Livingston Parish Library

Years in Business: 78 years
Meet the Director: Michelle Parrish

Livingston Parish Library began in one, very small room in the old courthouse in Livingston Parish. The shelves were lined with a collection of 6,000 books. From there, it began to grow, culminating into five state-of-the-art branches with top-notch programming, a Bookmobile, a thriving outreach department, digital media lab, and Career Center, and they just keep growing!

Services offered:

Storytimes
1,000 Books Before Kindergarten Comic Con
Book Festival
Summer Reading
IDEA Lab
Digital Media Lab
Career Center
Public Meeting Spaces
Study Rooms
Art Exhibits

How do you make it a point to put families first?

One of the big things that we do is go out and talk to our constituents and our patrons and ask them “what do you want to see us do first?” The library services are for the entire family, so we want to make sure we have things like Comic Con, the Book Festival, storytimes, and 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten. For our homeschoolers, we started learning kits. Homeschool groups were meeting in our libraries, and we asked them what they needed, so now we have all those manipulatives they need to help with their homeschooling. Our digital collection is accessible online.

What do you enjoy the most about having the library in our area?

I’m from here. I grew up here. I remember that one-room courthouse, so it has been nice to see the evolution of the library system. The previous administration really did a great job of bringing us forward and pushing those innovative services.

Having kids that grew up in this library and having more than one or two children, a family that has several children can relate to how expensive it is to go to a movie, so to have an outdoor movie night where you can just grab a pizza, and go sit with your kids and enjoy a free movie…being able to provide that for the families in this area and making sure that they are enjoying and having those social interactions is important to us.

We were also the first ones to enact the tiered card system, so to make sure that parents have the ability to gauge what their children are watching or reading, and making sure that the parents have that ability was important to us.

What’s next for the library?

We are really wanting to gauge what our patrons want. We want to make sure that we are listening to them and fulfilling the gaps that they think we have. We would absolutely want to increase our outreach services in some capacity. We really see the benefits of getting out into the public and making sure that everybody is aware of all the services that we have. Literacy is always going to be in the forefront. We want to make sure that we reach people who can’t get to the library. We do have five beautiful branches, but it’s not always accessible to everybody, so to be able to bring those services to them, closer to their homes or to their subdivisions, is important.