Nearly every other week, the Wallingford Public Library hosts a presentation on one of the various topics pertinent to the lives of the citizens in the town of Wallingford.
Ms. Beth Devlin, the Head of Community Activities at the Library, briefly described her role in bringing these presentations to the Library. “My job is to bring a variety of programs geared to adults,” she said. “There are some general topics that I try to hit on, including literature, science and technology, environment, music, art, history, and health.” The presentations aim to educate the public about these subjects; for example, the Library is currently hosting a series of environmental films and discussion and another series of lectures on the American Revolution. “These lectures are all presented by vetted presenters,” Ms. Devlin noted. “They’re either professors or historians of some sort.”
In addition, the Library also hosts stand-alone programs with topics ranging from “solo” traveling to entrepreneurship.
The library offers educational programs in addition to programs purely for entertainment, such as cooking demonstrations and musical performances.
“We consider our mission to be able to bring to our community a wide variety of information,” explained Ms. Devlin. “We have a great community of lifelong learners, so a lot of us are just always going to be students.”
Regarding the process of finding topics and presenters, Ms. Devlin stated that many people give recommendations as to what they would like to see in the Library next. “I have people calling me all the time,” she said. “There’s always people interested in getting their messages out to the public.” The Library also partners up with various local organizations — such as the Wallingford Police Department, several restaurants, the Spanish Community of Wallingford (SCOW), and Masonicare, a local nursing home — to coordinate and run these programs.
“This library has always been involved in programming these events,” Ms. Devlin said. “But I think that it’s been taken from a new level from the interest that we get. We usually get an excellent crowd.”
These presentations, as Ms. Devlin made sure to emphasize, are all free and open to the public. People are welcome to look and register for upcoming events online at the Wallingford Public Library’s website.
According to Ms. Devlin, Choate students are also more than welcome to come to and even host these programs. “In years past, I’ve actually worked with Choate’s a cappella groups,” Ms. Devlin said. “We’ve had them perform here — I’m always open to that. And if you represent a club and you’d like to do a presentation here to the public, I’d be really interested in working with you on that as well.”
