The Library and Me
Grandpa recently showed my sister and me the famous safe, which has for decades sat in his garage holding some family heirlooms.
Decades ago my grandfather bought an old industrial safe that once belonged to a jeweler but couldn’t be opened. After getting the safe home, he took the family to the local public library to check out a book on safecracking.
My mom, still a child, could not believe that you could go to the library and get whatever information you were looking for. She realized at that time the power of a library and the beauty of open access to information.
Fast forward to today she has a Master’s in Library Sciences and has worked in the UCLA Library for nearly 30 years. The small diamond Grandpa found in a seam of the safe he sucessfully cracked sits in her wedding band.
I may not have realized it as a kid but my mom always shared her love of the library with the family. The children’s reading cave in the Woodland Hills Public Library was one of my favorite places to sit and read as a kid, and I recall getting excited to go to the library to check out Power Puff Girls on DVR one by one. It seems a lot of people think the library is just a building full of books on shelves, but it is much, much more than that.
SFPL Values
While overviewing the SFPL website, I found recurring values:
- Accessibility
- Collaboration
- Community
- Culture
- Discovery
- Diversity
- Education
- Engagement
- Enrichment
- Equity
- Exploration
- Growth
- Guidance
- Health
- Inclusivity
- Innovation
- Literacy
- Mindfulness
- Opportunities
- Partnership
- Passion
- Preservation
- Resources
- Respect
- Sustainability
- Technology
- Well-being
How I’d Fit In
Work in Progress
Regina Henderson 