It’s National Library Week: Here’s a Few Ideas How to Celebrate

All right, so every year there certain holidays or events that everyone looks forward to. We all know the obvious ones like The 4th of July, Thanksgiving, New Years, etc. Between all of these big holidays though we have holidays that not everyone knows about.

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This leads to today and not just today but all week it is National Library Week. Libraries are such an incredible resource to have and there are numerous ways in which you can celebrate this week.

Starting with the Most Obvious

Probably the most obvious way you can celebrate National Library Week is with doing the most commonly known thing you can do at a library; rent a book. It may sound corny but books and stories really are like portals to different worlds. Whether it's a pop-up book, a famous book series like 'Harry Potter' or 'Game of Thrones' or even a book on science or history, the story will take you to different places or even different times.

See Events Being Held at Your Local Library

When it comes to our libraries, many of them hold numerous events on a weekly basis that are open to anyone and there are events for people of all ages. For example, the local library I have visited the most in my life is the Newburgh Free Library and their schedule is packed with different events nearly every day.

On their website they had everything listed from movie screenings, to Dungeons & Dragons night's and even coding classes. It should be mentioned though that many of these events do require that you register for them whether that registration is ahead of time or in person will vary.

In addition to events being held at individual libraries, each day for National Library Week is also dedicated to something specific each day. Today for example is 'Right to Read Day'. This day marks the one year anniversary of the American Library Association starting the 'Unite Against Book Bans' campaign. The organization will be releasing a list of the top 10 most 'challenged' books from 2022 and examine why it was these books faced the backlash they did.

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Libraries Aren't Just For Books

In today's day and age libraries have had to come up with new different ideas and have had to shown some ingenuity in getting citizens to continue to walk through the door. Some of the events listed before are evidence to that ingenuity and many other libraries have their own events that they run which aim to accomplish the same thing.

One of the greatest pieces of adapting with the times that was seen recently is this new concept called the "Library of Things". It is a concept based on libraries foundation of renting books but in this case it's not books that are being rented but a variety of different items or tools for anyone to use and then return.

Previously I'd written about the Newburgh Free Libraries version of the Library of Things (which you can read here) and was shocked at the types of items they had available. Simple items like a cake pan for baking could be had but other items like a movie projector and even different gaming systems were also available to rent. With that said though, if someone where to rent something and not return it within the allotted time frame, that individual would be subject to fines and then even buying the item outright if they had it for an excessively long time.

In today's day and age we as people have gotten very comfortable with the feelings of immediate gratification and the fact that we have phones that are basically supercomputers that can get us practically anything we want, whenever we want it. That being said though, there is something special about going to a library and being surrounded by a wealth of information at your fingertips that can't be replicated by just using your phone.