Ms. Lois at the Pomona Public Library has written to let us know that the annual Laura Ingalls Wilder Gingerbread Sociable is going to be held in the children's room of the library -- that's the Laura Ingalls Wilder Children's Room -- this saturday from 1-3pm. There will be storytelling, crafts, gingerbread by the Pomona Baking Company, and general bibliophilic good cheer. Meg-Bob sez check it out! (Ms. Lois's joke of the day is also particularly good.)
I'll try to stop by (although I have to work on saturday, wah), out of a strong sense of support for our library. Fie on anyone who wants to dump our local library (by Pomonans, for Pomonans) in favor of being another half-toothed cog in the sub-operational machinery of the LA County system!
7 comments:
I disagree!
Does that mean you don't like Miss Lois' joke of the day? Awwww.
On the other hand, with the County system you have access to millions more books. And if we were a County outpost a few decades ago, we might have already had branches in Phillips Ranch and north Pomona. For a city the size of Pomona, only one library is pretty embarrassing. Sure we all like our local library, and at this point I doubt the County could run the library cheaper, but if you step back a moment into history, rather than one central library, you might have had three La Verne-sized community libraries, with West Covina serving then, as now, as the regional headquarters.
Aren't Chino Hills and Rancho looking to create "downtowns"? We're floating in a puddle of sprawl and yet the library reinforces the reality that Pomona is it's own city. Forcing Phillips Ranch and northern Pomona residents to visit the civic center is not a bad thing.
I'd suggest that Pomona actually sits in an ideal position in that residents can access "millions more books" by jumping to the next city, but still have the benefits of a real city library.
I've been happily using both the Pomona library and the LA County library system for years. The Pomona library stands head and shoulders above any of the county libraries I've visited -- the collection is far larger and the building more comfortable. It's far better to have one central library with great resources than three little libraries with okay, possibly duplicated, resources.
I can't think of a better engine for self-improvement than a library. Is there another town in the IE that has more need of a way for it's residents to pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Given our diversity and economic issues, I wonder if Pomona could get outside grants to help out with the library?
As a former employee of the PPL, and with the caveat that things may have changed in the 5+ years since I moved on, I'd like to mention that patrons consistently remarked that we had a better collection. And sometimes, when my fellow clerks and I weren't shaking people down for overdue fines, they mentioned that we also had better service.
I agree that libraries in the county system allow for wider access, but what I heard from people was that on the off chance that they couldn't find what they needed at the PPL, we fulfilled requests much faster.
I also agree that forcing people in North Pomona and Phillips Ranch is not a bad thing; Ed's comment made me think of the Chris Rock joke about how in every city, there's the mall where the white people go, and the mall where the white people used to go. Based on the complaints that I also heard from some Pomona residents (cough*Phillips Ranch*cough), if there was a chance of avoiding going to the civic center, many would do so. One of my favorite things about working at the front desk of the PPL was coming into contact with all different kinds of people.
At one point, the '60s I think, a library branch opened in the Westmont neighborhood. I think it was in the small center that houses Westmont Hardware. This would have been in the heyday of Convair/General Dynamics. I came across information about it when researching the neighborhood for a "Pomona A to Z" column.
Don't know any more than that, but obviously the experiment was abandoned.
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