Mission Statement

Mission Statement

The mission of the Charlestown-Clark County Public Library shall be:
  1. To assemble, preserve, and administer electronically accessible, educational, and recreational collections in facilities that are convenient to daily life patterns of our constituents and are accessible to all in the most user friendly way.
  2. To serve as a community access center for timely and reliable information.
  3. To provide a place where inquiring minds may encounter the original, sometimes unorthodox and critical ideas so necessary as stimulants in a society that depends, for its survival, on free competition of ideas.
  4. To support the inter-connectivity of educational, business, civic, and cultural activities of the communities.
  5. To provide opportunity and encouragement for children, young people, and adults to participate in life long learning with sensitivity to anyone with special needs.
  6. To seek to continually identify community needs to provide educational opportunities and programs to meet such needs and to cooperate with other organizations, agencies, and institutions that can provide opportunities, programs, and services to meet community needs.
  7. To provide competent, well-trained, courteous, community minded staff to be the gatekeepers to the many information opportunities the library has, to access information within the local system, and throughout the library and information network.
  8. To work within the financial resources of the library to achieve the library’s mission and goals.

The public library system in northern Clark County, Indiana, is currently composed of three small and two medium sized libraries, and a bookmobile. There is another urban township library in the county. The philosophy of the Library Board and therefore the staff is to serve our suburban and rural communities with permanent community-focused library facilities that are situated within the patterns of our constituents’ everyday activities. A small community based library can provide the most popular reading materials to a wide variety of constituents and can also be an entry point into a sophisticated information system through electronic links to union catalogs, databases, indices, and interlibrary loan throughout the world.