St. Charles Public Library

The St. Charles Public Library is growing by leaps and bounds. "We're running out of space," said Library Director Diana Brown.

[Jake in West Chicago]

"We're running out of space"? Huh? Just like the newspaper libraries are becoming less of a resource. Get with the program, they just cost us more money for the select few people who still use them.
My kids have a library at their school. Do I need one in the town, for what? To check out outdated information? To use the internet? Check already have that. To read a book, umm, ever heard of books.google.com ? They're scanning them. Use a kindle or Iphone if you must read it portably.
Argue why we need one, the trend is moving towards them going away. When will you figure that out?

[Fly on the wall]

Apparently you live in a gilded cage. Not everyone is online or has those cool gadgets you reference.

[Jake in West Chicago]

Oh, I agree, but that percentage is significantly lower than it was 5, 10 or 20 years ago. Yet how is it that libraries are still growing?
Why should we expand something at continued expense and growing costs when much less of the population cares to go to the library. And why is it every town thinks they need to have one?

[Fly on the wall]

How do you know that the cenus or usage is lower? Where are you getting your information from?

[Jake in West Chicago]

The libraries are growing now like a lot of areas did in their high-growth times. The economy is bad right now so people get out to someplace like the library to socialize and do research as they're looking for jobs. These same people if they were working wouldn't have the time to play around at a library.
IT jobs grew like crazy in 1999 because of the Y2K scare, Real Estate and RE agents went crazy selling lots of homes between 2003-2007, Taxes went sky-high to meet. All of these things happened because of what was going on for the moment and no consideration was given as to prepare for the future, more lean times.
I've been in the IT industry for over 25 years, my kids used the library generally because the school pushed them too. Today they're both in College and they're able to do their studies from the texts they buy to searches performed on the internet. Some colleges are now pulling their computer labs since the students already have computers of their own. How long before libraries follow suit? Probably a while. It's a status and "nice to have" type of thing. But in todays advancing society it really is becoming less needed for more of the people.