Robin’s Observations from the front desk:
With tomorrow being the first day of summer, though it has felt like it for a few days now, we have cranked up the coolers. So, if you need a place to escape the heat of the summer sun come on into the library. For those of you who are planning on attending the Florence Farmer’s market every Thursday and happen to have your little ones with you why not head over and visit Cid who will be having story hour at 10:30 a.m. Also, for those of you who missed the sign up for summer reading you can still bring the kids to the programs every Tuesday at 10 a.m. To stay up to date with all the great summer happenings at the Library visit our website www.florencecolibrary.org!
Notes from the Back Room:
So I was reading an article about libraries – I know, I know don’t I have a life outside the library…well, I like libraries what can I say. Anyway, I was reading about libraries and children and I read this quote, “Libraries are community centers now, not mausoleums. In this neighborhood, these kids need a place to go.” “Great!”, I was thinking, “that is kind of like our library.” I often think of our library as being like a community center, with a slightly different focus than other kinds of community centers. And as far as kids go, we find that the library is definitely a destination especially in the summer. Which brings me to the hard part about the library and kids… the unattended child. Yup. Now, of course we want folks to come to the library, and yes, by golly, we want, desperately want, kids to come use the library. Some kids do fine navigating the world by themselves. We try to offer plenty of supervised activities with summer reading and such, we cannot watch every unattended child all day. Our parenting section has books in it, not people. As a community we have to realize this is the real world, not the set of “Leave it to Beaver”. According to the latest Ofcom study: 49% of children ages 8-17 have an online profile, 59% of 8 to 17-year-olds use social networks to make new friends, and 33% of parents and 43% of children say they set no rules for their children’s use of social networks. I know, computers and the Internet aren’t something Mr. & Mrs. Cleaver had to worry about. Yes, the computers at the library are filtered. Yes, we enforce time limits. As parents we need to check up on our childern’s Internet lives and we cannot rely on the average stranger to guide our children to safety.
