In the city of Columbus, the study found, about 35 percent of preschoolers were “Not Ready for Kindergarten.” What does this mean? Well, for example, when a 5-year-old walks into kindergarten, takes a book and holds it upside down, you know there is no reading readiness there. Only about 60 percent of exiting 3rd graders had reached the “Third Grade Reading Achievement”, suggesting that those same 35 to 40 percent of the kids didn’t make much progress in their last four years. Dreadful.

The library system’s answer to this problem is a set of labor-intensive hands-on programs. For a million dollars, the Ready for Kindergarten program settles into the neediest neighborhoods. They scout for families in laundromats, shops, clinics, shelters, churches, anywhere they can find them. Teams of library staff visit homes of these families regularly, kits with board books and bath-sponge letters in hand, and invitations to the library and story hours, all pointing toward helping families get started toward kindergarten a few years away.

The libraries have launched a number of other programs as well. They set up after-school help centers for homework, stocked with textbooks from their schools, supplies, computers, and a legion of community volunteers overseen by library staff. They have logged 78,000 visits so far and counting. They began a reading-buddies program for early readers and created a summer reading club. They deliver books to schools that need them. And my favorite: They stock school buses with books, 5000 of them. Bus drivers are reporting better behavior. There is more, but you get the idea.

The challenge next up and underway: Are the programs delivering? Losinski is clear in saying that none of these programs matter if they aren’t working. Over the next few years, they plan to find out if these works-in-progress are being effective.

Education efforts in Columbus libraries are a continuum from the kids on through “life skills” for adults. This means adult literacy programs, career and technology literacy, and financial literacy. Here is a true story that gives a sense of the realities: A young man comes into the library seeking help with a job search and filing his application for work. A librarian helps him load the application onto the screen. They agree he’ll fill it out and she’ll return to look it over. The librarian returns to discover the man has completed the application, not by keying in the responses, but with a marking pen on the screen.

Libraries all across the U.S. are trying to look ahead and plan their way as the traditional, shrinking analog world becomes more digital. Fact: About 32 percent fewer books were purchased by libraries over the last five years. Good news: Walk into just about any library now and you’ll see the public at free computers. Next challenge: how to safeguard access to digital content, which operates with a different system and set of standards than traditional book acquisition, from who controls the access to what are the copyright laws. (Debates about libraries' rapidly evolving role are the subject of extensive online analysis. For a place to start, see this post by David Rothman and this report from the Pew Internet project.)