With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, romance is in the air. It is the time for expressing our love and affection for those who are most important to us, including your public library. Libraries serve thousands of people every day – including you. The library is much more than a place to borrow books or to study. Libraries offer educational, civic, and entertaining programs and continue to play an important role within local communities. Libraries today are less about what they have for people and more about what they do for and with people. The library, at its essence, is a community place.

Libraries and their communities enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship: the library provides resources to support the community, and the community devotes a portion of its resources to support the library. So, let’s highlight this with a few SJCPLS 2019 statistics:

– Almost 96,000 people have a St. Johns County library card
– Almost 750,000 people used our libraries and bookmobiles in 2019
– Almost 2 million people visited our library website
– Almost 1.6 million items were borrowed from our libraries
– Over ½ million people asked Reference questions
– Almost 5,000 programs were offered for children, teens, and adults
– Almost 99,000 people attended those programs
– Library volunteers provided almost 25,000 hours of service

For anyone who loves their local library, these encouraging statistics are worth celebrating! So, what about you? What do you love about your library? The staff? The programs? The services? The memories it has provided you? Then, I encourage you to keep reading because you will love what is happening at your libraries in February. Check us out!