About Us

Antonia Krupicka-Smith

Library Director

As we head into the New Year, we have many programs to be excited about, but first I would like to share some of our accomplishments from the last couple months.  In the fall of 2022 we were able to launch LIT: Student accounts with the Council Bluffs Community School District.  These accounts will support academic success by providing every student, who opts in, access to the electronic offerings provided by the library including free virtual tutoring services, reviewed articles and resources, ebooks and eaudiobooks, and study prep and testing materials.  We are excited about this new partnership and look forward to expanding into Lewis Central Community Schools during 2023.

We also completed our oral history workshops and building out our podcast and portable sound booth makerspace kits to provide more training and tools within the community to support storytelling and the sharing of oral history.  The sharing of our stories is vital in capturing the history of our people and our place and these workshops and the supporting tools we purchased with the support from an Iowa Humanities grant and the Council Bluffs Public Library Foundation are wonderful resources to support our community doing just that.

Finally we welcomed back the Library Foundation Speaker Series with our first author, Geraldine Brooks.  It was a wonderful evening of discussion around her recently published historical fiction book, Horse.  I am excited in the New Year that we will be welcoming two more authors in this series, humorist nonfiction author Mary Roach on January 12^th, and fiction author Elin Hilderbrand on February 16^th.  I encourage you to read their titles now and purchase tickets for the events at the Arts Center on the Iowa Western Community College campus.

We are also looking forward to some wonderful new offerings in our Makerspace programming to include basic sewing, embroidery machine projects, and basic soldering.  Look for some new tool offerings as well including a heat press which will be great for creating designs for textiles such as t-shirts and bags.

I also encourage you to look for the announcement of our One Community Reads titles and author visits coming in March and April 2023.  The titles will be announced in January.  The theme this year is “The World is your Garden” and focuses on community gardens and ways to build community and fight food insecurity within our community.

I am excited about the upcoming line-up of authors and events for all ages and I hope you will visit the library often during the coming winter months.