On another site, I saw praise for this site headlined “Is the library transforming your life?”
The site collects and publishes stories of all the marvelous benefits of libraries — saving people money, building community, creating a safe haven for youth, and more.
Collecting these stories seems to be a defense against budget cuts. A powerful and poignant video on the site tells the story of Sean — how a librarian trusted him to take a book home and come back the next day and bring the ID needed to get a library card and how he went on to get a community-college education and a good job. There’s a neat Wizard-of-Oz moment in the video in which black and white becomes color just at the moment the narrator-librarian talks about how “alive” libraries are. (Sorry, couldn’t find any coding to embed the video here).