Category: Community Service

Meeting With the President of American Heritage to Discuss New Digital Age Products

Last week I meet with the president and editor-in-chief of American Heritage Magazine, Edwin S. Grosvenor.  This venerable old publication was created by the American Association for State and Local History in 1949 and its long time editor was the award winning historian, Bruce Catton.

When it was launched it sought to apply the methods of journalism to the discipline of history. Over the years it won many national awards. The publication was eagerly sought out and was so valued in many household that people maintained full collections of the serial. But the new media market in the 21st century has presented respected old publications such as American Heritage with many challenges.

As the market shifted, the corporation tried moving away from its roots, publishing popular history pieces. In 2007, it suspended publication and was sold by its owners, the Forbes Publishing Company. But it’s back as a quarterly in its fine original form while also focusing on emerging new digital age markets. That’s why I met with Mr. Grosevnor. We discussed some a state-of-the-art initiatives that he’s working on that will help Maryland institutions meet patron expectations and reach out to new audiences. Excellent material in the product development pipeline, that will help us reach out. Look for more information in the year ahead.

Rising Sun’s 150th Anniversary Celebration

Congratulations to the Town of Rising Sun.  The municipality officially kicked off its Sequicentennail Celebration today with a ribbon cutting at the town hall and an open house in the museum.  As brilliant April sunshine warmed the crowd, it was great to see the sense of history that exists in an old Maryland municipality as remarks by Mayor Cox and others indicated.  Additionally an enthusiastic crowd gathered to help remember the town’s past.  

Wrapping Up Service on the Cecil Co. Library Board: A Rewarding Experience

Mike Dixon Maryland Library Association Read campaign
Mike Dixon in a photo for a Maryland Library Association campaign

I just finished serving a ten-year term as a trustee for the Cecil County Public Library (CCPL) in March.  I started in January 2000 and in the decade that followed served as vice-president and president. It has been gratifying to see CCPL grow to meet the demands of citizens in the 21st century with critical things like computers for surfing the net and support for job searches while circulation climbed to the historic level of 1-million items.

Cecil County is served by some of the hardest working library staff members anywhere and they and the management staff made this task my most rewarding board experience through their professionalism and can-do approach to delivering services to patrons.

Driving home after the meeting I was mulling over the changes I’ve seen at CCPL over a half-century. As a kid, one of my hangouts in the 1960s was that old library on Main Street where those 43,000 volumes held enough insight to keep me pouring over the titles. (Of course, my other hangouts were the jail, firehouse, newspaper office, radio station, and police station, so I’d had it all covered in a small town.)

We had two great librarians back in those days, Mrs. Dorothy Jefferson and Miss Slocum, overseeing operations where everything was done manually and a computer for CCPL was still decades away. When they moved into a new facility in 1985, the county was getting closer to the personal computer age, but they weren’t a presence on the library floor and the net was still another decade away. The old, well-used card catalog was the repository for information and my go-to source for finding back articles in magazines was the “Readers Guide to Periodical Literature.”

I remember staff members saying that in the mid-1980s the big innovation wasn’t PCs, but was the photocopier and the installation of telephones for the few small branches in the system. They had to depend on postal mail to communicate with the outlying locations or call someone to carry the message over to the librarian. Today’s it an entirely different story and the demands for library services are different than those days in the 1960s when books, magazines, and newspapers were what a system was all about. I think I watched the communications revolution arrive at CCPL as we went from the 19th century into the 21st century in perhaps two decades.

Mike Dixon

Celebrating a Community of Readers

dixonlibraryThe library system in Cecil County recently celebrated an important achievement. For the first time, the system circulated 1-million items. That is 10 items checked out for every single citizen in the county. To observe this major milestone, every library branch in the county celebrated with a range of special programs. One aspect involved Cecil Reads posters featuring staff, citizens, and community leaders.

Over the past ten years, I have had the opportunity to serve the system as a trustee and president of the library board as it has grown. It’s been a worthwhile community experience as we opened two new branches, increased staff to serve demands, added 21st century programming, and enhanced technology. As required by state law my term on the board will end in Nov. If you haven’t visited some of branches in Cecil County, please stop in when you’re in the area.