BeachFest!

Christine and Olivia (on the right) try to decide what color they should top off their sand art with.

We want to thank everyone who made sand art at our tent or grabbed a book or two from our Pop-Up Library Saturday at BeachFest!

We hope you had as much fun as we did.

Allison and Brian smile as they add another layer to Allison's sand art.

We'll be having more Pop-Up Libraries in August, as well. You'll find it during the Mentor Rocks concerts, Matt Henk Benefit Softball Tournament, Concord Community Days, Mentor CityFest and more!

Christopher shows us his almost finished jar.

For more—seriously, a lot more—photos from BeachFest, check out Mentor Library's Facebook page.

Also, to the artist who sculpted an enormous Velveteen Rabbit, thanks for making us cry at the beach.

Flash libraries popping up in your neighborhood

Kristin, one of our reference librarians, at a flash library in Veterans Park.

In a perfect world, nobody would live more than a block from the library. Every person—child, teen or adult—could come to the library on a whim.

However, we live in a world of finite resources, and it would be impossible for us to build a branch on every block. So we try to do the next best thing and bring the library to you.

We do it in a lot of ways: our digital services that let you download eBooks, stream video and music, or download mp3s from home; our little free libraries; Beach Reads.

And our Flash Libraries are going to be springing up at parks, cul-de-sacs and farmers' markets this summer.

If you're not familiar with a Flash Library, they're similar to Bookmobiles. We come to your neck of the woods with popular movies and books. If you have a library card you can check them out—same as if you were in a brick-and-mortar library. And if you don't have a library card, well you can get one of those too. (And you really should have a library card.)

We have already brought our Flash Library to Lake Metroparks Veterans Park and you'll likely see us there again soon.

We're also bringing our Flash Library to the city of Mentor's Final Fridays, Headlands BeachFest on July 26 and Concord Community Days on Aug. 16.

Where else do you want to see our Flash Library? How can we help bring Mentor Library to you?