Since its inception in 1850 the overarching mission for the founders of the Otis Library was the establishment of a vibrant institution that supported the principles of intellectual freedom and the spirit of human creativity while diligently preserving the cultural heritage of all of the citizens of the Norwich community.
During the next forty years’ various trustees and backers of the library struggled without much success to fulfill this mission. As a subscription based library with a patron base of roughly 600 persons, the library experienced its first annual debt in 1856. It was only with the generosity of certain wealthy benefactors that the library was able to keep its doors open during the next fourteen years. By 1884 the number of subscribing patrons had declined to just 378 persons in a city with a population of nearly 25,000. Clearly the model of a subscription based public library had failed not only financially but in its egalitarian mission to serve the majority of the public rather than just a privileged subset of the community.
The major turning point came on October 17, 1891 when the library’s board voted to dispense with subscription membership and make the Otis Library a “free library”. Within less than year the number of library patrons mushroomed from 400 to nearly 4,000 members. In an article of Library Journal published in November of 1893, Jonathan Trumbull the librarian at the Otis Library wrote that it was as if “the institution had awakened from something like a sleep of forty years”. Serendipitously, the Connecticut Assembly passed a law in 1893 requiring each town with an existing “free library” to financially support that library with a portion of its tax revenues.
During the year 2025 we are celebrating the 175th anniversary of the library’s founding in 1850. The staff of the current Otis Library are still committed to the same principles espoused by the library’s founders. The analog print world of past centuries has rapidly given way to the realm of digital information. The Otis library, like all libraries, has evolved into an institution that dynamically embraced the utilization of the best of both the analog and digital information resources. The Otis Library was recognized for their stellar accomplishments receiving the National Medal for Museum and Library Service from the Institute of Museum and Library Services in 2016.
Library patrons may still engage in the traditional ritual of browsing the thousands of print books in the library’s general and special collections. Alternatively, they also can engage with the library’s multidimensional website to remotely search the library’s catalog for both print and digital items. Patrons can stay informed with the library’s website Events Calendar and attend a wide array of onsite programs for adults, teens and children or participate remotely with Zoom presentations.
The library also has onsite services offering job support counseling, a passport application service and periodic citizen and immigration classes, as well as appointments for one-to-one technology support. Patrons can also remotely engage with links on the library’s website for resources related to local community services, employment opportunities and education and learning materials. The library’s website even allows someone to send documents from their own laptop or cellphone to the library’s printer. Persons interested in our local history can access over 150 years (1773-1925) of the digitized version of the Norwich Bulletin and examine over 5,500 historical photographs related to Norwich and southeastern Connecticut.