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A Continuation of the History of the Public Library in Brunswick, Maine
Elisabeth Doucett
This slim volume by Elisabeth Doucett picks up where a beloved local history left off. In 1976, Louise Helmreich chronicled the first century-plus of the public library in Brunswick, Maine; nearly half a century later, Doucett — director of what is now the Curtis Memorial Library — carried the story forward. Her continuation covers the decades from the 1970s onward: a major building addition, the explosion of community programming, the arrival of computers and the internet, and the strange interruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is unabashedly local, produced for the community it describes, and reads as an institutional memoir as much as a history. For anyone interested in how a small-town American library reinvented itself for the twenty-first century, it is a quietly revealing document.
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The author
Elisabeth Doucett is the director of the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine, and has served on the Maine Library Commission. Writing this continuation from inside the institution, she brings an administrator's-eye view of how a public library actually runs, changes, and survives.
The book
Issued around 2022, the book deliberately extends Louise Helmreich's 1976 A History of the Public Library in Brunswick, Maine, taking up the narrative from roughly the 1970s to the present. Doucett covers a major addition to the building, the growth of community programming, the sweeping changes wrought by computers and the internet, and the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a short, purpose-built document, printed for the community rather than the trade.
How to read it
Best read as a companion to Helmreich's original — together they form a nearly 150-year portrait of one small-town library. On its own it is a candid snapshot of the pressures and reinventions that have reshaped public libraries in living memory.
For more context
Readers curious about the institution can consult the Curtis Memorial Library's own history pages, or Helmreich's founding volume, which this book was written to continue.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Elisabeth Doucett
- Place of publication
- Brunswick, Maine
- Year
- 2022
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Paperback
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine
Places
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