Valatie Free Library

The Valatie Free Library serves the Village of Valatie, the hamlet of Niverville, Kinderhook Lake, and the surrounding area of rural Kinderhook in Columbia County along the scenic Hudson River Valley of New York State. Begun in 1928 as a casual circulation of collected books, the Valatie Free Library Association was chartered in 1931 by the Valatie Parent Teachers Association. Housed in a local Church, the original library owned two-thousand books by 1939 when it moved to its current location—a 600 sq ft cottage. During the past ten years, the Valatie Free Library has seen a literal explosion of activity; in 2002, the library offered just six programs for the public; last year, almost 140. Our need for a larger space to properly attend to this growth is solved by our proposed Sustainable Library project, which will increase our operational space without increasing our operations budget. Our proposed Sustainable Library project caught the attention of the United Nations' recent Earth Summit (Rio+20) during 2012. Created through the retrofit and expansion of an historic freight barn, the new library will provide a centralized location and facility that meets multiple community needs, i.e.'community hub' for the chartered district. The Valatie Free Library is a registered 501(c)(3) organization.