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You think libraries are afraid of the Internet? You think librarians are intimidated by a global network that delivers thousands of search results in a few thousandths of a second?

In the words of Cathy De Rosa: Bring it on.

Unlike the last person to give this slogan a try, De Rosa doesn’t arrive dressed in a flight suit. However, she does bring a positive attitude, a new verb and a job title that could fill a library shelf all by itself. She’s the vice president for the Americas and global vice president of marketing for the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), based in Dublin, Ohio.

She was in town last week to help kick off a push called “Geek the Library,” a slogan no one has used before. Probably. We’ll have to look it up sometime.

The dictionary still thinks “geek” means “an odd or ridiculous person.” That, we looked up. But we’re moving beyond that era now, to a time when it refers to being extremely interested in or involved with something. For example, if you enjoy mixing two cups of white glue with 1 1/2 cups of water and some food coloring, you would say, “I geek Gack.” Or if you often clean metal parts with aromatic petroleum distillates, “I geek Gunk.”

“It’s cool to geek something; it doesn’t matter what,” De Rosa declared. “What we geek is what we are.”

The idea behind the campaign is to spark more interest in local libraries, and then to turn that into something just as vital: money. “Most people don’t know their library needs money,” De Rosa said. “They assume that if usage is up, so is funding.”

Library funding took a hit in this year’s Iowa budget along with almost everything else. Usage, however, continues to grow.

State Librarian Mary Wegner has statistics showing that the number of public library card holders increased 22 percent from 1998 through 2008, checkouts were up 12 percent and the number of people walking through the doors was up 41 percent.

How can this be? They used to tell us all you need is love, but we thought love had been replaced by Google.

“Internet use is up, and library use is up,” De Rosa said. “We find that people start on the Internet and then go to the library. It’s the best of times because of the Internet – it has created a discovery tool.”

It’s also the worst of times for people who find themselves without a job or otherwise victimized by the recession. Various sources have reported that library usage has soared in 2009, and some of that activity comes from people applying for jobs online or trying to figure out how to file for bankruptcy.

Riding that wave of good and bad news, OCLC decided to give the “Geek the Library” idea a trial run off-Broadway. The organization selected just two cities in the United States for the honor: Des Moines and Savannah, Ga.

Savannah is roughly equal to Greater Des Moines in population but – hard as this may be to accept – leads us in humidity. De Rosa can testify to this, because she was in Savannah for opening activities a day before flying into Des Moines.

Together, they’ll serve as a six-month test case for U.S. cities of this size. If this phase goes well, OCLC might take the whole thing national in smaller and larger locales.

A century ago, it was steel baron Andrew Carnegie who built libraries in cities and towns all across America. These days, OCLC has the baron of the digital age on its side. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated $350 million during the past decade to connect libraries to the Internet.

Countless others have helped the cause down through the years with little or no fanfare. For example, there was the 19th-century cattle rancher who built a library in the tiny town of Silver Star, Mont. – the great-great-grandfather of Cathy De Rosa.