Brittany Moeller, the Dell Rapids Carnegie Library Director, presented the Dell Rapids City Council with the final summer reading program numbers for 2018 during the council’s regular meeting on Monday, August 6th. The summer reading program officially ended the last week in July this year.
“The total sign up for babies through adults for the summer reading program was 654 people. That’s an increase of more than 220 people from last year, so that’s amazing! Our numbers just skyrocketed. We had double the amount of adults and teens sign up, and those are our two hardest groups to get signed up for the summer reading program. So to have those numbers double was pretty exciting to see,” said Moeller. In 2017 the library had a total of 426 people register for the program.
There were a total of six different programs for babies through adults. The library had just under 2,000 people attend just the program, which is nearly double from last year’s number. That number doesn’t include people who came into the library just to use the computer or check out books. There were a total of 934 participants that attended five different programs in 2017.
So far in 2018, the library has issued 71 new library cards for a total of 206 new people to the library. In 2017 the library issued 92 library cards for a total of 212 new people.
“We’ve had a record-breaking summer, and it’s been super exciting and a lot of fun,” Moeller added.
Moeller also said that they would like to keep this trend going, keep seeing people come into the library to participate in the programs, and do all the fun activities.
After the report of the new numbers, Dell Rapids Councilman Gary Haak asked Moeller what she would like to see in the future for the library in terms of programming and reaching out into the community.
“We would like to definitely expand the programs that we do. Libraries aren’t the same as they were 20 years ago. The library that my older siblings were used to where they came in and they checked out all these research books to write their papers and that kind of stuff, they still kind of do that, but a lot of that is online. So now the library’s role is changing. What we provide now is a place for community members to gather, to be together, to learn new things, to have new experiences whether it’s story time for their kids or offering photography classes or different ways we can involve community members. We would love to do more things like that, really expand not only the programming that we have at the library, but what else we can do outside of the library in the community, doing more with the schools, and partnering more with the daycares and centers like that. That’s kind of our main goal,” Moeller responded.
“When we look back at spending the money to add on to this, it shows that we did it right. Probably didn’t build it big enough now, I don’t know. If it’s growing like this, it’s good to see,” Haak commented.