A Friend Request from Your Local Public Library

If you are one of the millions of people who use Facebook, you are well acquainted with the idea of receiving a “friend request,” a message from someone who wants to be electronically connected or reconnected with you.  Sometimes the request comes from someone you see regularly in your everyday life; sometimes it is from someone with whom you’ve lost contact for years.


Please consider this article as a friend request, not from an individual but from a wonderfully vibrant part of our community: Neill Public Library.  For many of you, our library is a place with which you are well acquainted.  How do I know this?  Because on a variety of measures, Neill Public Library is one of the best used and highest performing libraries in the State of Washington.  We are a leader in the state in terms of the degree to which we as a community check out materials and attend library programs.  For example, this past summer an astounding 1331 local children registered for our Summer Reading Program.  Additionally, over 4000 children attended the 68 individual summer reading events offered by our talented children’s library staff, headed by Kathleen Ahern.  Stop by any open hour, and you will witness the range of people of all ages who use our library for a variety of purposes.

This high level of use at our library is easy to understand.  Like a good friend, our library supports our individual interests, encourages us to follow our passions, provides information that helps us solve problems and make decisions, and entertains us in myriad ways.  In short, it is a place with people and materials of many kinds, all of which help us achieve our best potential.

The Friends of Neill Public Library is the nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote, support, and improve the services and collections of our library in ways that supplement the budget provided by the City of Pullman.  It is the Friends who fund the Summer Reading Program and other library programs, provide funds to replace worn and damaged items in our collections, and support professional development for our exceptional staff.  In short, we are a group that aims to help the library achieve its best potential.

October 17-23 is National Friends of Libraries Week, and the Friends of Neill Public Library encourage you to celebrate your friendship with our library by becoming a Friend.  Stop by our table this week to enter our free raffle for adult and children’s books; pick up a free bookmark; browse our book store for items to add to your home collection; donate books, dvds, and videos that have outlived their useful life in your home.  Most importantly, consider accepting our Friend request by picking up one of our brochures.  “Friending” our library is an act that enriches our community in so many ways, adding to the network of resources that make Pullman such a wonderful place to live.   

~Karen Weathermon, President

Friends of Neill Public Library