Monterey Public Library
625 Pacific St., Monterey
(831) 646-3932, www.monterey.org/library
For 2012-13, there were 500,000 items borrowed, 335,000 visits to the library or bookmobile, almost 10,000 people attended 224 cultural and informational programs, the help desk fielded 32,000 questions and volunteers gave 3,500 hours. “Over 800 people attended the multicultural Winter Celebration in one day,” Burton says. “It was a busy day.” But it was just another day in the life of the first library founded (in 1849) in California.