Taylor Cudd moved to Mid-Missouri in January 2016 when she accepted her first recreational therapy job in the area. It means that she’s eight hours away from her hometown in Elgin, Oklahoma, but she’s ready to get involved with her newly adopted community.

Outside of the Southern Boone County Public Library, butterflies flutter in and out of the flowers now in full bloom in the library’s native garden that surrounds the building. The abundance and type of plantings in the garden entitled it to become a registered Monarch Waystation through Monarch Watch, and it recently was registered as a part of the Million Pollinator Garden Challenge.

The spirit of Summer Reading 2018 rocks on!  Listen to our patron-generated “Libraries Rock” Summer Reading Spotify Playlist. With more than 100 songs, there’s something for everyone in this mix of country, rock, rap, blues, K-pop and oldies.

On Thursday evening, the Callaway County Library District Board of Trustees accepted a letter of intent submitted by Marty Wilson with the Holts Summit Community Empowerment Foundation to open a library in a recently renovated space in Summit Plaza. The proposal offered to waive the first two years of rent for the new library.

Every summer, libraries around the country pull out all the stops to deliver extra programming and exciting events to engage communities, especially children, in reading. Preparing an engaging summer reading program is nearly year-round work. Why do we do it? We do it to celebrate the joy of reading, of course, but also to help stop the phenomenon known as the “summer slide,” where children often lose ground in the reading and math skills they gained throughout the school year.

Keep grooving to that beat! Research suggests that music benefits our brains, beginning at birth and continuing on into our golden years. And music can help ready kids for reading, too.

This, year our community voted to read “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders the the Birth of the FBI” by David Grann for this year’s One Read program. Over the last 17 years, several nonfiction titles have been selected, but this is the first time that a true crime story has been chosen. The community is given the summer to read the book in preparation for related programming, including an author talk, in September.

If you’re fascinated by local history, you’ll be excited about the library’s new Community History Archive. Debuting this month at archive.dbrl.org, this site offers a searchable archive of local historical images and documents.

Between 1854 and 1929, over 250,000 orphans and unwanted children were taken out of New York City and given away at train stations across America. Did you or someone in your family ride the Orphan Train?