Libraries in Southwestern Virginia

The Lonesome Pine Regional Library System

People send in the strangest requests for AC articles. "Describe 4 to 6 libraries in your town"? My home town is Gate City, Virginia, with a population between two and three thousand people. We are the home of the public library for the whole county. Unless you want to count school and church libraries, the library in whose computer center I'm typing this article is the one and only library my town has.

Some networking with the Big Stone Gap, Pennington Gap, and Wise county libraries had begun earlier, but the Lonesome Pine Regional Library only started operating as a network when it was connected by an incredibly slow, clunky, and out-of-touch computer system in the late 1980s. During the 1990s and 2000s, this system has gradually upgraded into something that's accessible via the Internet, looks smooth and professional, and offers accurate information on the materials and programs available at each of the four original libraries, plus five new branch libraries in smaller towns. The only vestige of past clunkiness is the web address: http://www.youseemore.com/lprl/.

The down side of this improvement has been that, to facilitate the transfer of library catalogues to the Internet, the Big Stone Gap and Gate City libraries have drastically downscaled their collections. Many valuable books have been discarded. This has happened at too many libraries across the United States. Although librarians may warble about the need to get rid of old, outdated books nobody ever read, and although such books did exist and aren't missed, libraries that have participated in radical purges have also removed many books that were being used, loved, placed on hold, and requested on interlibrary loan within months before purges took place.