One of the many reasons I love working in a public library is the impact we have on the community. Not just educational, but the social, economic and cultural impact as well. Our daily interaction with library members has always provided us with great anecdotal evidence of how we affect people's lives, especially the children. We love the stories we hear and the gratitude parents share with us when their child has learned a new skill, made a new friend or developed an interest in reading because of a program we offered or a relationship they developed with our staff.

We are fortunate to work with many caring and supportive teachers who visit our library for field trips and send us delightful letters from their students about their experience. All of these make us feel good, inspire us to keep creating more programs to respond to community needs, and help us to share the library experience with other organizations and businesses in town and especially with our legislative leaders.

But we expect more. We want to truly be able to determine the impact we have on Wallkill, not just the output, or numbers of people who attend our programs, but to truly be able to measure the outcome, or measurable impact, we are having on children and adults who attend our programs or use our collections and services.

Children's author Louis Sachar signs copies of his books during the ALA conference in June.

Over the last few years, we have taken advantage of some unique marketing and community outreach opportunities, particularly through OCLC (Online Computer Learning Center). OCLC partners with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to provide access to funds and tools to inform the public about the importance and value of libraries in the digital age. The Wallkill Public Library was the first library in New York State to adopt the "Geek the Library" community outreach campaign. (You may remember our "Geek the Library" night at Dutchess Stadium and the "Geek" posters we created featuring library members). Last year, we receive the "Outside the Box" grant - a partnership between the Project for Public Spaces, RedBox and OCLC that enabled us to use $5000 worth of funds awarded to acquire outdoor materials such as an inflatable movie screen, gliders, tables, and chairs to use around town at events and locations to foster community and provide attractive gathering places for our struggling downtown.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to represent our library at the American Library Association's annual conference in San Francisco in order to participate, as one of 50 libraries nationwide, in another Gates-funded effort: a three-year study called Project Impact. We will be one of the test sites - representing the small, rural library - to utilize a measurement tool to gather data with the purpose of assessing outcomes for the programs, collections and services we provide. As library members, you may be asked to provide information after participating in programming that will be charted and tracked over the next three years. We would really appreciate your support to help us with this project by providing your feedback.

Not only will this become a valuable planning tool for all of us, who work here, but it will enable us to more keenly assess what our community, and collectively, the country, wants from its library and specifically how the community benefits, educationally, culturally, socially, and economically.

We look forward to providing you, our taxpaying supporters, with the concrete data to support our stories, claims, and numbers. It will be an interesting and engaging interactive process we will go through together. We look forward to working with you, to growing with you, and especially to continue to build and enhance our library for the generations to come. Thank you, as always, for your dedication and support.

                                                 Director, Wallkill Public Library