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Dear Community, Happy New Year! The start of a new year is always a time for reflection, both on what we have accomplished in the past year and what lies ahead in our work. Like other organizations, the Library experienced no shortage of change and challenges in 2021. I hope you feel that we exceled in being flexible and adaptable throughout the year while always keeping community needs as our top priority. It has certainly been a learning experience for all of us at the Library and we have spent the entire year grateful for your continued support. We closed out 2021 with some exciting news: we have reached our fundraising goal of $500,000 for enclosure of the Corvallis Library’s second floor patio! I have mentioned this project in previous newsletters and you have probably noticed the construction barriers during your visits to the library, but you can visit our Enclose Our Library’s Patio webpage to learn about the details of the project. Due to supply delays, the opening of the space is now slated for March 2022. We will provide details about the grand opening in the future. I am still stunned at how quickly we raised the funds needed for this project, and I would like to extend my deepest thanks to everyone who has supported this project in one way or another. We look forward to making this space a reality in 2022. It is difficult to predict what might come our way in the year ahead of us. Rest assured we will continue to provide delivery service as long as it is needed and desired by the community. You may use this service as much or as little as you [Read more]

Dear Community, Throughout the past few months, we have been carefully monitoring the use of our libraries.  In exciting news, our circulation numbers are growing exponentially every month, and we are very near our pre-pandemic numbers for checkouts. Thank you for your support and showing how important you find library services in your life. What does look different this autumn are the times of day people are using library buildings. This is something we track hourly at all locations, and without the large evening events of the past, we have noticed that the number of library visitors during evening hours has sharply dropped. The foot traffic during these hours is minimal at best and we take that as a sign that you might prefer something different from what you used to. In order to increase access and hopefully serve you better, we are shifting our winter hours at our Corvallis and Philomath locations to the below schedule. We hope that you find these hours more convenient. As always, we continue to offer our delivery service to everyone who resides in our library service district. We highly encourage you to use delivery service if the new hours affect your hours of access to the building. Thank you again for your continued loyalty and support. We would not make a change like this unless we thought it would best serve the community, and we will continually re-evaluate community demand and adjust as needed. Corvallis Library Hours starting Monday, October 18, 2021: Monday-Thursday: 9am-7pm Friday-Saturday: 9am-5pm Sunday: 1-5pm Philomath Library Hours starting Monday, October 18, 2021: Monday and Tuesday: 9am-7pm Wed, Thurs, Friday: 9am-5pm Saturday: 9am-1pm Best, Ashlee Return to CBCPL October Newsletter  Return to all [Read more]

Dear Community, This month I would like to share an update with you regarding our construction project at the Corvallis Library! We are currently in the process of enclosing an unused patio space on the second floor of the Library. We worked with Woofter Bolch Architecture to come up with a wonderful design that remodels 2,400 square feet and adds an additional 1,200 square feet to the building’s floor plan. Our new space will include a beautiful reading lounge with a bank of windows facing the courthouse, a flexible classroom space for future programs, four group study rooms available for community use (all with an amazing view and plenty of space to spread out), and a new boardroom-style room, complete with presentation equipment, all on the second floor. These changes will also allow us to revitalize the most beautiful and least utilized portion of our building, the historic Belluschi wing. We have a number of wonderful changes coming shortly and stretching into the future that will hopefully bring new life to our building and provide useful spaces to you and other community members! Due to supply delays, our project is now scheduled to conclude in mid-December. In the meantime, we thank you for your patience. It is thanks to the hard work of the Corvallis-Benton County Library Foundation and our many generous donors that we are able to make this project happen! We are in the middle of fundraising the last $90,000 for this project. If you would like to give to this project and help us meet our fundraising goal or if you are interested in one of our few remaining naming opportunities, please reach out to me! You can follow the progress [Read more]

Dear Community, It would be remiss of me to start this month’s letter with anything other than appreciation. It has been amazing to see your faces in our libraries again over the past month! I have enjoyed watching children walk out with piles of books and materials almost as big as they are! I have seen tears of joy, cheering and clapping and excitement. All of it fills me with gratitude that you have supported us through a global pandemic and you are still here with us. This month, I would like to share a special opportunity with you. I have written in the past about how important our nonprofit organizations are to us. The Friends of the Library and the Library Foundation both work to support the library in different ways and we would not be the same without them. Both provide annual support to us through monetary contributions and take on many important roles. For example, the Friends of the Library process all of our donations of materials from the community—that is no easy task! The Friends of the Library in particular are searching for new Board Members and I would like to invite anyone interested in learning more about this opportunity to consider applying for a position! This is an amazing way to give back to the library through your time, creativity, and interest! They are looking for people with skills in leadership, organization, finance or experience leading a non-profit. However, if you are interested, there is no replacing passion and interest—so don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. There are multiple needs, so reach out to friends.thebestlibrary@gmail.com to find out more. If you’d like to support the Friends and [Read more]

