Library Continues Growth as Important Community Hub
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Draped with buntings of red, white, and blue and other decorations meant to mark both the nation’s 250th anniversary and the county’s 200th, the Anderson County Library has turned its Anderson location into a kind of civic stage set, one that celebrates memory while also trying to persuade the county that libraries are not merely repositories of books but engaged participants in community life.
Annie Sutton, the library system director, said the decorations were her idea, though she was quick to credit her staff for translating that idea into something larger and more imaginative than a few patriotic bunting swags. The displays went up at the end of June, in time for Carolina Day and the Fourth of July, and will remain in place because the library is using the season to launch a series of related programs, including this year’s “Books in Community” selection, which takes the Revolutionary War as its theme across adult, teen, and juvenile reading lists. The point, Sutton said, is not simply to commemorate the past but to make it usable — as literature, as discussion, and as an occasion for community art.
The library’s annual summer programming has taken on that same combination of education and theater. In September, the system will mount a makerspace art exhibit called “America Your Story,” open to artists ages 14 and up, along with a community project inviting residents to color historical flags for display at library branches. The library also plans to appear in the Anderson County 200th Anniversary Parade with the bookmobile in October, carrying the season’s patriotic mood out into the street and, more or less literally, on wheels.
That impulse to collect and preserve the county’s story is not new, it’s part of the mission of the library that has long been a place where residents come not just for checkout materials but for research the past via microfilm, obituaries, old yearbooks, local histories, with the help of staff members who know how to help people find the family information buried in the stacks. After more than a century, the library remains a place where the county’s history is not merely remembered; it is filed, indexed, and made searchable.
The present remains busy enough. The summer reading season is a two-part enterprise: weekly programming for children and families, and a countywide reading challenge designed to keep people reading through the summer and stave off the usual seasonal slide in literacy among children and students. This year’s theme is dinosaurs, giving the campaign a certain prehistorically cheerful energy, and the turnout has been especially strong this year, with about 67 percent of participants actively reading, which amounts to nearly 14,000 days of reading between June 1-5.
That reading effort comes with rewards. Children who finish the summer program can receive a ticket to a Greenville Drive baseball game and a free book, with the books sponsored this year by the Greg Steele Law Firm. Sutton said the sponsorship is a good example of how not everything is publicly funded, and not every gesture toward literacy has to be solitary.
The library’s numbers have been moving in ways that suggest the institution is still gaining relevance in a digital age that was supposed to make this sort of place quaint. Sutton said the system has recorded more checkouts in the new fiscal year than at any point in the past decade, with digital use through OverDrive and Libby up about 11 percent from last year and approximately 1,000 more users taking advantage of the service. The library also offers tne Hoopla app and continues to remind residents that they do not need to buy their e-books and audiobooks elsewhere when the county already provides them.
That digital growth has made library cards newly consequential. Sutton noted that September will be library card sign-up month, and that cards expire every two years and may be deleted after five years of inactivity. The reminder was an invitation and encouragement to the community. The library can renew cards for seniors through family members or caregivers, and, in general, seems prepared to meet people where they are, including at the end of a driveway, a school bus route, or a branch locker.
Those new lockers are part of a broader effort to make access feel less like a schedule and more like an accommodation. The Powdersville branch already has a 24/7 pickup locker, and Pendleton is expected to get one soon, joining a system that also includes a vending-style book machine on the west side of town. Sutton said the idea is to serve a county that keeps growing and dispersing, with 9 physical locations plus the bookmobile, six-day-a-week service at most branches, and seven-day access at the main Anderson branch. Even in a county where people may live at a remove from one another, the library is trying to make participation feel local and immediate.
The Friends of the Library remain essential to that effort. The nonprofit group remains an indispensable partner in programming and fundraising, especially as grant support becomes less certain. For $25 a year a family can join and help sustain the library’s work, whether through storybook events, partnerships with Marketplace Theater, or other public programs that are easier to describe as civic glue than as mere enrichment.
What Sutton seemed happiest to describe was that more people using the library often enough to make it part of their routine. She mentioned the appreciation the newly rebuilt Iva branch has received, and the pleasure of hearing that people now stop in every week when they once did not. That, she said, is the real aspiration — not just to lend books, or provide databases, or display flags in patriotic sequence, but to become a place where people feel they belong. In a county still marking anniversaries and adding branches and trying to keep up with its own growth, that may be the most durable achievement of all.
