| To the Library and Beyond As we progress through October, we continue to celebrate Information Literacy Awareness Month. The last full week of October (22-28) is International Open Access Week celebrating unrestricted online access to articles published in scholarly publications. The theory of Open Access is intended to inspire global momentum toward the open sharing of knowledge in order to address important social issues. This year’s theme is “Community Over Commercialization” making it an opportunity to “join together, take action and raise awareness about the importance of community control of knowledge-sharing systems.” October 24 to 31 is Global Media and Information Literacy Week, and if this is your kind of subject, you should definitely become a Librarian! With heavy hearts we find we must close Prairie Community Library for an indefinite length of time. We will be busy boxing up books and all volunteers are most welcome! We continue looking for a place to store the Library collection and any help is greatly appreciated. Though we might wish for a library building of our own, we may not be quite up to all the miracles necessary to make that happen. We would like to encourage all patrons who have items checked out to return them at your earliest convenience so that we can keep the boxes as complete as possible. We don’t expect to find a place where we could reopen the Library temporarily until the Community Hall basement space is cleaned and restored for occupancy. And we are uncertain how long that process might take. (We hope we won’t forget all the library lessons we have learned while we are closed!) We wish to express our deep gratitude for the public generosity of our beloved community and pray that your benevolence will be returned to you hundreds of times over. J |