Michael Scott, Assistant Director

 On July 28, 2008, I had the privilege of visiting the Zumbrota Public Library.  I met with James Hill, the director of Zumbrota Public Library, who gave me a tour of the library.  It is a wonderful library that offers so much to the community.  The children's area is just inside the front entrance, across from the information desk.  It is a very inviting area and the day that I was there it was decorated to celebrate the library's summer reading program, "Catch the Reading Bug."  The computers in that area were all in use which I know is no surprise to any of our libraries.  The library also has a comfortable reading room towards the back of the library.  Library patrons will find comfy chairs, a reading table, and plenty of natural light for reading the latest mystery novel or browsing the newspaper.  The teen area is expanding and I especially like the use of "graffiti" script to highlight the books in the teen area.  James tells me that he wants to continue to expand this area and add more comfortable seating and other things to draw in more teens.

Something new that the library is doing is highlighting different parts of their collection by using a mobile book display.  The day I was there the highlight was on cooking.  They had just finished having a display of travel books which proved very popular.  James noted that there were lots of "I didn't know you had these!" moments when items were added to this display.

One of the other areas that is always a favorite of mine at the Zumbrota Public Library is their music collection.  From my previous time working at SELCO, I had remembered that Zumbrota had a large collection of music CDs covering many musical genres. Of course I took advantage of being at Zumbrota and checked out a couple of new CDs.  As they have such a large collection of CDs as well as an ever-expanding collection of DVDs (movies and TV Series) the library has a very nice disc cleaning machine that has enabled them to keep their discs in good shape and in many cases helped them keep down the cost of replacements.  Which we all know can be frustrating when Disc 5 of  6-disc set stops working and we end up replacing the entire set instead of just one disc.  If you'd like more information about their machine, please feel free to contact James at the library.

I also want to acknowledge Flora Burfeind whom I also met on my visit.  She was keeping the library's busy information desk running that day but had time for a quick hello for me as well as an opportunity to share a little bit about the library.

For additional photos from my visit, please visit the SELCO Flickr site by clicking here.

Thank you James and Flora for such a great visit to the Zumbrota Public Library!