Subscribe
Subscribe
SubscribeWorthington Libraries (OH) named the 2007 Library of the Year
Gale and Library Journal Honor Library at ALA National Conference
New York, NY, June 11, 2007--Any library that's been around since the early 1800s deserves an award for longevity, but there are plenty of other reasons why Worthington PL, OH, has been named 2007 Library of the Year by Library Journal and Gale. Created by settlers who brought their books with them from Connecticut, the library is still the focal point of the community, emphasizing accountability to its patrons through rigorous, forward-looking planning and quality service that embraces not just adults but also children and hard-to-get teens, those readers of the future. The community returns the compliment with strong financial support, giving the library 65.5 percent of it funding, even though three-quarters of Ohio's public libraries get most or all of their funding from the state.
Director Meribah Mansfield will be outlining Worthington PL's success story when the library is honored at a special ceremony on Monday, June 25, during the annual American Library Association conference in Washington, DC. The award includes a $10,000 cash prize that will help support ambitious programming at the two brick-and-mortar library branches and on the lively web site (www.worthingtonlibraries.com), first winner of the LJ netConnect award for small library web sites in 2002. Innovations that won the judges' attention include a roving reference librarian; new ways to promote high-traffic items like popular fiction; a teen blog and MySpace page; adult programming that extend to forums sponsored with the town's Council for Public Deliberation; and strong e-assets that include not only 164 topnotch electronic resources and more than 8000 full-text periodicals but also TumbleBooks, which provides animated stories for children.
For more information and to read the feature article that appears in the June 15th issue of Library Journal magazine, visit www.LibraryJournal.com.
Judges for the award were Mary Baykan, Director, Washington County Free Library, Hagerstown, MD; LJ 2007 Librarian of the Year; Michael Gorman, Immediate Past
President, American Library Association; Jill Lectka, Gale's Senior Vice President, Circulating & Trade Publishing; and Gale Nancy Tessman, Director, Salt Lake City Public Library; LJ 2006 Library of the Year. The panel of judges also included Library Journal staff John N. Berry III, Lynn Blumenstein, Jay Datema, Francine Fialkoff, Rebecca Miller, and Norman Oder.
For more information on the Worthington Libraries, contact Meribah Mansfield, Director, Worthington Libraries, at 614-807-2601 or meribah@worthingtonlibraries.org
For more information on Gale, contact Vanessa Birch at 248-699-8193 or vanessa.birch@cengage.com.
For more information on Library Journal, contact Krista Rafanello at 646-746-6420 or krista.rafanello@reedbusiness.com.
