I know people have wondered for years just what happens when somebody walks into the library with a question about local history. Well, now, thanks to Douglas County's government cable TV station, DC8, all our secrets have been laid bare.

It's in their recent "Kit Carson's Last Campfire," an original musical detailing the real story of Kit Carson in Douglas County. When challenged, the staff of the Douglas County History Research Center springs into action.

Recently, I was elected to something called the OCLC Membership Council. OCLC is a company that has been around for over 30 years, since the dawn of library automation.

Nonetheless, OCLC is a little hard to define. It is...

* A world-wide libary catalog. OCLC is used by librarians in 109 countries to describe over a billion books, music and film recordings, theses, photographs, and other documents.

My grandfather spent all this life as a business man. He dropped out of 10th grade to support his disabled mother. For awhile, Granddad worked through a correspondence course to become an attorney. Then the Depression hit.

So though he never became a lawyer, he got a taste for self-education. He remained a voracious reader.

Most of his working life, he drove a pastry truck, and considered himself lucky to have the job. Eventually, he wound up in appliance sales at a big department store, where he worked until his death at 72.

During the recent recession, the Colorado State Legislature reduced state funding for libraries by almost 79%. Libraries were not, of course, the only services to take a hit.

That recession, along with various competing mandates -- federally mandated increases in Medicaid funding, State Constitutionally mandated increases in education funding, and TABOR mandated tax cuts -- meant that there simply wasn't enough money to keep funding many other programs at historic levels.