There’s a new addition at New Florence City Park.

A new little free library box was built in mid-May, giving the children from the New Florence area an opportunity to increase their love of reading. The box became available through the Impact Library Program, which provides no-cost library book exchanges to communities.

“We were doing some research on some grant opportunities and things,” City Administrator David Ingle said. “This came up as something we were eligible for. It didn’t cost the city anything. We just applied for it. It’s basically for townships that don’t have local libraries within their community. So it’s an opportunity for the kids and other people to come up and be able to either leave a book or take a book.”

Ingle said the library box was funded through a grant program.

“The city clerk was going through some of the grant opportunities,” Ingle said. “We applied for it and, 30 days later, we got the notification that we were going to get it. Then, it was shipped to us. There were no strings attached to it other than providing the reading materials to the community.”

Ingle said Michelle Fortmann, who is in charge of the City of New Florence Parks and Recreation Department and is a city alderman, said she liked the idea of having a little free library box at the park, which includes a playground, a baseball field and a community center.

“We figured that we were doing our upgrades and park maintenance and things of that nature,” Ingle said. “We have a lot of our citizens that visit our park locally instead of trying to go somewhere, especially with the way the economy and gas prices are going. So it’s a thing that we added to our parks program.”

As of May 24, there were more than 30 books in the library box, most of them targeted to young children.

“The way it was set up was that they sent some free books with it, so we didn’t have to go out and stock anything,” Ingle said. “With that being said, it was kind of up to the citizens to take a book, leave a book, read a book or bring it back. We do monitor it on a monthly basis to make sure it is stocked. There are a lot of different library type programs that will actually give you the books for free and things of that nature.”

Little free libraries have been popular all over the world during the last decade as there are more than 100,000 registered little free library book-sharing boxes in 108 countries.

Ingle said children have enjoyed the new library box ever since it was built at the park.

“Over the last week or so that we had it up, we had a lot of kids poking around into it and being interested in it,” Ingle said. “So I think it’s a great addition to our city park. It’s just another amenity offered to our citizens.”