July 31, 2024 – Leonardtown, Md. – St. Mary’s County Library is pleased to release the Fiscal Year 2024 Annual Report. View the Annual Report.
St. Mary’s County Library had a great year!
Find the statistics, stories, and images that help us demonstrate the Library’s community impact this past year. Highlights include:
- 1,039,038 Items Checked Out
- 205,153 digital items were checked out in Fiscal Year 2024 – that’s 22% increase over FY2023
- 314,043 visitors came to one of our Libraries in FY2024
- Over 1,700 free events that nearly 40,000 people attended. Our attendance for events was up 32% over last year!
- 2,008 groups used the meeting rooms and 5,212 individuals or groups used study rooms.
- Our computers had nearly 34,000 sessions logged
- Our free WiFi was accessed over 20,000 times
The Mobile Library is on the road and held 48 community stops, and with help from Library staff, attended 156 events throughout the County. All together, St. Mary’s County Library visited over 9,500 community members this year. Our digital checkouts increased by 22% in just one year. We added access to The Shelf, which offers thousands of Spanish language movies, television shows, and live performances and American Mosaic, which provides access to The African American Experience, The American Indian Experience, The Asian American Experience, and The Latino American Experience. The three Library locations opened SEED Libraries that have given out over 2,500 seed packets to over 400 community members.
St. Mary’s County Library completed our Strategic Plan to help guide our organization for the next 5 years. The Leonardtown Rotary and SMECO partnered with the Leonardtown Library and Charlotte Hall Library to install new Storywalks. All three Library buildings now have Memory Labs which allows customers to take physical memories and make them digital for free! VHS tapes, cassettes, film negatives, slides, photos, and documents can all be converted to digital files in just a few simple steps. Through a generous donation from our Friends of the St. Mary’s County Library, Lexington Park Library got new shelving to help with accessibility and made room for a future makerspace. Don’t worry! The collection was not significantly changed, it was just reorganized.
“Fiscal Year 2024 brought many new services and technologies to St. Mary’s County Library,” said Michael Blackwell, St. Mary’s County Library Director, “providing even more opportunities for county residents for learning and enjoyment. Our digital collection is even more robust than before, even as we continue to offer the best in new books and our greatest asset: outstanding employees dedicated to excellent customer service. Thank you to St. Mary’s County Commissioners for their continued support for the Library and to our many thousands of customers for helping us stay strong.”
Thank you for helping us have an unforgettable year!
