Derek and Darla's Summer Road Trip Part 1: Shelter Island

As many of you know,  while all you wonderful folks are in the throes of the Summer Reading Club, we put our workshops and trainings on pause until the rest of the year and go visit YOU! We're not able to see EVERY library (please don't think we hate you if we didn't make it to you!!), but we try to hit as many as we can.

This post will be the first in a set of posts summarizing our various travels, so you can see some of the fantastic stuff everyone's been working on!

Our first day of hitting the road was Tuesday, July 18, when we put on our sea legs and embarked upon the lengthy sea voyage from Sag Harbor to Shelter Island (eight whole minutes, can you even believe it? The things we do for this blog...). Neither Derek nor I had ever been to Shelter Island Public Library and Derek had never been to Shelter Island at all, so this was an exciting trip for both
of us.

Image from the Shelter Island Reporter,
because I forgot to take an outside pic >.<

For those of you who also haven't been, Shelter Island Public Library is a small but intensely charming building located near the school and a few local businesses. Derek and I were given the grand tour by the delightful Terry Lucas, SIPL's director.

SIPL's current youth services area

If you gotta have a mole that expands your face into an
extra dimension, of course it should be a Tardis!

The Youth Services department is currently located on the main floor, where it is lorded over by a stately giraffe with an unusual facial growth (thanks, teens), and enough pop culture-y decorations to make a really fun eye-spy out of. However, they're thinking of moving the whole kit and kaboodle to the lower level soon so the kids can let loose just a bit more than they're currently able to - always a wonderful thing! Shelter Island's unique attributes carry over from their community into their library community: there aren't a lot of year-round residents, which means that everyone knows everyone else -- all the kids who were visiting that day were on a first-name basis with head of youth services Anthony Zutter, who we also got to chat with. He told us about how their programming spills out into the community, from story times in the small park next to the library, the farmer's market and parks on the island, all the way to joint-programming with North Fork libraries for bigger performances. What a cool place! We're so glad we got to make the trip out.

Summer Reading Raffles and Program Offerings