A week from today, the Carmel Clay Public Library Foundation will host a roundtable discussion moderated by Inside Indiana Business host and founder, Gerry Dick, on the matter of the role of libraries in entrepreneurship and business success. Along with Matt Frey, owner of Bub’s Burgers & Ice Cream and Bub’s Café, Mickey Maurer, chairman of IBJ Media Corp., IBJ columnist, and author of “10 Essential Principles of Entrepreneurship You Never Learned in School,” and Mo Merhoff, Carmel Chamber of Commerce president, I will answer questions and posit thoughts on the role of a library in modern times.
It is likely to come as no surprise that I am counted among the believers in the role of the humanities to help us understand and cling to one another in spite (or perhaps because) of the dehumanizing tumult that surrounds us almost everywhere in almost every way. There is nothing that brings us closer to empathy for the life of another more than literature. In the fear of Anne Frank, the adventure of Jack London’s Buck and the tragedy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we are able to find new perspective. But libraries do far more. They provide access to thinking – and to thinkers. In a world wide web, they are a crucial entrée, at once rousing a thirst for knowledge and quenching it.
Once imagined to be piles of dusty old books, modern libraries, through a myriad of programs, are intended to inspire, inform and initiate. Join us from 7:30 to 9 a.m. on Sept. 17 in the Program Room at the Carmel Clay Public Library, 4th Ave. SE, Carmel. Call the Foundation Office at 814-3905 for more info. Registration is not required for the free event. Besides, they provide the bagels and coffee and how can that not be a good thing?!