Eight Branches and a Bookmobile: Lincoln City Libraries in Program Season
Lincoln's library system has served the city since 1875 — and its November calendar of storytimes, tech help and author events is built for the dark evenings.
Lincoln City Libraries is among the oldest civic institutions in the city — founded in 1875, when Lincoln was eight years old — and today it runs Bennett Martin Public Library downtown and seven branches across the city, plus the bookmobile and outreach services that carry the collection into neighborhoods.
The downtown Bennett Martin library anchors the system with the Jane Pope Geske Heritage Room of Nebraska authors — one of the nation's notable collections of a single state's literature — alongside the main collection, meeting spaces and the system's administrative heart.
November fills the system's calendar the way patrons like it: preschool storytimes in the mornings, after-school teen programs, technology and genealogy help sessions, book groups, and the author events that the Nebraska literary scene — unusually rich for a state this size — reliably supplies.
The library's work has expanded past books into the civic infrastructure Lincoln leans on: public computers and printing, job and benefits navigation help, voter information in election season, and warm, staffed rooms open to anyone with a library card — or, for most services, without one.
Lincoln's branches are placed like the city grew: Gere in the southeast, Walt Anderson in the university's shadow, Eiseley in the northwest, and the neighborhood branches — Bethany, South, Victor Anderson — that function as their districts' living rooms.
Cards are free to Lincoln and Lancaster County residents, and the digital library runs around the clock. A city that produced Willa Cather's readers keeps its libraries like it keeps its capitol: as the point.