April 5, 2021 Dear Community, I am happy to share with you that April 4-10, 2021 is National Library Week. It is a great time to stop and reflect on the importance of libraries to their communities. Libraries remain a cornerstone of democracy, promoting the free exchange of information and ideas for all. Libraries are more than buildings; we can often find them as the heart of the community. I hope you feel the same way I do, that libraries are important in our world and the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library makes a positive impact in our community. If so, I encourage you to help us celebrate National Library Week! Pull out those “I Love Our Library” yard signs for the month, make use of our services and tell a friend who does not use the library about all of our awesome services. We are here to serve everyone. Speaking of serving you, we hope we can open our doors again to you in the not-too-distant future. Please be assured that we are constantly watching for a change in guidelines from OHA that means we can open our doors. Currently Benton County is still in the High Risk category, meaning curbside pickup is encouraged and buildings are limited to 50% max capacity. For the library, these kinds of restrictions mean we can serve more of you by offering our current services of delivery and contactless pickup. Trust me – we would love to have you back in the building and browsing for books. As soon as we can realistically do that and serve the entire community well, you’ll know about it. In the meantime, take care and I hope to see you soon. Best, [Read more]

February 2021 Dear Community, In my last letter, I took a moment to thank our Library staff for their hard work over the past year. Our success is also thanks to the support of our two non-profit organizations: The Friends of the Library and The Library Foundation. The Friends and the Foundation champion the Library in different ways and they have both made significant contributions to our organization during the pandemic. Your support of these two organizations means direct assistance to the Library. The Friends of the Library partially finance our delivery service, the popular take-and-go craft kits, and pay for most of our speakers and program supplies. In 2021, the Friends approved a budget of over $100,000 to support Library programs, staff development, home delivery, and other supplies and services. The Library Foundation invests funds into the library’s collection of materials, allowing us to continue curating a catalog that meets our community’s needs. The Foundation is also preparing to take on a construction project at the Corvallis Library that will allow our space to grow and further serve our users. Having the Foundation by our side to help us complete capital projects makes us extremely fortunate, and you’ll be hearing more about this construction project in the next letter! I remain incredibly thankful for the Friends, the Foundation and especially all of our generous donors. The community support we have received from all of you continues to keep us encouraged. Thank you to those of you who have sent in thank-you notes, called with compliments, or dropped words of kudos in your returned items. We celebrate these words of gratitude each day. The support of the Corvallis and Benton County community is unparalleled. [Read more]

January 2021 Happy New Year! Like all of you, I am excited to ring in the New Year. Here at the Library, it is our plan to continue adapting our services so that we can offer you the best library experience while balancing community safety. I am proud to share with you that we are currently serving about 620 community members a day, and that is not including digital visits to the Library!  Looking at our comparators, these are some of the highest numbers around the state. To that end, I would like to start this year by saying thank you to Library staff. I am proud and privileged to work with them. Trust me when I say that everyone working at the Library right now misses their old job! We miss singing with your kids, we miss helping you find books, and we miss seeing your smiling faces when you are checking books out. However, we know that you need a different service right now and we are here for you: taking risks, staying flexible, learning new jobs, doing our absolute best to ensure you have a library that is meeting your needs. As we head into 2021, we continue to make plans to improve our services and offer you what you need. Never hesitate to let us know what services matter the most to you! Best, Ashlee Return to all Letters from the Library Director Return to CBCPL Newsletter

October 2020 Dear Community, Welcome to Fall! I am happy to say that all of our locations now feature walk-up hours of service in addition to holds delivery offered to all patrons who live in our library district. Every day we consider how to improve our services and provide more ways to access the library. Along those lines, we are now offering a new service: Text and Go Holds! To start with, two days a week at the Corvallis Library, you can text ahead for contactless pickup of your holds. On Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 AM to 4 PM, signs will be outside of the library with a phone number you can text. When you arrive, just send a text with your name and last four digits of your library card to the phone number listed on the patio signs. We will check out your items, and call your name at the table outside when they are ready! Anyone can use this service, even if you also utilize delivery services. As a reminder, due to procedures based on the most recent library-specific studies available, we are quarantining all returned library items for 7 days. This means items will remain on your account for at least 7-10 days before we can handle them. Thank you for your patience as we work to ensure the safety of our library materials for your use. Lastly, I’m sure many of you have made use of a ballot box inside of the library before. Even though our facilities are not open, ballot boxes have been installed outside of our libraries so that you still have a secure place to drop your ballot, if you need to do so. [Read more]