2024: An Awesome Year in Review!
The Saline County Library tackled a lot of our goals this year!
Y’all checked out a LOT of books, movies, video games and more at the library… a 13% increase, actually! There were a couple of items that were REALLY popular, like the new animated Addams Family movie, Super Mario: Wonder, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid!
This year, we added so many folks to our library community: 6,000 new library cards were added in 2024! Of those cards, around 1,000 were added during the national event “LCSUM” in September!
And everyone came rushing through our doors: across all locations, our foot traffic was up 14% from 2023. 3,583 visited the Makerspace, and 768 patrons signed up for and attended our special Makerspace programs!
This year, the library attended 46 outreach events like the annual Benton Parks Glow Run, City of Benton Third Thursdays, Leadership Cheese Dip Festival, Bryant Chamber Fall Fest, and more. At each event, we helped the community sign up for library cards and explained some of the MANY benefits of having a library card, and of course provided a fun game or activity for the littles.
One of those many benefits? Free events! There was a total of 962 of events across all three locations. The biggest event of 2024 was the Paw Patrol Party in Bryant, which had an attendance of 550 people!
Did you know the library gives out free Halloween costumes? In 2024 the Benton branch distributed 287 free costumes, the Bryant branch handed out 391, and the newly opened East End branch dispersed 98 costumes.
We welcomed our East End Branch to Saline County on April 1st, 2024. Since its opening, it has already had over 14,000 visitors and signed up over 900 new library cards! Following the smashing success of our rumble to knock out food insecurity in “The Battle of the Businesses,” the East End branch was able to open a community pantry, offering free food and hygiene products to anyone in need, regardless of whether they have a library card! Our new spin on the annual food drive nearly TRIPLED what had been previously donated in 2023!
We planted the seeds of success this year… and so did you! Our Seed Library program added over 600 new members and gave out 13,000 seed packets. Compared to last year, we saw a 55% growth. That’s incredible!
On social media, our Facebook page grew 5%, gaining 1,500 new followers. And our webpage saw 75,000 new visitors! The most visited pages included the Hours and Locations page, Get a Library Card page, main hub of all Online Resources page, and the Summer Reading Challenge 2024 page.