On Friday, May 26, 2000, I had the privilege to be present at the signing of historic library legislation. On that day, at the White Branch of the Pueblo City-County Library District in West Pueblo, Governor Bill Owens signed Senate Bill 85 into law.

I was, briefly, a Cub Scout. I quit after about a year, mostly because we never got around to doing all the things I though Scouts were supposed to do -- go camping, for instance.

Instead, we made necklaces out of pennies, and spent hours practicing military drills in the basement of the Methodist church. I even won a neckerchief clasp for winning a "drill off " -- correctly doing right, left, and about faces longer than anyone else in the den. I'm still not sure just why we were doing that.

I just returned from a New Mexico Library Association conference. New Mexico is gearing up for Gates Grants. The embattled Bill Gates has been giving literally millions of dollars to public libraries around the country in order to set up public workstations where people can have access to PCs, both for word processing, and for Internet access.

The money is targeted to the poorest states first. So New Mexico is in the first wave of distribution.

The Douglas Public Library District was created by voters in November, 1990. Before then, we were a department of the county.

In 1991, we made the biggest change in our services. Our three full service libraries -- one in Castle Rock, one in Parker, one in the area now known as Lone Tree -- adopted a regular 7 day a week schedule. Before then, some of our libraries were open only 3 or 4 days a week, and all of them were closed on Fridays and Sundays. Not only that, our branches had different schedules depending upon the time of the year.