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NPR: Turning A Page Inside A Rural One-Room Library

Interesting NPR story about Rural Libraries, profiling the Myrtle Public Library in Myrtle, Mo, population 300:

Rachel Reynolds in front of book shelves.
Rachel Reynolds Luster, the librarian for Myrtle, Mo.

Turning A Page Inside A Rural One-Room Library : NPR.

She’s one of thousands of rural librarians trying to bring a sense of community, learning and connectedness to their isolated areas. The Institute of Museum and Library Services estimates that nearly half of America’s public libraries are rural, and many of those are staffed by only one or two people.

Two things caught my ear:

  1. The manager “calls herself a curator, not just a librarian.”  It seems more often that librarians will explain how they are so much more than a curator.
  2. That she discarded the cooking magazines and “scanned her shelves for the one book she felt every library must have: the Greek epic Is she bucking the trend, or do rural libraries have more of an obligation to provide access to classics, since there are few other ways to access them?

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