Sharon St. Hilaire, director at the Seekonk Library, is an inductee into the 2008 Massachusetts Library Association Hall of Fame. She is also a fiber artist, and some samples of her work hang on the wall in her office.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

SEEKONK — It’s not just a love of books that’s kept Sharon St. Hilaire motivated throughout her three decades leading the Seekonk Public Library.

Instead, St. Hilaire said she’s stayed invested because of her strong beliefs in First Amendment rights and intellectual freedom.

“It’s more than just the books for me,” St. Hilaire said. “Libraries have always been the place to get information.”

St. Hilaire has also evolved in the job — “I re-created myself every 10 years,” she said — and now her work has been recognized by her peers.

St. Hilaire, 54, was inducted last month into the Massachusetts Library Association Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed so far on only 22 people.

The library association calls St. Hilaire a “change agent.” Indeed, in her acceptance speech, St. Hilaire listed the 10 things she’s learned from working in public libraries, including the importance of knowing your host community’s demographics, getting people into your library, working collaboratively — and most of all, staying relevant, a lesson she listed six times in her top-10 list.

Once convinced that she’d become an academic librarian, St. Hilaire actually started her career at Fall River’s East End library branch when it first opened in 1976. She was 23 at the time, and admits, “I thought I had learned everything I needed to learn. I really didn’t know what public libraries were all about.”

But St. Hilaire poured herself into the job and moved a year later to the Seekonk library, which had just opened.

In the last 30 years, she’s started the library’s computer system, weathered tough budget times, helped establish the Friends of the Library, joined a regional library system and created an endowment that’s grown to $250,000.

All this at a small library with only about 20 full-time employees and a circulation of about 100,000 materials.

“I’m always doing a ‘project,’ ” St. Hilaire said, laughing.

The library profession is experiencing more change now than ever, St. Hilaire said. Technology has made public libraries the source not just for books and periodicals but also for music, movies and computer use.

“We really say we’re a ‘popular materials’ library,” St. Hilaire said.

Purchasing new materials for a library, St. Hilaire said, is a bit like stocking a small grocery in Manhattan: Space and money is limited, so every item must meet a customer’s need.

“You don’t want to get esoteric things that might someday be checked out,” she said. “We’d rather buy three copies of a book we know they will read.”

The town’s aging population has resulted in a greater demand for large-print and audio books.

Tough economic times have also meant that more families are turning to the library for reading materials and entertainment. In the last six months or so, St. Hilaire said she’s noticed an uptick in the number of people taking out DVDs for the weekend as a source of free entertainment.

These days, St. Hilaire’s “projects” include encouraging residents to bequeath money to support the library. She’s one of the main promoters of overhauling the town’s Web site. She’s starting to envision an online social network, hosted by the library, for schoolchildren who need help with homework. From her office, she can see the backhoes prepping the former landfill behind the library for eventual use as the town’s first public park.

“I’m the planner,” she said. “I’m looking now at where we should be in 2010, 2011.”

By that time, St. Hilaire may well be retired. But she won’t stop working. Instead, she said she will dedicate more time to her other passion, fabric art. A longtime crocheter, St. Hilaire has now taken to affixing textured, patterned fabric to canvas or wood. She’s inspired by Asian and Native American art, and she admits that some of her best ideas have come from the mindless doodling she’s done during downtime at town meetings.

mwims@projo.com