Almost 15 years ago, my family and I decamped from Brunswick for a year-long sojourn in Ljubljana, Slovenia. While there, we were impressed with the ways in which people generally lived in smaller spaces with less stuff. Sorted recycling was the norm. There was at least one tailor and shoe repair shop in every neighborhood. As in other European countries, there was less of a mandate to consume, and there was a vital tradition of prioritizing relationships and communities.
On the weekends, most of the families we knew went out for hours-long walks followed by leisurely lunches. And people crowded the daily city farmers market, which featured a mlekomat, a vending machine for local milk. Unsurprisingly, Slovenia has been regularly celebrated for its sustainable practices; just this past winter, it was deemed one of the top 10 eco-friendly countries in Europe by Hemsol, a Swedish renewable energy company.
What a serendipitous convergence, then, when the Curtis Memorial Library’s own Hazel Onsrud was contacted through the Library of Things Mutual Aid Group by a Slovenian library interested in establishing its own Library of Things. Hazel has been a driving force behind the library’s sustainability initiatives, building our Library of Things so that it is useful to a wide swath of our communities. With one of the largest library collections of “things” in Maine, we now have such diverse items as a fermenting crock, a fruit tree harvester, a sewing machine and a pressure washer.
By providing items that our community can share, the Library of Things helps reduce consumption and waste; moreover, it enables people to access resources that they might not otherwise have had. It also promotes creativity. I would not have even thought that one might make paper bricks for burning in a woodstove before borrowing the brickmaker.
Other sustainability projects that Hazel has helmed include the Growing Literacy program, a collaboration with the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust and Growing to Give; Eco-Crafts; the Sustainable Brunswick and Climate Action Lecture Series; and more. Hazel contributed to Curtis being named the first Certified Sustainable Library outside of New York last year by the Sustainable Libraries Initiative, and was recently appointed to the advisory board of this organization, helping to “champion libraries as beacons of resiliency in our communities.”
Even more exciting is that Hazel was recently named as a Library Journal Mover & Shaker 2024 for her work shaping the future of our library through these many sustainability projects. This award recognizes great leaders and behind-the-scenes contributors from around the world who are innovative, creative, and making a difference moving all types of libraries ahead. Hazel and the entire Curtis staff are constantly seeking more ways to bring library joy to our community of readers, thinkers, makers and doers.
I am certain that the Slovenian library that reached out was delighted to have found Hazel and the Library of Things 4,000 miles away. Find your own way to Curtis Memorial Library and you can share this delight. I’ve got first dibs on the pressure washer, though!
Curtis Memorial Library provides free library cards to Harpswell residents, year-round and seasonal. Lisa Botshon chairs the library’s board of directors. A professor of English at the University of Maine at Augusta, she was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Ljubljana in 2009-10.
“Library Connections” is a monthly column that rotates among the three libraries that serve Harpswell: Cundy’s Harbor, Orr’s Island and Curtis Memorial.
