by Miranda Wisor
Last week, I read a delightful news article about a high school in Australia that was surprised to learn that a boulder that had sat next to their building for 20 years was a treasure trove of dinosaur footprints. It made the dino-loving child inside me giddy. After all these years, I still love dinosaurs. Why don’t grown-ups get asked about their favorite dinosaur? Without a doubt, my favorite dinosaur is the Parasaurolophus. Such a fun word to say. Parasaurolophus. Peh-ruh-saw-raa-luh-fuhs.
Why do I mention dinosaurs? Well, dear reader, because the swift expansion of the digital economy has led some to believe that public libraries might go the way of the dinosaur. Extinct, I mean – not turn into fossil fuels after millions of years. After all, why trek to a local Adams County Library when you can find what you need with the click of a mouse or a punch of a button on your device?
Well, I’m so glad that I asked. Let’s look at it from an economic perspective. If we look at the return on investment here in Adams County, we find some startling strong figures! For each dollar of local investment, county residents saved $8.63 from book borrowing alone last year. That’s over $10 million dollars in savings – just in books!
But you might be asking about the many other things that can be found at the library. We haven’t assigned value to those yet, have we? What is the value of more than 18 story times each week or the family-friendly FunFest hosted each June? What do you think an art class is worth? History lecture? Chess lessons? What about health or financial training? How do you assess the value of meeting new people with shared interests? It’s especially difficult for us to do that at the library because we offer it all free of charge. You might say it’s a bonus on the investment that more than 36,000 people claimed last year.
Estimating the excess value of ACLS gets a little bit easier when we are comparing streaming services. Spotify costs $11.99 per month for an individual account. Streaming with your library card from Freegal is $0 per month. My household dropped Netflix with the last price increase to $24.99 per month; instead, we can stream Black Hawk Down for free with our library card from Kanopy. Audible is $14.95 per month, but ebooks and e-audiobooks from CloudLibrary are free. That’s also free.
In traveling through this little thought exercise, I tried to research what constitutes a “good” investment. What I found is that most investors consider an annual return of more than 7% to be a solid, long-term investment. I think that clinches it. The Adams County Library System has eclipsed that by more than 100 times. Visiting your local library, in person or virtually, just makes sense. Your free ACLS library card will be the best investment you make this year.
Miranda Wisor is Executive Director of the Adams County Library System.