In 1995, we opened our renovated Parker Library in a former bowling alley. Our architects, Humphries Poli, did a brilliant job of responding to a key public concern: how to make a building on the west side of Parker Road feel like part of Mainstreet.

How did they do it? By making the first internal corridor of the library feel like a street. We had lamp posts and storefront windows and cafe tables.

And we had paving bricks.

This week's column is courtesy of Naioma Walberg, a reference librarian at our Parker Library. It captures wonderfully well just what happens at this vital service desk.

Librarian. . . Reference. . . Desk. . . nouns that bring up shuddering images of long forgotten term papers, dusty boring books and trying to find magazine articles in the endless shelves of the fungi green volumes of Readers Guide to Periodicals.

Librarians have been assembling some resources to assist our patrons in trying to make sense of the senseless.

First, I understand that there have been some scams related to "relief" agencies that in fact do not exist. This one, from the Red Cross, is real:
https://www.redcross.org/donate/donate.html.

The library owns a graphic novel called "My War with Brian," by Ted Rall. It wounds me every time I read it. It's about a boy who got brutally bullied by another boy, all through junior high school. Repeatedly, the victim appealed to his teachers, his principal, and his parents. Nothing worked. Instead, he was left to his own devices, day after day.