100 Years and Counting!

In just a little under two hours, a celebration will begin in Stockton's Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the partnership between the City of Stockton and San Joaquin County allowing for unified public library services throughout our region. I have the honor of saying a few words on this occasion about the past and the future of our library. Here are my prepared comments for those of you who just wish you could be present but cant...:


What has been the legacy of the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library over the past 100 years? For as long as the libraries throughout this county have been serving our visitors, our libraries have served as a snapshot of our communities. Whether it’s the Troke Library or Ripon, the Thornton Library or Chavez, the people who walk through our doors on a daily basis, to the tune of more than a million visitors each year, come for reasons that are their own.

Some come to the library for a sense of community. They come to meet with others and to enjoy the variety of opportunities present at the library to learn, to pass the time, and to enjoy the community experience.

Some come to the library to satisfy the human need for a good story. We are a place of stories. The library is the place that children have come for more than a century in this country to develop and share a love of reading with their friends and family.

Some come to the library to because of what we have to offer to those who can’t afford luxuries such as books or movies or access to the Internet. They come because libraries are the one place in the community where we all are equals, where we all can share with equality the offerings of our collections.

The future of the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library, I believe, will not be so dramatically different than the Library that has been so beloved by the residents of this community for the past century. Whether you want your library to be a meeting place or a reading place, we will satisfy your need.

Without a doubt, the container may change but the content remains. While our children will grow up to bring their children to story time, they may also grow to think of the library as the place they can freely download all of their reading needs, fiction or fact, right on to the cell phone they go nowhere without.

While the method of interaction may change, the meeting will remain. Our children will continue to know the library as a physical location where they can attend cultural and community building events but they will also know us as a presence online where they can interact with one another through the technologies that develop allowing robust interactions across distances.

My vision of the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library is one in which the residents of this county feel, to a person, that they cannot live without their library and that the people working for the library do everything we can on a daily basis to engender that love of libraries in our community.