Photo courtesy of Emma Davis
Emma Davis, a library specialist at the Hoover Public Library in Hoover, Alabama, won the Alabama Library Association's Distinguished Service Award in July 2022 for work she did on projects to install "little free libraries" around the city and put a children's Storywalk at Aldridge Gardens.
Emma Davis, a library specialist at the Hoover Public Library, this year received the Distinguished Service Award from the Alabama Library Association for work on two projects over the past year.
Davis spearheaded a project to put “little free libraries” in five Hoover apartment complexes with $2,500 in donations from an anonymous donor and worked with the Hoover Helps nonprofit to coordinate placement of 10 more “little free libraries” funded by Hoover Helps.
“Little free libraries” are wooden boxes that allow people in a community to share books with one another freely. Frequently, someone or a group of people provide an initial stockpile of books, and people can take the books, read them and return them to the box when they are done. Other people in the community can add to the collection as they please.
The Hoover Public Library library got its first three “little free libraries” in place in April of last year and expanded that to five by August 2021, 11 by May of this year and 15 by August of this year, with the last one going into place in the Wildwood Apartments, Davis said.
The little libraries are in 14 Hoover apartment complexes and at Aldridge Gardens. The other apartment complexes are Chestnut Tree, City Heights Hoover, Elevation Hoover, Hawthorne at Lake Heather, Hawthorne at Wisteria, Lorna Place, Ridge Crossings, Riverchase Landing, Royal Oaks of Riverchase, Summerchase at Riverchase, The Place at Galleria, The Retreat at Rocky Ridge and Thirty-one 32 Cypress.
The library just received a $12,500 federal Strengthening Communities grant administered by the Alabama Public Library Service to buy five more “little free libraries” and stock them, Davis said. Those likely will go in other Hoover apartment complexes, she said.
Davis also organized a Storywalk project at Aldridge Gardens that allows children to read portions of a book as they walk through the gardens. Each page of the book is enlarged and placed in a glass case for children to read, with the pages spread out over certain distances as children walk and experience nature.
The Storywalk opened in November, and a new book is selected each quarter to be featured in the glass cases.
Davis said she was surprised to receive the Distinguished Service Award because a colleague from the Hoover Public Library — outreach librarian Katie Jane Morris — won the award last year after organizing a week of virtual workshops and programs for the Jefferson County Public Library Association staff week in 2020. These programs focused on ways to make library programming virtual as well as mindfulness workshops.
It's unusual for two people from the same library to win the award in back-to-back years, Davis said.
Davis, 26, is a 2014 graduate of Spain Park High School who earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Alabama in 2018 and a master’s degree in library information science from Alabama in 2020. She started working at the Hoover Public Library as a temporary page in 2015 and was hired as a library specialist in 2017.
