Public library still evolving 100 years later
Margaret Hewitt brings a mailbox-sized metal case out from a back room on the second floor of the Butler Area Public Library. Inside the faded gray container are manila folders that look newer than the case they came out of, but inside one is a single square of paper older than all of them containing a numbered list.
This single sheet was the list of “library rules” that the Butler Area Public Library opened its doors with in 1894, when it was a rented space in the Duffy Building on West Jefferson Street with a total of 432 books on hand.
The 1898 catalog consisted of books including “Ben Hur,“ “Gulliver’s Travels,” “Jane Eyre” and “Catalog of Library of the Butler Public Schools,” which is the library’s oldest surviving book.
Now, the entire library catalog of more than 103,000 items fits in the palm of Hewitt’s hand, on a new smartphone application developed for the library in 2021.
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