When you become a member in Rotary, you are assigned a classification relating to your profession. Each new Rotary member or transferee is asked to give a "classification talk" after they have been in our Club for 1 - 6 months to share their life stories and journey with other members in order to develop deeper personal relations with club members beyond your work in Rotary.
On Oct 22, Rotarian Unrath, Director of the Dorothy Alling Memorial Library (DAML), shared his journey including his education as a World Literature major, becoming Director of the Middlebury VT Library and on to his current post at the DAML. Kevin has a certain view of why libraries matter, and in giving his thoughts on the matter so many times, he boiled it down to 13 ways why a library matters. For literature buffs, this is a take off on “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” poem by Wallace Stevens written in 1917 that explores how a single object can be view through multiple distinct points of viewpoints and realities.
13 Ways a Library Matters by Kevin Unrath
LIBRARIES:
*level the playing field
*are extremely popular, and actually the most popular cultural activity in the US
*are deeply about important long-term topics
*have a power of ideas that change the world
*places where you can find hard-to-find new ideas
*are where history is preserved and reintroduced to new generations
*protect the freedom for all individuals to make up their own mind
*are inherently green institutions - one book read over and over saves trees from being cut down for paper
*are weather-disaster locations and internet connection stations for community members
*have tech expects that can scan docs for you and provide some computer tablet support
*help children learn to read
*are places for teens and tweens to hang out and geek out
*can take you anywhere in the world or even across the galaxy with ever leaving home
To see and hear Kevin's classification talk w our club, go to: https://youtu.be/8Y9nFUCWQaM
To read more or donate to the DAML, visit: https://damlvt.org/
To read Wallace Steven's 13 Ways of looking at a blackbird, go to: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45236/thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-a-blackbird