When Baltimore County's tiny community libraries merged into one public system 50 years ago, the Towson branch was in an old house so small that books were kept in the bathtub.
After the merger, the first director, Richard Minnich, had to drive to downtown Baltimore each week to borrow books his readers wanted -- from the city's Enoch Pratt Free Library.
A half-century later, the county's 16-branch system -- which celebrates its anniversary today -- circulates more books than the Pratt and is eyeing expansion to keep up with demand and technological changes.
"It's no longer strictly about books," said library Director Jim Fish, who heads the institution at a time when libraries must begin thinking about innovations such as electronic books and online book clubs.
In branch after branch, computers providing Internet access to cyber-savvy patrons crowd book stacks, making it difficult for staff to help and supervise users, said Fish.
Library officials would like to have room to place the computers in one area, but in many cases, the layout of the buildings makes that difficult. The Reisterstown branch is a former school, and the most modern branch, White Marsh, was built in 1987, before widespread Internet use.
Those factors, along with issues such as the lack of a branch in the fast-growing Owings Mills area, have library officials considering a major modernization. "We're doing a master plan for library facilities looking 20 years into the future," Fish said.
Such a path would have been hard to imagine in 1948, when the newly chosen library directors asked the prestigious Pratt to manage the fledgling system -- only to be rebuffed by the Pratt board, which feared a drain on its resources.
"Pratt was the big potato, and they knew they were," recalled Nettie B. Taylor, 84, who was supervisor of public libraries in Maryland at the time.
By the 1960s, the tables had turned, with the county system outstripping the Pratt's circulation. The county's first modern branch opened in Catonsville in 1963, at a cost of $650,000.
By 1992, county branches were distributing more materials to city residents than the Pratt, said former Director Charles W. Robinson, who headed the county system for 33 years.
The library, which has an annual budget of $26 million, circulates more than 10 million items each year and has bounced back from the recession years of the early 1990s, when money woes forced the closing of eight mini-branches and the Loch Raven branch.
