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The Branch Roll: Nine Branches, and Where North Liberty Stands in the Building Line

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1920 – present

North Liberty was the seventh branch seat the system opened, in a building programme that ran from 1920 to 2009 and put a branch in each taxed township's town. The roll is the system's own history page, read whole, and it prints at the size it bears on this branch — the full telling of each South Bend branch belongs to South Bend's build. The first branch was River Park, in 1920, initially inside River Park School; the Tutt Branch followed in 1928, named for the second head librarian; the Western Branch in 1939; the first bookmobile in 1953, for residents "not served by a branch"; the Francis Branch in 1977, opened as the Clay Branch and later renamed for Director Francis. Four new branch buildings opened in November 1983 — Tutt and River Park first, then Western and LaSalle — and then the programme turned to the townships: North Liberty in 1986; Lakeville in December 1990, opened inside Lakeville High School; the Centre Branch in 1999; the German Branch in 2009. The counts of the system differ by what is being counted, and print whole: the history page's Main plus "nine branch locations"; the locations page's nine branches — Centre, Francis, German, Lakeville, LaSalle, North Liberty, River Park, Tutt, Western — plus Main, the Community Learning Center, and Studio 304; a national case study's "ten outlets, including its main branch"; and a 2018 press release's loose "10 branches." North Liberty is one of the nine branches in every counting. The branch-building era that produced it ran under Director Napoli, whose 2015 honors credit all nine branches to his leadership; it was built while the system was still legally the South Bend Public Library, four years before the county name arrived — a township branch of a city-named library, which is exactly the halfway state the 1990 rename tidied.

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Source: The Branch Roll: Nine Branches, and Where North Liberty Stands in the Building Line, Moosed History by Project Moosed, https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/north-liberty/libraries/branch-roll-nine-branches-and-where-north-liberty-stands/