A national leader on neighborhood issues, Mayor Thomas M. Menino believes that government is about helping people. Elected five times as Mayor of Boston and five times as a City Councilor from Hyde Park, he has spent a lifetime building a better Boston for residents and businesses.

“The Boston Public Library is an important place for the people of Boston to make a connection – to learning, to history, and to each other,” says Mayor Menino. “Libraries are not only a place where families can find books to read, they are also the place where people can learn how to use a computer, search for jobs, and research their family trees. Libraries are opportunity.”

While Mayor Menino has been in office, Boston’s population has grown. According to 2010 Census numbers, the City of Boston population is 617,594, a 4.8% increase over the 2000 census or 28,453 more residents. The latest numbers mark the first time since the 1970s that Boston’s population exceeded 600,000.

“Now, more than ever, building connections in our communities is an important part of a great, growing city,” says Mayor Menino. “The public library was born in Boston. We can be proud of our history and prouder still of all that libraries do for the people of Boston today.”

When Josephine Bruzzese’s parents moved from Italy to the United States, they faced a challenge that is common to immigrants to this country: ensuring that their children become fluent in a language they themselves could neither speak nor understand. They realized that the best way to go about it was to have their children mingle with native English speakers. So, when Josephine was just four years old, they began sending her to the library.

That decision instilled in Josephine a lifelong love of libraries—in particular, her neighborhood library. “The neighborhood branch is the center of the community,” she explains. And as her neighborhood has diversified over the years with the arrival of Latino, Chinese, and North African Muslim immigrants, she has seen how the library helps others for whom English is a second language, just as it once did for her.

Because she believes so strongly in the importance of the library to her neighborhood, Josephine today is active in her local friends of the library group. “The requirements of one branch location are different from another, because the demographics are so different in different parts of the city,” she says. “There’s a lot going on with the library, all over the city.”