3mo ago

My wife has been working for years on opening a new branch library in our town of Terre Haute, Indiana. It finally opened! Here is an image gallery. It might not be what you would expect.

imgur.com The new Vigo County Public Library 12 Points Branch

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered entertainment destination. Lift your spirits with funny jokes, trending memes, entertaining gifs, inspiring stories, viral videos, and so much more from users.

This is a branch library in one of the poorer parts of an already depressed town, so they are wanting to use it as more of a free community activity center, and the community it’s in will need it.

The library is not gigantic. It was formerly a funeral home. But they did an amazing job fixing it up.

Some of the features this library has or will have soon:

A test kitchen with restaurant-grade equipment.
A workshop with a tool library for lending.
A clean-up room featuring a washer, dryer and shower free for use.
A playground and splash pad for kids.
A huge patio deck for reading, relaxing or whatever else you might want to do.
Just a pleasant place to hang out.

And, of course, the expected things like a children's area, meeting rooms, a teen area, a small computer lab and a small collection of books and DVDs.

Before you start complaining about how “libraries don’t have books anymore!” The book stacks are still a 10-minute drive/bus ride away at the downtown branch. The books aren’t going anywhere. Libraries are more than just books. They are one of the few places the community can get all sorts of resources and a place to access them for free

75 comments

I absolutely love this. Good stuff, man.

I love how you include a cleanup space. Very cozy 3rd place for people to hangout. Good job dude!
How do you continue to fund this though?
- Primarily funded through taxes, but even the local Republicans aren't suggesting cutting the library budget. They're pissed off about the clean-up room because "it will encourage them" (while also complaining about the smelly homeless people in the library), but they also know the library here is super popular. There was a "we love our library" yard sign they were doing a few years ago and they ran out of signs. They have a summer community book read and they did The Martian this year and ran out of free copies.
  Such a weird town. A lot of poor people, many of them without advanced education, but a lot of readers as well.
  
  Keep fighting the good fight against ignorance and illiteracy!
  
  Nice! We need people like you all over the world

Every public library is a beacon of hope. Its the most true symbol of a civilized society. Each one brings light of knowledge where there would otherwise be darkness of ignorance.
Please pass my thanks to your wife for advancing civilization.

That looks awesome!
A few tips, based on what has worked in our local libraries:
A story-reading space where parents or caregivers can bring infants and toddlers to listen to books being read outloud. Librarians, parents, and volunteers take turns as book readers. Hugely popular. Absolutely packed them in. One branch even built a hand-painted replica of the "Goodnight Moon" set.
A separate, private space for nursing mothers.
If the budget allows it, a phone charging station.
Space for common government forms. Applications for welfare, disability, voter, and tax forms. If you can get volunteers to help, even better.
Was going to mention tools, but see you already have it. In ours, you can check out shovels, saws, wrench sets, gardening tools, etc, to take home for a few days. It got so popular they had to move into their own space.
We love our local libraries.
- The government forms are genius
  
  That's already generally a thing in libraries, thankfully. I used to go to get them from the library occasionally when I ran a sole proprietorship business (i.e. I was the only employee) in the 2000s.

Thank you.

Just another wow post, make sure to tell her people from all over the world are grateful for her work:)
- I told her just before she left for work this morning about the positive responses she's received from Lemmings and she was really happy about it. She has worked so hard on this and I'm so impressed with the results. It was the first time I'd seen the inside.

Obviously I love books and complaining about not enough books. But actually who cares. This is badass. Every bullet point cooler than the last. A kitchen? A workshop?? A shower and wash room?!
Actually excellent. Congrats to your wife's hard work!

My god the world needs people like your wife. Man. Tell her that I said she’s amazing.
- Thanks, I read a bunch of comments to her this morning and I'll read more to her when she gets home tonight.

I really wish Imgur didn't block VPNs 🙁
I'm sure it's lovely - congratulations!
- Is that why I see that message instead?
- No issues using Mullvad
  
  I'm using Mullvad, too. I can almost never get a response from Imgur unless I hop exit nodes a bunch.

We really need more wholesome stuff like this in Lemmy.

Holy crap, that is a legitimately amazing place! Well done by Mrs. Squid!!
P.S. Libraries rock and are true treasures
- How many arms does Mrs. Squid have to do all that?
  
  Just the two. It's an interspecies marriage.

Before you start complaining about how “libraries don’t have books anymore!” The book stacks are still a 10-minute drive/bus ride away at the downtown branch. The books aren’t going anywhere. Libraries are more than just books. They are one of the few places the community can get all sorts of resources and a place to access them for free
There's always interlibrary loans. I'm sure you can search for a book on the online catalogue and ask for it to be transferred from another branch.
Anyway, fantastic and very creative work. I wish I had a library like this near me growing up.
- You absolutely can. I've done it multiple times myself. Pretty much any public library (in the U.S. anyway) can do ILLs from what I understand.

Wow.. that's gorgeous. A real community center..

That's cool as shit, wow. I hope she's proud!
- She's very proud. And very tired.

This is incredible and is going to be such a benefit to the community. Your wife is good people and the world truly needs more libraries and "third places" for everyone in a community to use and feel safe in regardless of their socioeconomic status or education or anything else.

