(gentle music) - Oh, hey, hi there.

Today we're in a really special place, one that holds untold adventures and histories, more than you could read in a lifetime.

- Two entire city blocks of nothing but books.

- And you can see all the things that people read 100 years ago.

- Hi there, I'm Chrisena, and today we are exploring one of my favorite places in the world - the library.

To be specific, we are visiting Buffalo's Central Library downtown.

Shh, let's go.

♪ Let's go, let's go, let's go ♪ ♪ Let's go ♪ (singer giggles) - [Chrisena] The Buffalo & Erie County Public Library consists of a central hub and eight branches in the city of Buffalo and 22 other libraries in Western New York.

These serve as centers of information, education, culture, and entertainment for residents.

The Central Library - where we are today- holds special collections of local history, genealogy, music and rare books.

- Hey Chrisena, welcome to the Central Library.

- Hey, Dan.

So nice to meet you.

- Yeah, thanks for coming.

Well, right now we are in the brand new children's space.

It's where kids come to get their books, play a bit, we do story time here, a little bit of everything.

- Now, where do all the books come from?

- I think it's just easier to show you, so why don't you follow me?

- Okay.

- And then lucky you get to be authorized personnel for the day.

(laughs) So this is shipping and receiving.

It's where we organize all of the books coming into the library but also leaving the library.

We have bins for every library in the system here.

Kenmore, Kenilworth, Tonawanda, Grand Island, Newstead, Bookmobile, Library To Go, the Central Library, and then Eden at the end over there.

- When I go to my library in my neighborhood and there's a book that I want that they don't currently have, when I request that book, is this how it gets to me?

- Oh yes, absolutely.

We have trucks coming every single day to take books and take them all throughout Erie County.

- So those trucks, they send books, but do they also bring books back?

- Yes, of course, yes.

We house millions of books here at the Central Library.

And this here is the tiers.

This is over a million books alone on this floor.

And if you were to walk down this way, you will see that this floor alone is two entire city blocks of nothing but books.

These books not only go to people looking for them in Erie County, but throughout the entire country as well.

We have fiction, we have nonfiction, we have magazine folios, graphic novels, kids books, teen books.

I mean, we have everything up here.

- It's a lot of books, so that sounds like a lot of work.

- You know, it is a lot of work, but it's the job of a library to provide access to books and we take that really seriously.

So this here is our banned book display.

Now, when a book is challenged, if someone who is attempting to remove a book from either a school or a library, and so a banned book is a book that is actually removed from a library or a school.

And these are the most challenged and banned books as of last year.

- Why would a book get banned?

- Well, we see book bannings predominantly in books that target children, middle schoolers and high schoolers.

And they get banned because a parent finds the content inappropriate and thinks that kids shouldn't be exposed to it.

But at the library we say that onus is on the parent.

If a parent doesn't want you to read a book, that's fine, but everyone should still have access to it.

We see most challenge and bans happening in public libraries and school libraries, but if a book gets banned, its impact is really on the community because it's making it harder for anyone to get access to that book.

So my friend Susan's going to show you an entirely different side of the library, so have fun.

- Great, I will.

See ya.

- See ya.

- Welcome to the Grovsenor Room.

This is the Library's Special Collections Department.

So, a great thing to do when you come into our Special Collections Department, if you want to do a project, a great place to start is here at our Local History File.

And this file has been in development for over 100 years.

Librarians, before there was the internet, would read newspaper articles, read books, read different pamphlets, and they would write down citations, like notes, based on different topics.

So if you were looking up the history of a home, for example, or if you were looking up someone famous that came to visit, you could come to the local history file and see if you can find an article or a book that a librarian has read sometime in the last 100 years and thought was really important and something that people might want to know about.

And you'll look in here.

I'm going to see here on this file it says "schools, grammar schools, number one."

So this would be Public School Number One.

And when you look into here, it says, "Buffalo Scrapbook," and then there's this weird number.

So if you want to look, we can go take a peek at the scrapbook.

- At a scrapbook?

Heck yeah, let's go.

- All right, let's do it.

This way.

Here's our scrapbook area, so let's take a look.

Now, when you have a book and you're not sure exactly how it works, the best place to look is the table of contents, right?

- Makes sense.

- So, how is this listed?

It's listed by school number, so school number one, that makes it easy, right?

So let's see, 217 to 225.

Let's flip there and see what we can discover.

So you see these are all old newspaper articles that someone very carefully clipped and put in this book.

We're here on page 217 and what do we see a picture of?

- Public School Number One.

And then it says there, "November 14th, 1900."

- Yes, so that is when this article was written, and it's always important when you're doing a project to write down the citation or the information about where you got the information, for a couple of reasons.

One, so you can find it again, right?

And also so that you are sort of acknowledging the people that did the work even 124 years ago.

That their work is important and that we value it.

Have you ever seen microfilm rolls before?

- I haven't.

- Okay, so let's pull it out here.

January 2nd through the 31st, 1924.

So what they used to do is they would take the old newspapers and they would take pictures of every single page and they would collect the pictures on these long rolls of microfilm.

Newspaper isn't really meant to last forever, it's not the best quality paper because papers are supposed to be inexpensive, right?

You can see the cartoons and the photos and the advertisements and all the things that people read 100 years ago.

Okay, so here we are at our microfilm machine.

(machine whirring) You can see what kind of clothing people wore, you could see how much things cost.

This is an interesting thing to see about what was happening 100 years ago today.

What is that?

- It says, "The glorified American girls of Mr. Ziegfeld Follies take a leaf from the scrapbook of Magnus Johnson and Secretary Wallace and hold their own milking contest."

Huh, I don't think I've ever had a milking contest before.

- I don't think I've ever seen evidence of a milking contest before in my life.

- There you go.

- Right.

Oh, and we can see that there was a flood on the Ohio River at some point in 1924.

Sometimes things kind of look the same as they did 100 years ago, but other things are very different, like cow milking contests.

The public library also has an amazing collection of rare books and materials that are one of a kind.

One of the most amazing things, one of the treasures of our collection is the handwritten manuscript of "Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain.

So a manuscript is something that hasn't been officially published.

As Mark Twain wrote, he made lots of corrections, and there's lots of notes and interesting things that you can see and determine about Mark Twain's writing process.

For an earlier published book, we have a copy of Shakespeare's "First Folio," which was printed 400 years ago.

We have short stories written by Louisa May Alcott, for example.

Emerson, short stories by Charles Dickens.

So one of the things that we do is we will digitize precious items that maybe can't take being handled all the time, so I can show you the entire Mark Twain manuscript digitized and available for view in this room.

- Yes, please.

- You can see the back of one page and you can even see where the ink sort of bled through between one side and the next.

- [Chrisena] "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Tom Sawyer's comrade."

- So, with the use of modern technology, you can really bring the past alive in a way that, you know, not too long ago we wouldn't have been able to do.

- I'm so impressed with all that this library offers the community.

All libraries are special because of the knowledge they can give us.

And who knows, maybe someday my journal will end up in a scrapbook collection, or maybe yours will.

In the first episode this season, we learned about Charles Burchfield and how his journals gave us a unique perspective into the artist's mind a long time ago.

Just look at all the stories we have written together on this season of "Let's Go."

Thanks for tuning in for the journey.

Stay curious and happy exploring.

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