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as of November 2026
The system's local-history strength sits at Main Library in South Bend; its own public pages state no local-history holdings at the North Liberty Branch and name no North Liberty newspaper anywhere — and Pass 1's open question settles on exactly that negative. The Local & Family History department occupies the third floor of Main Library, 304 South Main Street, its librarians helping with local history projects and photograph digitization, with hours running Monday to Thursday 9 to 7, Friday and Saturday 9 to 5, and Sunday afternoons in the school year. The system is a FamilySearch affiliate library. The department offers lookups at a distance — obituaries, marriage licenses, newspaper articles among St. Joseph County items — links the county obituary index, takes booked research consultations, and runs four reservable digitization stations handling photographs, documents, slides, negatives, film, cassettes, and records in four-hour blocks; its archival materials sit in closed stacks behind finding aids. Its resource types, as its own librarian described them to the board, run "clipping files, digitization equipment, city directories, high school yearbooks, microfilm, archival collections, rare and fragile books and maps" — held at Main, with the digital collection as the online route. Pass 1 of this build left a named gap here, G-SP-6: the branch's local-history holdings at the system's own statement. This pass settles it, negatively: neither the department's page nor the locations page, each read in full, states any local-history holdings at the North Liberty Branch, and neither names any North Liberty newspaper title or microfilm range held anywhere in the system; the branch's own entry lists only its three features. Whatever North Liberty material the branch physically holds, the system's own public pages make no statement of it — and the build prints the negative at that strength, with the department's own guides and the system catalog named as the settlers for any future positive statement. The contrast stands next door and is not merged: the Walkerton Heritage Museum holds North Liberty newspaper microfilm for 1912–1962, on Pass 1's record; and the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris library — a different district — claims county newspaper microfilm from 1853 on its own materials page, a claim that belongs to that library and is not attributed to this one. North Liberty's own church records do reach the system's shelves at one remove: the genealogical society's county church-records crosswalk credits this system with holding the records of North Liberty United Methodist, Pine Creek Church of the Brethren, and St. John Evangelical Lutheran — the society's statement about the system, printed at that strength. The digital door is Michiana Memory, the department's collections site, launched 1 August 2015 with more than two hundred objects digitized jointly with the university archives in South Bend across named collections — county maps and atlases, civil rights and African American history, arts and architecture, postcards, high school yearbooks, local history — and grown since around its largest holding, the South Bend Tribune Photographs Collection: negatives and prints spanning 1937–1999, donated by the newspaper at a count of as many as a million photographs, of which the department's librarians curated and released more than ten thousand digitized images in September 2021. Its extent prints in conflict, because its own finding aid carries both figures: "21 cabinets, 94 boxes" in one copy's summary and "21 cabinets, 67 boxes" in a later copy's inventory line, the dates agreeing; no single box count is published here. No carrier opened enumerates North Liberty items inside Michiana Memory — no North Liberty-named collection, and no count of North Liberty-tagged objects, was reached — and that enumeration banks as a named gap (G-LIB-9), its settler a live browse of the collection on the town's name. No size for the genealogy and local-history collection as a collection was stated by any carrier opened (G-LIB-8); the latest system-wide figures reached are 2018's — 479,139 volumes and 29,323 eBooks — and the board's own year-end account for 2022: almost two million checkouts, more than 585,000 visits, 110,000 reference questions answered.