News from Your Otis Library
By Stephanie Skinner, Director
May 2025
About a week ago a friend asked my husband, "How many people actually use the library? A couple hundred?" This is actually an excellent question, and one I can answer.
In 2024 the Otis Library had more than 5,000 visitors. These visitors took out books, videos, audio books, local venue passes (such as Magic Wings, The Clark, etc.) attended events and clubs, used our computers, printers and faxes. They came in for information and found community.
In all, during 2024 the Otis Library circulated 15,795 items. Valuing those items at $20 each (some are much more, some are less but we can use this as an appropriate average) the Otis Library saved the town residents $315,900 in one year alone.
That means for a town of 1,626 full time residents the Otis Library saved every man, woman and child $194 in 2024 alone.
But what is really interesting is the variety of people who use the library. Some come in for books or information and some to find community. We have many actual communities at the Otis Library. Where else can you go outside of your home where no one asks you for money? Where you can sit quietly or find a conversation, surf the net, read to your grandchild, or research your family ancestry? You can talk to the knowledgeable staff and find your next book series, or movie addiction, and best of all, if what you want isn’t in OUR library, we can almost always order it for you.
Twice a week boxes of books and movies ordered by Otis Library patrons arrive from other libraries, and we send some of ours out to other libraries. This is because of a wonderful thing called Central Western Massachusetts Automated Resource Sharing, a.k.a. CWMARS. This wonderful asset, originally brought in to the Otis Library by longtime Library Director Kathy Bort, connects 165 libraries in Massachusetts, making more than eight million items available to over 750,000 linked patrons.
It's kind of breathtaking. I have always been a library user but I hadn’t ever thought about how it all worked; what and how stuff got on the shelves, how the whole borrowing and returning system worked, how it all got done without charging patrons! I had no reason to look under the hood until I started work at the Otis Library. I see now that it is millions of pieces of data crunching through thousands of linked libraries and computers and all handled without fuss or fury. If you want something organized, what you need is a librarian.
If you haven’t used a library recently you might be surprised at how digital it has become. There are no more meticulously managed card catalogs - that’s all online. The reference books are no longer hidden behind manned desks - they’re right there for the browsing. There isn’t even that much silence! Yes, the Otis Library is not echoing hallways and whispered questions. It is conversations and community at its best.
I have heard from a few people recently who have come in to the library for the first time in a while that the reason they are in is because they are out of work, or now retired, or they just need to save money so they can’t afford to buy every book or movie they want. It struck me that I had never thought about what the lifetime value of the physical items I took out of the many libraries I had used might be. I knew how important the sense of belonging to a library was to me, but I had never actually put dollars and cents to it. And that’s pretty weird for an old business person like me. What I see is that you CAN actually calculate what you save, but you CAN’T put a value on community.
Maybe we should change our library motto? “Come for Savings, Stay for the Community.” What do you think?
And now a short sampling of our many new items!
New Fiction:
Tartufo by Kira Jane Buxton
Ward D by Freida McFadden
Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow
New Non Fiction:
A Memoir by Ina Garten
Kids:
Dogman, Big Jim Begins by Dav Pilkey
Movies:
(For those who love horror...) Nosferatu
And plenty more. Come on by for a great read or watch and, of course, chocolate.
