Library hopes voters agree future is now

The library of the future -- it's a destination spot, a community center and a high-tech information portal.

All those books will still take up a lot of space, but with Wi-Fi Internet, a coffee bar and a drive-through window, books won't be the only attraction.

In Cape Girardeau, the public library board believes the future is now.

"We believe in the concept of a destination library. Really a community center where teens can hang out and families can come together and retired people can come for company and stimulation," said Cape Girardeau Public Library director Betty Martin. "We believe if you build it, they will come."

But building it will require help from the community.

The library has proposed a $9 million expansion. A measure to pay for most of the funding will be on the ballot during a special election Feb. 6.

The measure will ask voters to approve doubling the property tax for library use. The owners of a home valued at $120,000 would pay $34 more a year in property tax to the library over the next 20 years.

In past years, special elections in Cape Girardeau have drawn scant turnout. In August 2005, 8.7 percent of eligible voters went to the polls to approve the third Transportation Trust Fund tax. In June 2004, 21 percent turned out to pass the fire safety tax.

Martin conceded the need to bring out a large number of library supporters without being overshadowed by a general election made the February date appealing. "We thought about that when we chose it," she said.

But she added the plan has been carefully vetted.

By the election date, Martin will have made her case for the project in 47 presentations. In meetings she held with focus groups and key city, school and chamber of commerce officials, clear priorities emerged, including more computer access, larger meeting spaces, larger and separated spaces for children of different age groups and conveniences like a drive-through window.

She and the library board did not consider a smaller-scale project, she said, instead choosing to incorporate all the top priorities into the $9 million proposal.

"We just evaluated exactly what we needed, and we're going to go for it," she said of the request of taxpayers.

The plan drawn up by the architectural firm Clark Enersen Partners of Lincoln, Neb., calls for a doubling of the library square footage to 38,860 square feet. The firm has designed libraries in Lincoln, Fall City and Omaha, Neb., and Johnson City, Kan.

Under the plan, the entire building would be gutted and the 27-year-old heating and air-conditioning replaced. Though the library would stay open throughout the two-year construction time, it might shift operations to a vacant building to save time and money, Martin said.

The proposal

The proposed library is set up differently than the current one.

The building is bisected by a "main street" aisle where new releases, magazines and a coffee bar will be aligned in a manner similar to popular bookstores. New releases will be rotated often and displayed with covers facing out in order to catch the eye of users.

The library expansion, however, does not call for an increase in the collection.

The Cape Girardeau library purchases about 500 new books per month and 961 CDs and DVDs annually. Martin said study groups did not list increasing the collection as a top priority. Instead they told her the library is "out of people space."

One area where the library says more "people space" is needed is its meeting rooms. The current library has one public meeting room with space for about 50 people. The room was booked 469 times in 2005. According to library records, at least one not-for-profit group per week was turned away due to overbooking.

The new plan calls for two spaces large enough for 100-person groups, one 16-person conference room and three other study/tutoring rooms.

"We're really the only public meeting space available free of charge to community groups," Martin said.

The plan also calls for a drive-up window on the northeast corner of the new building. Martin said this convenience has become a fixture in many of the "destination libraries" being built.

"That was a request we heard almost more than any other," she said. "It's very popular with parents of young children. ... Maybe the child falls asleep and they don't want to leave them in the car. That's when this is a big convenience."

Lowell S. Berg, a senior architect with Clark Enersen, believes Cape Girardeau's current library building is undersized. A community should typically have a library with one square foot per person, Berg said. The library currently has 18,900 square feet, but Cape Gir?ardeau's population was 35,349, according to the 2000 census.

The company has seen how libraries help a community, Berg said. "Not just providing the service but also in terms of self-esteem. It's a really strong point of pride for a city. Usage typically can as much as double after an expansion of this type."

But how much demand is there for the library?

Using state figures from 2004, the Cape Girardeau Public Library totaled 98,500 library visits and more than 18,000 borrowers.

By contrast, the public library in Joplin, Mo., serving a city of just over 47,000, boasted more than 294,000 visits that same year and 30,000 borrowers.

The library with the closest amount of visits to Cape Gir?ardeau was the Hannibal Free Public Library in Hannibal, Mo., a town with a population of less than 18,000 people.

The Cape Girardeau library has 16 public-access computers that handle about 80 Internet sessions per day. That's an average of five sessions per unit over the course of a 12-hour day (Monday through Thursday).

Most adult Internet users interviewed at the library said they have little to no waiting time to get online.

But supporters say the library competes with Kent Library at Southeast Missouri State University and suffers from library boundaries, frozen since 1965, that leave some Cape Girardeau residents in the adjoining Riverside Regional Library district.

Martin is convinced, however, that an improved facility will attract new users.

"It is underused, that's true, and that's a question we ask people, 'Why don't you use the public library?' ... We believe people want this concept of a destination library, they want and need the community center."

Asked for a project with a similar impact, Martin points to the Library Station branch of Springfield, Mo. Built in 2002, the 36,000-square-foot branch library has a transportation theme that includes working model trains and full-sized replica trains for children to play on. It also has a Panera Bread eatery and a gift shop.

Martin said the branch has increased Springfield's library usage by 128 percent since its opening.

Alaina Culbertson, a librarian associate at Kent Library, previously worked at Library Station in Springfield. She said the impact of the "destination library" was immediate and widespread.

"It attracts young people and high school students to study and families who come together just to experience it," she said. "If you have time to spend in Springfield now, you want to come to the library."

The children's area of the proposed Cape Girardeau library would similarly have a unifying theme, but a design for it has not been decided.

tgreaney@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 245