This month we tip our gardening hats to the Green Bay Botanical Garden (GBBG)—yes, home of the Packers—as TinyCat’s Library of the Month. Linda Gustke, Director of Education & Guest Experience at GBBG, was kind enough to field my questions this month:

Who are you, and what is your mission—your “raison d’être”?

Green Bay Botanical Garden’s mission statement is this: We connect people with plants by providing year-round educational and recreational experiences for everyone in an environment that engages, inspires and refreshes.

Tell us some interesting things about how your library supports the community.

We love to be a resource for our gardening community! Our library has a wide variety of gardening books, as well as some DVD’s, for adults—from starting a garden, to garden design, landscaping, native plants, vegetable gardens, grasses, plant lore, even backyard chickens! We also have a Children’s Library that brings nature to life through stories about all that happens in the Garden—plants, animals, lifecycles, plant stories and more. We host a story time each Tuesday morning with stories from the Children’s Library, and the library is especially utilized by families visiting the Garden during the summertime.

What are some of your favorite items in your collection?

In our adult section, I love the books by Amy Stewart: Wicked Bugs, Wicked Plants, The Drunken Botanist. In our kids section, it’s hard to pick a favorite, they’re all so great!

What’s a particular challenge your library experiences?

We continue to run out of space in our building for our staff, and that means the library gets relocated and underutilized. It has such great resources that we would love to make it more widely available, but it’s been difficult to devote the staff time to it to really make it more usable for the community.

Hopefully having an online catalog makes your library’s visibility just a little bit easier! Speaking of TinyCat, what’s your favorite thing about TinyCat, and what’s something you’d love to see implemented or developed?

We love that it has brought our collection online and it makes it easy for guests and members to check out books! I haven’t worked with it as closely yet (our staff member that got it up and running recently left) so I don’t have suggestions for things I’d like to see implemented or developed at this time.

Want to learn more about GBBG?

Visit their website at https://gbbg.org/, follow them on Facebook / Instagram / Twitter, and explore their full TinyCat collection here.

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To read up on TinyCat’s previous Libraries of the Month, visit the TinyCat Post archive here.

Want to be considered for TinyCat’s Library of the Month? Send us a Tweet @TinyCat_lib or email Kristi at kristi@librarything.com.

Labels: libraries, Library of the Month, TinyCat