Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Genealogist Jim Holcom attended the Warsaw Community Public Library board meeting Monday to promote genealogy and suggest the library give genealogy classes to interested patrons.
"There's a lot of history in this area," said Holcom. "The library should give classes in genealogy."
Holcom said he has helped a lot of people with genealogy in the past and he stressed the need to keep the history accessible. He said the library has its records on paper and he suggested putting genealogy information on CD, databanks and the Internet to preserve it. If the library doesn't do this, he said, the records will eventually be gone.
Holcom also said it would be nice for the library to have a genealogy computer.
"The library is dedicated to genealogy," said board president Mark Morrison.
Morrison urged Holcom to discuss the issue with library director Ann Zydek. He also said class instruction in genealogy at the library is a good idea.
In other business:
• The board approved several motions, including the treasurer's report, a review of the fines and fees policy, a review of the non-resident fee policy, a review of the large meeting groups policy, a change order for the LULA elevator and the 2001 staff salaries and wages.
"One thing we discovered," said Zydek in her director's report, "is that people are really using the library."
Zydek said the library parking lot is too small to accommodate some of the meeting groups that use the library. She said the library may have to limit the size of groups using the meeting rooms, especially on Mondays and Tuesdays, so as not to cause parking problems for the regular patrons of the library. Mondays and Tuesdays are the library's highest circulation days.
The non-resident fees are as follows: annual individual fee is $45; a four-month fee is $16; annual fee for students and senior citizens is $20; a four-month fee is $8; annual family fee is $125; and a four-month fee is $45.
• Zydek said she attended the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Indiana Grant workshop Nov. 28 in South Bend. The State Partnership Grant program presented partners with public libraries to bring access to public access computing, the Internet and digital information to people in low-income communities.
Zydek said the Warsaw library did not qualify for the grant. A library is required to serve an area with a 10 percent poverty rate in order to qualify for the grant. The Warsaw library serves an area with a 6.77 percent poverty rate. The library does qualify for a partial grant, said Zydek. The library can participate and purchase equipment at the grant price. Zydek said there is an opportunity to add a quality Spanish workstation to make the library more useful to the Spanish-speaking members of the community.
The library board members include: president Mark Morrison, Larry Chamberlain, Joel Curry, John Yingling, Ruth Jones, Irvin Lindemuth and Caroline Nye.
