By Scot Kersgaard, JVA Consulting

Like most people, I first went to the library as a young child. We lived out in the country, and I cannot recall a convenient public library. While we did go to the main library in downtown Eugene from time to time, it is the library at Bailey Hill Elementary School that I remember the most fondly.

It is in the biography section (920-928) that I fell in love with Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, Abe Lincoln, James Naismith (inventor of basketball), Mickey Mantle, Jesse Owens, Henry Wallace, Bob Cousy and a host of American heroes.

It was in a little glass walled conference room where I learned to play word games with a special ed teacher who came in once a week or so to work with “gifted” children.

At Winston Churchill High School, the library has different meanings. I hung out in a conversation area with friends–essentially the same “gifted” bunch from grade school. Some very serious nerds and geeks in that crowd. There were small conference rooms with glass doors that could be reserved for study groups. We often reserved them for poker games.

At the University of Washington, the Suzzallo Library was my piece of heaven. One of the original buildings, the graduate reading room on the top floor had soaring ceilings, stained glass everywhere, original oak study tables with green-glass shaded brass reading lamps. I loved that room more than any other on campus. Another campus library had a room where each kiosk came with headphones and you could ask the librarian (a work study student) to play any records on a long list. It is there that I fell I love with the Beatles Revolver and Rubber Soul albums.

From there it was the libraries in Ketchum, Idaho and Vail that I fell in love with. Yes, they had books, but it was way more than that–they were the hearts of their respective communities. Places to meet friends, to attend meetings, and take the pulse of the town.

When my own kids were born in the early 1990s, they were backpacked over to the Eugene Field branch of the Denver Public Library. Long before they could walk, they would crawl around the children’s section, pulling books from shelves and laughing with pure joy.

I’ve had the same laughing joy lately working on strategic planning projects for the Denver Public Library Friends Foundation and the Garfield County Public Library District.

What role do libraries play in a world with instant Google searches, next day Amazon deliveries, and e-books for every possible device? E-books, Google and Amazon are all great at delivering content in a faster faster world. Libraries can do everything Google and Amazon do, though, and they can lend you e-books at the speed of Twitter. But they can also slow it all down and give you time to think, to contemplate, to wonder. They provide us with a community of fellow thinkers to give it all context.  Is joy relevant? Is wonder? Is community? Is opening doors to unlimited possibility meaningful? Walking through the door (or virtual door) of a library is to open yourself to worlds not yet known, ideas not yet formed. Google can deliver information. The library gives meaning to information. Amazon delivers books. The library brings communities together around the power of reading. If anything, our hyper digital world makes libraries more important than ever.

As much of the planet’s food is shipped thousands of miles before being eaten, community gardens, urban agriculture and slow food thrive. We do not live in a world of one or the other. I use Amazon and Google. I hate my Kindle, and I love my library. Go figure.

Libraries are as relevant as we want them to be. Much like democracy, when you take a library for granted it shrivels. Like democracy, libraries require participation to work. A building full of books is worth a lot. A building full of people reading, and talking about books is worth a lot more.

If democracy wasn’t actually born in a library, I’m thinking it couldn’t have been born without one.

In a library, children learn to dream big, and if there is one thing that will determine our future it is the dreams of our children.