf project. Our second big fund raiser is our Annual Book Sale in April. This takes place each year during National Library Week. The benefit of being a Friend during the book sale is you get to shop the night before everyone else.
That is just a sampling of who the friends are, what we do, and the ways they enrich the community. If you are interested in being a Friend of the Liberal Memorial Library, please stop by the library and ask for Royce, or go online at our website www.lmlibrary.org and click on the Friends tab, or follow us on Facebook at: Friends of the Liberal Memorial Library.
Whew! We did it! Or more importantly you did it. 2015 Summer Reading is officially in the books. The library hasn’t quite yet put all the numbers together, but it looks like we had another record breaking year in terms of program attendance and the number of finished reading logs turned in.
I want to take a quick minute and say thank you to our staff that put together an awesome childrens and young adults line-up. We left no stone unturned in providing what was a great summer reading gauging by the smiles on the faces of our participants. Library staff did an awesome job of improvising on the spot and doing what needed to be done to make sure things went off as planned. A good example of this is when a performer failed to show up and our Assistant Director Tammy gave an impromptu program on dog training.
This summer reading season also saw the library being a site for the Summer Food Program through the USDA and USD 480. Not only were we able to nourish kids minds but their stomachs as well. For the library it also meant a chance to reach more patrons and to tell people about library programs and services. The program continues through July 24th. An important thing to remember about the Summer Food Program is that the emphasis is on providing a child with a nutritious lunch. It is not dependent on income level or qualifying for any particular program. You come in, get a lunch, and eat up. That’s it.
 In a month of highlights it is hard to pick out just a few moments to talk about but there are a few that stand out. My personal favorite was the Southern Pioneer Power Van.
Usually when you see someone working on a utility pole you understand how dangerous it is, but aren’t really aware of just how dangerous. Watching the people from Southern Pioneer show us electrical arcing on a dummy drove the point home. If the crackling of the high voltage wasn’t enough to scare the wits out of you, the hot dogs they fried with that energy was a good lesson. Leave those power cables alone.
Another favorite moment was when Darth Vader once again visited the library. I mean. C’mon. How cool is it that Darth Vader has been in the library twice this year so far? The young adults were treated to a chance to sit down with a gentleman who portrays Darth Vader for local functions and at conventions around the area. He talked about making his own custom costume and what it takes to immerse oneself in the role. Plus, for those who stuck around they got to make light sabers.
In this moment of reflection, I want to take a moment and thank our Friends of the Library. They provided gift certificates and prizes for our summer reading programs and it was much appreciated. My favorite part was calling people to let them know they had won something. The Friends of the Library do a lot for the library and they make programs like Summer Reading even more exciting.
Last but not least, I want to thank you the library patron and community member. Part of what makes a successfully summer reading program is people taking the time out of a busy summer to attend programs at the library. Just as important is people in the community realizing we have such a program and sending their summer visitors over to participate. We have quite a few kids from out of town whose grandparents brought them down to the library during June.
Once again thanks. We take a bit of a rest in July, but not by much. We will return to our regular storytimes and will also be offering programs and don’t forget our Friday Movies at 2pm the rest of the summer.
See you at your library.
New Year, New things going on at Library
With the New Year comes many new things going on in the library. Starting Tuesday, January 20th the library will start afterschool programming for kids from 4pm-5pm, Monday through Thursday. Activities will include computer programming, video production, audio recording, creating comics and a variety of other crafts and hands-on learning opportunities. These activities will take place in what we are now calling The Learning Center and is accessible via a walkway from the main part of the library. The Learning Center will also be developing computer classes for adults during the day and providing meeting space when not being used for classes or afterschool programming.
The library has a long history of community participation through the Friends of the Library group which was fairly active up until about ten years ago. Back in September of 2014 we started making plans to get that group going again and thanks to the help of a couple of local volunteers we will be hosting our first Friends Meeting on Thursday, January 22nd at 6:30pm in the library. This first meeting will be a formative meeting to talk about what the Friends group hopes to achieve, election of officers, and other topics of interest. Consider putting this on your calendar if you would like to become more involved in volunteer activities at the library.
Thanks to a grant from the Cooper-Clark Foundation, the library is excited to announce that we are in the beginning stages of installing a digital microfilm station in our genealogy section located in the lower level of the library. The beauty of this machine will be allowing genealogists to search our historical newspapers stored on microfilm with greater efficiency and accuracy. The digital microfilm station will allow users to email documents and to store information on a personal data stick or portable storage. Software included in the microfilm station will also assist users in searching for information without having to read each page in its entirety. We have a librarian on staff who is an expert on these genealogy resources so please stop in and talk to us about getting started with your family tree or family history.
The last thing I want to talk about today is not a new service or new device, but the library itself and our service to the community. As we all know, things got pretty cold in town the past few weeks. The library is a great place for those people who want a nice warm place to warm up. We offer some comfy furniture and we also check out laptops and have plenty of Wi-Fi to help you pass the time. We even have a book or two that you can check out.
If you have any questions about library services or programs, please stop by the library, check us out online at lmlibrary.org, or give us a call at 620-626-0180.
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