For this installment of the Cuyahoga Falls.Ohio.com one-year celebration, we spoke with Cuyahoga Falls Library Director Kevin Rosswurm about the library’s own milestone and what residents can find.
Last year, the library celebrated 100 years in business and Rosswurm said it was the best ever with the most visitors and items checked out in its history.
Moving forward, the library is continuing to add new elements to the experience. It’s in the preliminary stage of examining the children’s area on the lower level for potential renovation. It’s also beginning a demonstration garden where residents will be able get ideas for lawn upkeep.
“What we’re trying to do is use the outside of the library as an education tool just like the inside of the library as an educational tool,” Rosswurm said. “We hope to have a design in place this year and planting next year.”
Here’s more of what Rosswurm had to say:
Q: Please note the various services and activities this library offers the city.
A: The library itself is large enough to offer a large variety of really important services, but small enough that it’s pretty manageable for anyone that comes in to find what they want and to get their way around and for us to offer a kind of personal service that may be hard to find at a much larger library.
For the younger children, we really try to offer the best reading preparation classes that we can. Preschool children can come in and have an experience, and sort of instruction in the environment that is necessary for them to come in and learn how to read. On the other end we do a pretty good job of providing service to older retired or adults who are out of school adults who are interested in anything from finding latest health-related research, to monitoring their retirement savings to setting up a good resume.
Q: How does the community influence what services, or activities the library offers?
A: We monitor use of the library quite a bit, so we analyze what is most popular and respond to those levels of popularity. So if we have a lot of people interested in one particular subject or one particular book we try and get enough books to try to accommodate popular demand so you don’t have to wait very long in order to get what you’re interested in.
We also try to stay a little bit ahead of the curve, but not so far ahead that we’re offering things people don’t want. We try to provide those traditional services, like popular reading, DVDs and so on, but at the same time we’re moving very heavily into electronic databases.
This year we started a service where you can download music to MP3 players for free. You can download subscriptions to magazines for free. We’ve got an increasingly large number of e-books people can download onto their tablets or whatever device they might use.
