The idea would have merit even if its only purpose was to serve as a collection of love letters to local libraries.

Across the state, public libraries are asking patrons to write brief accounts of how libraries might have changed their lives. Most regular users of libraries do have such a story to tell, since librarians hear them so often throughout their careers.

It might be the testimonial of someone who first fell in love with the library when he attended story hours as a child and now considers the library to be an invaluable resource in his professional life. Perhaps someone met a spouse while wandering the stacks, or used the library to solve a business problem, or has come to know the place as the only safe, well-lighted haven available in town on cold winter days after school lets out. Or maybe it’s as simple as someone looking back on that very first library card in childhood as her passport to an unexplored universe.

Each library will gather its essays a month from now and choose five that best speak of how the local institutions have changed or enriched lives. A committee of the Maine State Library then will publish the statewide testimonials in a book that will be presented to every elected official, from small-town selectmen to the governor.

A worthwhile project, any way you look at it, but Maine’s public library advocates plan to use the book for a more practical purpose. In these worsening economic times, the document will serve as a statement of need for those local institutions that traditionally suffer when municipal officials become desperate to trim costs.

“Library services are often the first cut when town budgets are cut,” says Barbara McDade, director of the Bangor Public Library. “If we’re headed into hard economic times, people who fund libraries need to understand that they are an essential service to a community, not a frill, and that they should be supported as much as the fire and police departments.”

In her career as a librarian, McDade has heard from many people for whom libraries were an integral part of life. When she started the first public library in rural Augusta County, Va., in 1976, she met a farmer whose extensive library research on livestock convinced him that cattle and sheep could graze together compatibly. Based on that information, the man became the first farmer in the region to begin raising sheep on his large cattle farm. Several years ago, McDade learned that from that humble experiment, Augusta County had gone on to become the largest sheep-producing county east of the Mississippi. In Virginia, she also got to know a shy, latchkey kid who would come into the library every day and immerse himself for hours in books on cartooning. The boy, McDade was delighted to find out, grew up to become a successful animator for the Warner Bros. studios in California.

Yet it was a trustee from that same library’s board who convinced McDade of the need to remain vigilant in fighting for libraries. A year after the library opened, she recalls with a laugh, the trustee questioned the need to buy any more books since the locals seemed to enjoy the ones they already had.

“In some ways we might have helped create this kind of perception by calling them free public libraries,” McDade says. “It might not cost anything for the public to use them, but it certainly costs a lot of money to run them. These are not static operations.”

McDade says the Bangor library usually has fared well in difficult times. Bangor residents and their elected leaders have always had the highest regard and affection for their 500,000-volume downtown library, long considered to be one

of the busiest of its size in the country. The Portland Public Library and the Maine State Library, on the other hand, already have been asked to trim their budgets.

“Personnel and books are a library’s two biggest costs,” McDade says. “So where do you cut back without jeopardizing the quality of your services?”

McDade dismisses the increasingly familiar refrain that the Internet is rapidly making public libraries and their books less important to a community. For one thing, she says, not everyone has a computer at home – the waiting lines for the library’s dozens of computers is ample evidence of that.

“Many of the databases we subscribe to here, and offer without charge, will cost people something if they want to access them at home,” she says. “And most people still do need information specialists like librarians, who are trained to get people what they need quickly and efficiently.”

Besides, McDade says, public libraries can provide a service that all of the home computers sitting on desktops across America can never hope to achieve.

“A library is a community center as much as anything, a gathering place for people of all ages and interests,” she says. “Immediately after the attacks on September 11, for example, when everyone was still in shock, we noticed that lots of people came in just to sit and talk and be with other people in a nonthreatening environment. The library was their meeting place, and that’s an important role in any community.”

Tom Weber’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.