A trip to Central Library

    Some of you know me. My name is Art and I'm a Clerk Typist here at the branch. You can usually find me at the circulation desk but I recently went on a field trip. "Where to?" you ask? Well, I went down to Central Library and stopped in to check out Children's Literature. I had such a great time I decided to write about it. I also wanted to share things that I found out with anybody reading this. Check it out.

    Our Children's Librarian, Alicia, called Diane, a librarian in Children's Literature and told her I'd be stopping by. Diane was kind enough to give me a behind the scenes tour when I got there. We started off with the staff workroom. I've only worked in branches so I was in for a big surprise.

These stacks open and close by turning the wheels. I had never seen anything like this. 

There are approximately 235,000 items in Children's Literature. 

 I had never been to "Children's Lit" (as the locals call it) but I've heard many stories. You see my wife's grandfather, Dudley "Willie" Williams, worked in the dept. from 1986-2003 and passed away in 2005 so this was a must stop for me. Diane worked with Willie for many years and had plenty of good stories to tell me about him. She showed me a prop he made for the Saturday puppet shows.

Willie went home one day with an idea and returned to work with this prop the next day. 

Be sure to catch a puppet show here at the KLOS Theater on Saturdays. 

     Diane gave me the heads up on many cool things they offer at Children's Lit like class tours. There were 387 class visits between 2010-2011 which brought 7605 students through the dept. That same year they had a total of 126 programs which brought in another 8,466 people.

     Here's something you might not have known. World Penguin Day is April 25th and in honor of this special day, Children's Lit will be having stories, songs, poems and a puppet show in the KLOS Theater on Saturday, the 21st. How cool is that?

Children's Lit is a beautiful place filled with a awesome book collection and a very nice and helpful staff. I'm so glad I chose to visit (on my day off as a matter of fact). I can't wait to visit again.