By BETTY JESPERSEN Staff Writer Tuesday, May 8, 2007

The 100-year-old building in the heart of downtown Wilton is a small rural library that is pushing hard to connect to the youngest children, teenagers, families and care givers. It is becoming a meeting place as well as a clearing house for information on what people want to know about building healthy communities and healthy families, according to children's librarian Sandy Warren.

"We want to get people thinking that we are here as a community resource. We want to be looked at as being more than about books," she said.

Parent Lisa Lindsey, who regularly walks to the library with her 3-year-old son, said the facility has become an important part of her family's life.

"It is such a great resource, with the story times and summer reading program and the parenting information. Sandy has been my son's first teacher," Lindsay said. "They have everything we need, and not just books. It is really good for my son to be with other kids and I get to meet young mothers."

"We might have to move and the thing I would miss most is this library," she said.

The library is one of only six in the state named a Family Place Library by the Americans for Libraries Council, a national non-profit organization that works to keep libraries high on the national agenda and at the center in communities, according to the Council's Web site. The other Family Place Libraries are in Waterville, Auburn, Topsham, North Berwick and Norway.

Hallmarks of the Family Place model are parent-child workshops; outreach to families; a multi-media early-childhood collection that includes books, videos, toys and computers; a parenting education collection; and collaborations with area agencies and schools that can steer families to the library.

This week, the Wilton Library is collaborating with the Academy Hill School and Cushing Elementary School in Wilton to bring children's author Toni Buzzeo to town for a two-day residency.

She will be offering daytime programs at the schools and at 6 p.m. Thursday. Buzzeo, the author of children's books and resources on teaching literacy, will be at the library to talk about how she went from being a shy child to published author. The artist residency is funded through a MBNA grant.

To earn Wilton's credential as a Family Place Library, Warren had to attend a five-day training session in New York and commit to continuing the philosophy back home.

Programs at the Wilton Library now include an outreach program to six area child care centers in which every other week, Warren, a former early childhood teacher, brings in a tote bag filled with books. There are library story hours for infant-toddlers, preschool and elementary school age youngsters, and she also reads to children at the Early Childhood Center at Western Maine Community Action in East Wilton.

Once a month, local kindergartners walk over for a program Warren prepares and browse in the cozy and well-stocked children's library. And this summer's reading program, "Dig Into Archeology," will run for an hour and a half Tuesdays to Fridays from June 28 to Aug. 2.

In addition, twice a year Warren sets up parent-child workshops -- five-week programs for kids ages 1 to 3 and their caregivers that feature toys, books and art supplies for the children and professionals from community agencies to talk about parenting, literacy or other issues that concern children.

The library is also part of a network with agencies that work with young families and where Warren and her staff can refer patrons. These include the Franklin County Children's Task Force, which provides parenting information and resources, the Women, Infant and Child program, Literacy Volunteers, Community Concepts, the Center for Child Development and Swett-Winter Child Care at the University of Maine at Farmington.

"For a small library, we are doing a lot," Warren said.

Library director David Olson said libraries today are more vital to a community than ever.

"Libraries provide a vital service. There are different ways to get information to people, outside of computers, books and databases. We continue to be relevant," he said. "We are all about getting information to people."

Betty Jespersen -- 778-6991

bjespersen@centralmaine.com