I am a library geek.

The evidence is clear. Check my wallet and you will find cards for Emmaus Public Library, covered with stickers permitting access to the Allentown Public Library system and "Access Pennsylvania," an online carte-blanche of sorts for libraries throughout the state. I have a card, expired, for Cressman Library at Cedar Crest College and, the prize of the collection, an ACCESS card to the New York Public Library: The Research Libraries.

My vacation pictures include snapshots of yours truly with Patience and Fortitude, the famous marble lions whose stoic edifices stand watch at the New York Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, Manhattan, formally known as Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library. And I stood in line to be among the first of the public to enter the flagship of the Seattle Public Library system designed by Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus when it opened May 23, 2004, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle. My bucket list includes a trip to the Library of Congress. Yes. Definitely a geek.

There is so much to capture the imagination at and about libraries. The history of the library extends into ancient times. Stuart A.P. Murray, in his examination of the library as an institution titled The Library: An Illustrated History (2009), notes the first libraries appeared as many as 5000 years ago in Asia and Africa.

In the United States, Founding Father and second U.S. President John Adams signed into law a bill creating, at a cost of $5,000, a reference library for Congress, an idea first suggested by James Madison, our fourth president. And when the reference library burned to the ground during a devastating fire wiping out the U.S. Capitol in August 1814 in the War of 1812, it was Thomas Jefferson, two-term president, retired, who offered for sale his private library in Monticello to the government to resuscitate the Library of Congress. Jefferson's library, described in a history of the Library of Congress as one of the largest in the country at the time, cost the government $23,950.

But it was Andrew Carnegie, a captain of industry in the late 19th and early 20th century, who many point to as the sire of the public library as a vital enterprise in the United States, when he dedicated part of his personal fortune, $60 million by most calculations, to create more than 2,000 public libraries in the United States, two of the earliest surfacing in Pennsylvania outside Pittsburgh. In a radio piece on Andrew Carnegie and his mission, radio personality Susan Stamberg described the steel baron's view of public libraries as "not luxuries, but rather necessities, important institutions – as vital to the community as police and fire stations and public schools."

And evidence of such a sense of community surfaces in many of our local libraries. In September, for example, the Emmaus Public Library, 11 E. Main St., opened its doors for Community Heroes Day, an event celebrating the work done by first responders and born, in part, from the world changing events of Sept. 11, 2001. A professor friend, David Silver, now teaching at the University of San Francisco, looked to libraries in a similar spirit, creating the September Project, an effort set in libraries to celebrate and address freedom and issues important to specific communities. Read through this newspaper and you will, no doubt, find out about many events planned for and executed in our local public libraries.

And for the industrious among us who do not have collections to rival Jefferson, funds to equal Carnegie, or resolve to match Emmaus Community Heroes Day, Martha Vines and the librarians at the Emmaus Public Library, there is the trending Little Free Library movement featured in the pages of American Profile magazine, March 17-23, 2013 issue, an insert in this and many newspapers around the country, and in O, The Oprah Magazine, in the spring of this year. Little Free Libraries are crafted by individuals for their neighborhoods and often are simple wooden boxes perched at the end of a driveway or front yard and crowded with books others are encouraged to borrow and, of course, return to the tiny library, many at no charge. The American Profile article features the story of the first tiny library created by Todd Bol in 2009 to honor his mom, a school teacher. Bol's tiny library is modeled on a one-room schoolhouse and stands in his front yard in Wisconsin. Bol and others in the movement credit their small libraries with fostering a sense of community by sharing books.

The Northampton Press has also run features on Little Free Libraries created in Bath and Northampton.

Libraries are places to celebrate and enjoy a community and the knowledge therein and the knowledge made available through the exchange of ideas made possible by the existence of the library in the community. Libraries, as Carnegie and Adams apparently believed, are worth the investment. Libraries, as Madison, Silver, Bol, librarians and users of the Emmaus Public Library and so many other libraries in our communities, apparently are relevant institutions worthy of community support and interest. Visit your library. And, if you can, give. Please.

April Peterson

editorial assistant

East Penn Press

Salisbury Press