PBS: How the Public Library Became an American Civic Institution (full documentary)

[NNadir]

1. Libraries, public and otherwise, have been the essential resource of my life. I was in a good school district as...

...a child, but lived on the wrong side of the tracks, and there was no public library attached to the school district. I suffered, I think, as a result, although I did OK, just OK, not great. My parents were laborers who didn't complete high school. My friends in school all had parents who were well educated, engineers, lawyers, pilots and so on. They had books other than the Bible in their homes. I didn't.

I often muse that if I'd had a library in which I could hang out, as I've done as an adult, I might have had less trouble in life.

One of the first things I did when my children were small was to familiarize them with libraries, as well as building for each of them, a personal library.