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Serving Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and other towns of the North Carolina High Country | Founded 05-05-05
January 25, 2007 issue
Dr. Daniel Barron: New Director For AMY Regional Library
Story by Celeste von Mangan
After serving as interim director from August through December 2006, Dr. Daniel Barron has accepted the permanent position as director of the Avery, Mitchell and Yancey Regional Library system effective January 1, replacing former director Patti Bowers.
“I fell in love with the interim director job,” said Barron. “The director’s role fits so neatly into my initial retirement goals, as I intended to work with local literacy efforts. One of the wonderful things about the library is it’s a three-county library. We’re basically one government with three counties, and all those pull together. It is important to emphasize services beyond checking in and checking out books. We’re going to expand library services over the next few years.”
Born and raised in the North Carolina mountains, Barron recently returned to his hometown of Bakersville after a 30-year absence. He and his wife Brette, an artist and owner of Hedgerow Arts, built a house on land that has been in his family for almost 100 years.
“I can walk out on my back porch and in the winter, look down and see the spot where I was born,” said Barron. “My fourth great-grandfathers were David Baker and William Wiseman, so my roots go deep.”
Like his mountain heritage, Barron’s roots in the literacy and library world also run deep.
When he was a child, he and his dog spent many hours in the old library behind the historic courthouse in Bakersville. Ms. Dorothy Thomas, the first countywide librarian, took Barron with her on bookmobile trips during the summer. Thomas gave the young Barron his first copy of The Wind in the Willows, and he has continued collecting editions over the years. He currently owns more than 300 copies of the book.
Barron’s mother worked for the library and served as the librarian for five schools before she retired.
Barron majored in library science at Appalachian State University, became a media specialist in Gastonia and worked weekends, nights and summers at Gaston Lincoln Regional Library. He eventually earned three degrees and retired in August 2006 after 30 years at the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science where he served as a faculty member for 27 years and as director of the program for 3 years.
“I loved my job and the people of South Carolina, ” said Barron, “and while I feel that much was accomplished during my tenure there, you don’t know how happy I am to be home in the mountains of North Carolina. This is my heritage and my home.”
As director of the AMY Regional Library, Barron said his number one goal is 100 percent literacy, with a focus on ensuring that the counties’ young people are literate. Both the Avery and Mitchell County libraries are now in the process of being remodeled to accommodate middle school and high school students.
“I believe that the library, like the family and the church, is one of the only institutions in our society that remains with the individual for a lifetime to support, influence and expand his or her educational opportunity,” he said. “If you can’t read, you can’t succeed!”
In addition to promoting literacy, Barron will emphasize children, families, health issues, economic development and cultural heritage.
“We will collaborate with all organizations,” Barron said. We work with Avery County Partnership for Children, and in all three counties we work with the domestic violence programs. Also, we are involved with two Hispanic centers and we just discovered there is one in Avery which we will also work with.”
Barron continued, “Though libraries’ primary function is education, we want to show people how important libraries are to the economy as well. And since this area has many people interested in genealogy, we are focusing on that with ancestry,com. Anyone who knows anything about genealogy will say, ‘Oh wow, this is great!’ NC LIVE is another service we provide. All our library users are able to use that at the library or at home. We are going to develop programming to help people become involved in history—especially young people. James Baldwin said, ‘If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.’ Books are half the story, but they will always be a part of the story.”