Boyle library looking to future with long-range plan

Published 7:00 am Saturday, February 18, 2017

The Boyle County Public Library is in the midst of a five-month process to determine what its priorities should be over the next three to five years.

Community forums have already been held in Forkland, Perryville and Junction City, and another will be held in Danville — at the library — on Feb. 27, Director Georgia de Araujo said. The library is also organizing many smaller focus groups with educators, people who work with senior citizens, people who work with disabled people and others, de Araujo said.

Caleb Conover, who chairs the committee working on the long-range plan, said the process began in November and the goal is to have the library’s board approve the final plan in April.

The plan will lay out bigger areas where the library will focus; it will be up to staff to work out the specifics and implement the plan, de Araujo said.

“We’re going to talk about where do we need to focus our energies,” she said. “I think it’s going to be a broadly stated document and just determine what are the areas we need to focus on. … It helps you decide what are we going to focus on, where are we going to put our resources?”

But the library isn’t looking only for big-picture thoughts from Boyle County’s residents — it wants to hear about small things, too. At Junction City’s community forum on Thursday, area resident Bonnie Hill suggested the library could do a better job informing people of the specific times and locations when the bookmobile comes through Junction City. The library could also look into if churches might share information about library events in their bulletins, Hill said. The librarians in attendance agreed both were great suggestions and they would look into them further.

When the library last went through the process of developing a plan five years ago, it heard from people in Junction City that services were needed and it figured out that partnering with Junction City Elementary School would be a good way to provide those services, de Araujo said.

“Reaching out into the county is just always a good thing,” she said.

The Boyle County Public Library will host a community forum for discussing what the library should be focused on during the next three to five years at 7 p.m. Feb. 27. More details about the event will be released by the library soon. Anyone with comments or thoughts for the committee working on the long-range plan can email library@boylepublib.org or attend the forum.