The collection, and the local-history shelf

THE HOLDINGS AT THE STRENGTHS THE CARRIERS CARRY

The collection stands at more than fifty thousand titles in the library's own mid-2000s accounting — and the part of it that matters most to this build is the corner that keeps the town's own past. The staff manual's figure — "more than 50,000 different titles," new ones arriving almost daily — is the library's own, and the audited statements give the shelf a second measure: books and other materials carried as capital assets at $439,471 on December 31, 2022. A current count at line strength — volumes, circulation, and the district's service population as the state statistics series prints them — was not extracted in this section and stands as a named residue in the closing ledger, with the Indiana Public Library Statistics series named as its settler. The local-history holding, by contrast, is attested in the board's own paperwork: the library's minutes carry, month after month, a standing Reference and Local History report, joined in 2017 by a Local History and Digitization report — a staffed local-history function with an active digitization program, in a library of this size a deliberate act of institutional will. Its deepest single holding this section can name is the press file: the South Bend Tribune on microfilm from 1960 to about 2002, in the staff manual's accounting — four decades of the county's paper of record, on film, in the town it covered. The town's pictorial record exists in print as well: an Images of America volume on New Carlisle, drawn from twenty collections — the photographs leg and the sources leg carry it at their own strengths. And one measured absence belongs here: the state's digital library, Indiana Memory, returns this town's photographs under the St. Joseph County Public Library's South Bend Tribune Photographs collection — the county library's digitization, not this one's — and no collection contributed by this library surfaced in the searches run for this build. The library digitizes; where its digital output publicly lives is a question its own reports, in the minutes archive, are the settler for.

Principal sources: the library's Staff Manual (the 50,000-title figure; the Tribune microfilm run — read whole); State Board of Accounts audit 2021–2022 (books and other materials at $439,471, schedule of capital assets); board minutes 2015–2017 (the standing local-history and digitization reports, in the agenda and department reports); Indiana Memory search results as reached (the town's photographs under the county library's Tribune collection).