When you work at our Library, you are surrounded by marbled, male beauty: the magisterial Emerson, the quirky Thoreau and the Byronic Hawthorne, but William Munroe, the 19th century local boy who made good, the guy who put the ‘free’ in Concord Free Public Library, quickly became the man of my dreams. This is because, in addition to providing the library building itself, Munroe established a “corporation,”with a board of up to eleven worthies, to attend to the needs of that building. Trust me, the needs of public buildings are vast and unending and Concord taxpayers have been spared most of those expenses at the Library since 1873.

There’s more to today’s library than books. Allow me to demonstrate with this dizzying list: It is your source for documentary videos, movies and audiobooks. If you’d like to convert old technology to new, it can be done with equipment like Photo-to-Digital JPEG, cassette-to-MP3, VHS-to-digital; not to mention the virtual reality glasses, which just became available.

Over the past 20 years, few Concord organizations have ignited as much excitement or stimulated as great and intellectual charge as the Concord Free Public Library. As a trustee for 25 years, I enjoyed a front-row seat from which to engage with its programming, events and resources. I am well aware... that demand for these services has outstripped the library’s capacity to deliver them for several years now.

While book circulation remains robust, our library is an increasingly critical source of real-world connection in what can feel like a disconnected age...The Library must grow to serve the community’s demand for programming and continue to be the thriving heart of our community.