Yesterday, I was walking back home from a meeting and passed the Brooklyn Public Library’s Nostrand Avenue Branch. Since I knew I had a library card in my wallet that I wanted to update with my address – and realizing that I have not been in a library for at least the last ten years – I decided to go inside, and in doing so, discovered just how amazingly different the library of today is from what I remember.

When I was a kid, I used to love to go to the Avenue J Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library to research my three favorite topics – dinosaurs, snakes and sharks. Using the five-cent Xerox machine that never once made good copies, I would copy pages of various books on the subjects so I could take them home and learn all I could about what I considered to be three fascinating species of animals.

From what I can recall, the library I vested as a child had books that you could borrow, newspapers and magazines that you could read – and records that you could rent for a few days. And every now and then, they would have an author come to the library and read a passage from the book they wrote.

The libraries of today are a whole different story.

I immediately realized the difference when I received my new library card – because the card I had was so old I was no longer in the system. My new “Access Brooklyn Card” has an information stripe on the back and says, “Library Debit Card” on the front. When I asked the librarian what that meant, she told me that I can go over to the Library Card Kiosk and put money on my library card so I can automatically pay any late fees and make copies on the hopefully newer copy machine just by inserting my card. I could also use the card to reserve and renew materials online and reserve library computers. She then asked me to choose a Personal Identification Number for the card so she could activate it. This really impressed me because I remember when library cards were nothing but business cards that had my name written on it in pen.

After I got my new card, I decided to look around – and was absolutely amazed at what I saw.

The lower level of the library had at least a dozen computers that all had Internet access – not counting the dozen other Internet-ready computers that were in the children’s section upstairs. Then, as I looked around at what you could borrow, I saw that besides being able to borrow books – you could audio books both on cassette and compact disc, as well as CDs, videos and DVDs. And as for the books, the kind of books you can borrow have come a long way from “Fiction” and “Non-Fiction.” They now have sections on the Occult, self-help and even sections of books in other languages. And while they still have newspapers and magazines to read, the selection is twenty times what it was the last time I found myself in a library.

I remember attending the 100th Anniversary Celebration for the Brooklyn Public Library on November 19, 1997 and hearing the Library’s President talk about the many advances the Brooklyn Public Library has made over the years and will continue to make. Considering that it had been years since was in a library before that event and even more years after it, I never got the chance to see the implementation of the advances the President of the library describe first hand – until I walked into a library for the first time in years yesterday – and realized what I was missing.

Now that I have been to a library and once again have an active library card, I plan to take advantage of all that the sixty branches of the Brooklyn Public Library has to offer. I also plan to return to the Nostrand Avenue branch next week and donate a copy of my book to the library so kids in my borough can borrow it if they choose to do so. I also plan to go to www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org and activate my online library account.

And now that I see how amazing the libraries here in Brooklyn are and realize all that they have to offer, I will make it a point to visit the library more than once a decade.