As a former library assistant for 16 years at the Falmouth Memorial Library, I am well aware of the basic importance of a library. What I experienced in my years as library support staff, as well as in my own life, goes well beyond the value of the books one checks out.

Libraries are lifelines for education, social engagement, community interaction and often spaces for the marginally outcast in our society. They provide escapism into other, sometimes better worlds, and help us see through the eyes of those different from us.

I have personally just checked out two books that have meaning to me through the statewide Minerva system. The first is titled “Behind Barbed Wire,” which is about the POW camp in Houlton from 1944-46. My father was an Army administrator there during that period. That experience has significant meaning to my family, and access to this personal history has touched me deeply. The second book is titled “The Scalpel and the Silver Bear,” about the first female Navajo surgeon. This also has great meaning, as my husband was a medical officer with the IHS in Shiprock, New Mexico, in the early 1970s. That experience is shared with so few people but has changed the course of our lives. Without the Minerva system, books such as these would not have touched my hands and my heart.

I could go on and list the multitude of opportunities that libraries provide. Better still, people should go and check out their own local library.

Corey Goodrich
Cumberland