Libraries are the best shining examples of community service & thats the coolest library I’ve ever seen. props to your wife and who helped make it happen!

The clean up area... Amazing.
Being dirty was one of my biggest fears when I was homeless. I felt like if I passed the point where I couldn't clean myself anymore, it would just get so much worse from there.
- One of the complains she hears all the time is about the "smelly homeless people" in the library. Well now a solution has been provided.
  Of course, that meant that conservatives flocked to community meetings about it and complained about how it would bring more of them into the neighborhood.
  One guy said, "I have them setting up tents in my back yard!" Did you try just asking them to go somewhere else, dude?
  
  I think the core of the problem is the complainers just don't want to see or be inconvenienced by "those people." Even though "those people" would almost certainly not choose to live that way if they didn't fall on hard times.
  It's an uncomfortable reminder that many of us are closer to being in that situation than we think, and it is easier to fall into that with the more social programs we cut.

holy freaking cow this is the coolest thing ever! is there any way that we can (through sheer willpower maybe?) magically make one of these in every state?
stuff like this keeps me and my hope in humanity alive, thank you for sharing and thank you Mrs. Squid for being so awesome :)
- Talk to your library board!

I actually feel like I'm going to cry right now. This is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard of. I wish every town had something like this

How many people did it take to get this done? It looks fantastic for something that is just getting started.
- A large number. Construction crews, architects, all kinds of stuff. The funeral home it used to be had to be gutted and remodeled. They had to do stuff like get rid of the embalming fluid smell in the basement. Plus all the permitting and stuff. She only told me a bit about it and because it's been such an exhausting process, I haven't really pressed her on details unless she offers them.
  I do know that there was such a rush to get it open by yesterday that my wife was out doing things like spreading gravel with the maintenance people to get it done in time.
  
  Well a hearty well done to everyone involved. And thank you for showing it to us. It is refreshing to see examples of people building up their community when the majority of news focuses on negative events.

That is AWESOME! You both must be so proud!
- We sure are, thanks!

Elkhart didn't have the best libraries when I was growing up (80s), but they felt like the only decent lifeline to the outside world, before the internet. I regret not taking better advantage of them, but their selection was extremely old till they moved to a bigger building.
Farmers have a really weird love/hate attitude towards books.
Try to convince your library to get a 3d printer, and do demonstration classes, I think they'll find people really like them and kids can make projects for their parents or even school (our schools had 0 budget for anything, we legit learned on trash 80s in 1991).
Edit: looking through the pictures, would love to take my kid there, nice.
- The main branch already does have a 3D printer! Also a laser cutter, an audio recording booth, sewing machines... all kinds of cool stuff.
  
  That's really awesome!
  I think things like this really help bring the community together, which is what we've lost the most over the past 3 decades, we've traded being "rich" (ie externally showy) for being comfortable and having a community. We compete with each other and drive ourselves apart.

As a grumpy skeptic doomer, thank you! Keep doing this. I really hope it helps a great number of people.

Very cool. Seems like it has all the things many modern libraries should pivot to offering where possible.

This is amazing! I love hearing stories like this. Keep up the fantastic work.

Congratulations! I love seeing new libraries show up! I hope you don't have to deal with authoritarian jackasses trying to ban books.

Looks great fellow Hoosier. Terre Haute needs more of this.

Why would you hurt Leslie Knope like this?
- We're from Eagleton.

Congrats.
Is Terre Haute really that poor? Not what I'd expect from the hometown of one of our country's most premier private technical colleges. Usually a college contributes quite a bit to the local economy, and that's a fancy one.
- Average household income is ~$40,000, which is about half the national average, and there's a lot of joblessness, homelessness and substance abuse.
  Rose-Hulman is a great school, but the school is outside of town and there's no bus from there to town either, so they don't go. We actually have three schools here- RHIT, Indiana State Univeristy and Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College. The students of all of them rarely leave campus. And I don't blame them because in general, there's fuck all for them to do.
- It's a pretty tiny school. Only around 2k students.
  
  Oh, I see. That is really tiny.

Tell her thank you. Awesome job. Now can we put one of these in every town?

Heeeey whats up my fellow hoosier. Cheers to your bookstore!!

Huge W

Dope. As. Fuck.

Congrats mate

More books would be nice, but the rest looks awesome. A great place for the community.

I didn't understand what imgur had become before I clicked the link and briefly thought the library had lots of copies of Twisters in 4k.

This looks amazing! Especially love the kitchen, workshop, and clean up areas. It's great to give people a space to do things they don't necessarily have the equipment or means to on their own. Which reminds me I should see if there are any publicly available workshops in my area.

It's beautiful! The post isn't public on imgur or I would upvote you there too!

Damn

Wow!

Fantastic! If I lived in Terra Haute I would spend some time in there! Congrats on the opening and I hope the place thrives.

I can't see any images or any link to an album. Using Boost for Lemmy app on Android
- Try using the "Share" link to open it in your web browser. Lemmy apps can have trouble with off-site image galleries (doesn't work in Eternity, for instance.)
  
  I'm using eternity and see a link
  Edit: I see what you mean. Can't copy it.
- The link is in the headline as always with these things, so I don't understand.

75 comments