Dundee Library District has a new name
Starting July 1, the Dundee Township Public Library District will be known as the Fox River Valley Public Library District.
Officials said its old name didn’t accurately reflect the community the district serves, and late last year authorities asked residents, employees and benefactors to come up with a new one.
The old name came about in 1981, when voters agreed to form the district that served Dundee Township and the communities within it.
But as surrounding towns grew in the early 1990s, the district grabbed parts of Gilberts, Rutland Township, Algonquin, Barrington Hills and Elgin. Today, 69,338 people live in the district.
The library began accepting submissions in January and ended up with 108.
To generate the name, library officials entered the submissions into a website to determine the names most frequently used — “Fox,” “river” and “valley” were the most popular and helped officials craft the new name, Library Director Roxane Bennett said.
Library officials are delighted with the feedback and excited about the marketing opportunities that surround the new name.
“We thought about the fact that, rivers conjure up the idea of bridges and we think of the library as being a bridge between our communities,” Bennett said. “We think of the flow of the river like the information flow and the library connecting people with information.”
The board has already named the East Dundee facility the Dundee Library, while the branch under construction at the Randall Oaks Recreation Center is called the Randall Oaks Branch Library.
Trustees could have renamed the district as well, but decided they would rather leave that up to their patrons. Costs associated with the name change are not expected to exceed $1,000, Bennett said.