PERSONALITIES: Librarian moves books to make way for arts, technology, and more

Jul. 1—VERNON — Jennifer Johnston-Marius' mother and grandmother raised her to love books, which led her on a journey to become director of the Vernon Public Library four years ago.

Originally from the small coal town of Arnot, Pennsylvania, population 300, in the north central part of the state, she lived there into her 20s, and returned home periodically.

Johnston-Marius said the local school system did its best, though, to expose her to as much culture as possible.

"I remember in fourth grade going to Philadelphia on a class trip and your eyes are widened and you're experiencing things," she said. "I remember seeing my first homeless person and being shocked by that because poverty was certainly something that I was very familiar with, but not homelessness.

"When I was in high school, we had a really great art club that I was involved in that took trips to New York City every year," she said. "We got to go see plays like 'Les Miserables' and 'Phantom of the Opera.' I certainly felt fortunate that there were people trying to open the outer world to us as much as possible with what funds and experiences that they could."

Her mother encouraged this exploration of arts and culture also, she said.

"My mother was a voracious reader and books were the way to experience other places and cultures," Johnston-Marius said. "Her and my grandmother were never without a book in hand and there was always a stack on the bedside tables, always pushing us to read new things. The written word was something that was very, very, important in our family."

Her mother's encouragement led Johnston-Marius to want to participate in a foreign exchange program through the local Rotary Club.

"I was an exchange student for a year," she said. "I went to Costa Rica."

College and beyond

After studying in Costa Rica, Johnston-Marius went to college at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.

After a year working for the United Way in Portland, Maine, Johnston-Marius returned to Mansfield, Pennsylvania, and worked at the public library while earning her teaching certificate, which inspired her to earn her Master's of Library Science at Clarion University.

After Clarion, she interned in Wales, United Kingdom, then moved to Culpeper, Virginia, for her first professional library job as a children's librarian, she said, before spending nine years working at a library Selins Grove, Pennsylvania.

It was at this time, she said, that she felt she needed to find a place where being a librarian allowed her to make a livable wage, which brought her to New England.

"I was able to find a position at Springfield City Libraries," she said, "but unfortunately you're required to live in the city there as a town employee. I just wasn't pleased with the education system there."

This led her to Vernon, where she is now library director.

"When I came on, the library had just become a department of the town," she said. Things were very new and a bit tumultuous, especially for staff because things had changed a lot for them.

"They had been without a director for a little while," she said, "which also makes things difficult. To me, it was an exciting time. I said, 'We're going to figure this out together,' and things went really well."

She said that under her leadership the library has started to offer more services and programming.

"The community response was wonderful," she said. "It's a good community to work in because people love their library and want to be involved, which is a wonderful thing.

The pandemic put a halt to all that. "All of a sudden, the doors are closed," she said.

"It was a real curveball. We laid off all of our part-time staff, which was devastating to do, but the full-time staff that was still here thought, 'We're gonna figure this out.'

Step by step, she said, they pivoted, offering curbside pickup and Zoom programming.

"I feel like, in many ways, we're back at the beginning again," she said. "We maintained some of our previous population, but things have changed for them too. It's taking another look at ourselves to say, 'where do we go now'?

"Some of the things that we were doing previously worked and are still working now, but libraries across the country are struggling in the sense that we did certainly lose some users. We lost some users to online, which is fine. They're still using us. It's just in a different way. It's trying to figure out how do we re-engage these people?"

It's not just books

The library is no longer just about books, and Johnston-Marius has expanded the outreach of the library to put a social worker on staff to help people with job searches and resume building, and teaching computer skills.

"As time moves on, (people) are being forced to enter that world because you can't hardly do your taxes on paper anymore, and you don't do job applications in paper," she said. "You have to create the resume online. You don't even get paper insurance cards anymore. You have to go into your account online and print them. All of these people are coming to us saying, 'We don't know how to do this.' We need help. So much of our energy is put towards that."

And there's more.

A benefit of the library, she said, is that it is completely free and anyone can come in to participate in its activities.

"We offer arts and crafts," she said. "We offered Shakespeare last summer here. We're doing it again. We provide music concerts. It's making it so that everybody has the opportunity to experience art and culture, educational resources, computers, technology."

Johnston-Marius said she hopes to see continued growth for the library.

"I think growing in programming and what we offer; we've been trying to grow our technology," she said. "I think that's going to have to continue so we can stay up to date.

"I think we need to think outside of our walls," she said. "We need to be in the community more and make our presence widely known, because there are still a lot of people out there who aren't library users."

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