Downtown Kids Area Temporarily Closed for Upgrades!

Wed, 01/08/2025 - 9:45pm by eli

January and February are usually some of our slowest months of the year at the Downtown Library. While we're not planning any further major upgrades to the current Downtown building, we’re still making the small changes that make sense to keep the building working as well as it can for patrons and staff, and this is a good time to do some small changes.

So, the Downtown Kids Area closed on Monday, January 6 for about 8 weeks for reorganization and updates. We’ll have a better idea of when it will reopen when we get closer to the end of the project. But when it does, patrons will find nice new furniture, more space to move around, a brand-new play feature, and a reorganized collection, using the category system we’ve been using at our branches for years.

Most of the work to be done is to unshelve, relabel, and reshelve almost 50,000 items in their new locations. Yes, the Downtown Kids Area has about as many items on its shelves as the entirety of Westgate Branch; it’s a lot of stuff! Ever since we finished reorganizing the collections at our branches into our category system, patrons have been asking if we can bring that system to the Downtown Library, especially to the Kids collection. That relabeling project is now underway, and teams of staff are relabeling hundreds and hundreds of items every day into this proven system. We’ve found it helps more patrons find more books they’d like to read, and that’s a big part of what libraries are for!

While we’ll be making some changes to the DVD and CD collections as use has been falling, and we’ll be moving shelves around to make better use of the space with wider aisles, the number of books in the room isn’t changing.

And about that new play feature; our Story Team spent time researching and testing different options over the past year to find something new that would be fun for kids of all ages and sizes to be able to play with; something that could also stand up to the heavy use of a busy library. So when the room reopens, patrons will find a brand-new magnet wall! Featuring movable magnetic ramps, spinners, tubes, gears, and more, patrons will be able to make their own ball ramps, working alone or together, and send soft rubber balls bouncing and rolling down the ramps to land in troughs along the wall. We can’t wait to see what our patrons make of this fun new thing to play with at the library.

In addition, furniture that has served a long and happy life will be replaced, and we have a plan for a new addition to the downtown fish tank… so stay tuned for that! In the meantime, we’ve set up a temporary mini Kids Room and play area in the Downtown Lobby, where the Friends of the Library shop was before their move to AADL’s Archives, Acquisitions, and Logistics Facility at 265 Parkland Plaza. This temporary Kids Room will have toys, seating, and a small browsing collection of kids books so that there’s still a good place for our kids and families to play inside at the Library during the coldest part of winter. More to come on the future plans for that space as this project wraps up.

Some patrons may be wondering if our category system will be applied to books at the Downtown Library outside the Kids Area, and the short answer is that we don’t have a plan for that at this time. The longer answer is that there are so many books to relabel, that project would really only make sense in the context of a major project, and that’s still over the horizon. When it starts to come into view… you’ll hear it here first.

Thanks to all our Downtown patrons for their patience through this project. We know that this is a major disruption and it will involve a little reorientation for regular users when it reopens. But we know these upgrades will make family visits to the Downtown Library even more fun and special, and we can’t wait to welcome you all back!

Thanks for using your library!