Alamogordo Public Library

The Alamogordo Public Library is the public library serving Alamogordo, New Mexico and Otero County, New Mexico. The library has extensive collections of Spanish-language and German-language books and of materials related to the Western writer Eugene Manlove Rhodes.

The Alamogordo Public Library first opened on March 1, 1900. Alamogordo was unusual for a Southwestern town at the time in that it was a planned community, the planning being carried out by Charles Bishop Eddy's and John Arthur Eddy's Alamogordo Improvement Company. The Eddy brothers saw a library as being necessary for their community and they gave financial support to the Alamogordo Woman's Club to start the library. Ownership passed to an offshoot, the Alamogordo Library Association, and then to the Civic League. The Civic League retained ownership of the library until 1958 when it was sold for one dollar to the City of Alamogordo. The library had resided in a series of rented rooms until 1962 when a library building was constructed at 920 Oregon Avenue. The building was 10,280 square feet (955 m2) and cost $175,000. John Reed of Albuquerque was the architect. The library building was doubled in size in 1987 to 20,764 square feet (1,929.0 m2) at a cost of $871,042. The architect was again John Reed. In 2001 a block of land next to the current library was donated to the city to be the site of a new library building, planned at 40,000 square feet (3,700 m2). Bond elections in 2005 and 2009 to fund construction of the new building failed. Alamogordo Public Library is a city-owned library, but library cards are free to all residents of Otero County. (County government pays a yearly subsidy to the city for this service; in FY 2023/2024 the subsidy was $50,000.) The Alamogordo Public Library offers a variety of library cards, including regular cards with material checkout and digital collections access, digital access only cards, internet use only cards, and nonresident cards. The Alamogordo Public Library installed a system for automating collection and catalog records in 1995,:20 and the catalog became available over the Internet in 2004. The library catalog is run by Syndetics Unbound. Syndetics Unbound is a powerful service for digital reader's advisory assistance with interactive exploration and serendipitous discovery tool. Options like “Summary” and “Author Bios” provide in-depth details on the collection's titles. “Reading Level” and “Book Profiles” also give further insight into the context of titles to assist in selection, and elements such as “You May Also Like,” “Look Inside,” “Reviews,” “Related,” and “More Information” aid in book selection. Collections The Alamogordo Public Library has 16,400,395 items available to patrons in its collections, including audiobooks, books in print, compact disks, digital audiobooks, digital books, digital and DVD movies, digital and CD music, as well as digital and print magazines and newspapers. 24 Hour Library (Digital Collection) The Alamogordo Public Library's digital collection, the 24 Hour Library, offers more than 16,000,000 resources available to patrons at any time. The digital repository includes: Acceda Noticias (NewsBank) Acceda Noticias provides convenient access to the complete electronic editions of more than 90 Spanish-language sources published in major U.S. cities. It contains tens of thousands of current and archived full-text articles from around the world. Access Military, Government & Defense (NewsBank) Access Military, Government & Defense features current and archived full-text content from key military publications. America's News (NewsBank) Current and archived articles from local, regional, and national sources. Includes access to more than 2,000 newspapers. Black Freedom Struggle The Black Fr

Library data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).