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Library to serve as community commons
By MAUREEN BYRNE AHERN SEMINOLE -- Remember the days when food and drinks were taboo in a library? No longer. Today's library is expected to provide a place to peruse a newspaper and sip a cappuccino. Take the new library in Seminole, which construction workers will begin building in a couple of weeks. When it's finished, it will contain much more than books and resource materials. Computers. Lots of them. A cafe similar to those in bookstores where patrons can enjoy a sandwich and a smoothie. A teen area where young people can hang out and find videos, magazines and books to their liking. A supervised children's area where toddlers can play while parents attend class or surf the Internet. A drive-through with a dropoff window where patrons can return books as easily as they can pick up a burger and fries. "It's new and different in the Tampa Bay area, but on a nationwide level, we're not the first to break this ground," said Michael Bryan, who will manage the new library and is the director of the existing Seminole Community Library. As communities are changing, so too are public libraries. Following a trend that is sweeping the country, the new library in Seminole will be a community commons, a gathering place of sorts. "That's a big hope and expectation for this library," Bryan said. As a social institution, public libraries always have responded to communities' needs, said Toni Garvey, president of the 9,000-member Public Library Association and Phoenix's city librarian. "Public libraries are now doing a better job than they ever have in finding out what those needs are," Garvey said. In Seminole, it's all of the above. "This is really extraordinary for a little town like Seminole," said Bryan, library director since 1994. Suffice it to say, the library in Seminole has come a long way from its early days, when folks checked out donated books from an old cottage near Park Boulevard. The collection of hardbacks and paperbacks was stored in every available space. Even in the bathtub. Fast forward 40 years. The new library will be a state-of-the-art facility that will serve the needs of a college and a community. "I think that's the beauty of it," said Jim Olliver, provost of St. Petersburg College's Seminole campus. The library is a $7.1-million joint project of Seminole and St. Petersburg College. The two-story building will serve both students and the general public. For example, classrooms are across the hall from a drop-in children's play area. The 52,000-square-foot facility will be on the college campus on 113th Street, across the street from the city's existing library and adjacent to the Seminole Recreation Complex. It is scheduled to open July 2003. On Monday, St. Petersburg and SPC officials announced they also plan to share a similar 50,000-square-foot library that would be built on the college's campus at 66th Street and Fifth Avenue N. Seminole agreed to build a library with SPC because of concerns that the community was outgrowing its existing 17,500-square-foot library. Although the city has only 16,000 residents, the library serves 70,000 people in unincorporated Pinellas County. City officials also figured the public would benefit from a partnership because the college could bring more computers to the library than the city could afford on its own. After five years of planning, city and college officials finally saw their vision become a reality at a groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday morning. "We are at an exciting point here," Susan Reiter, SPC's director for facilities and planning, told Seminole City Council members before they approved final designs for the library at a meeting last week. "It's been a really good experience for all of us." A committee of two dozen people, including city administrators, college officials and Seminole and SPC library staff, met for six months last year to identify programming needs. The result was a list of 46 types of spaces needed in the library and the square footage they required. It was up to Harvard Jolly Clees and Toppe Architects to design the building. And make everyone happy in the process. "It made it a little bit more exciting because it's different than a typical library," said Ward Friszolowski, vice president of the company, which has designed libraries in Gulfport, Dunedin, Temple Terrace and Orlando. The firm also is designing the new Clearwater Main Library. The college will be responsible for maintenance, security and utilities of the building. It also will provide the technology, including computer labs that will be available to the public. The city, on the other hand, will be in charge of the library's daily operations and personnel. It will transfer its library collection and furnishings, valued at about $1-million, to the library. The college will add to the collection. On the first floor of the library, visitors will find general library space, the cafe, a multipurpose area that can serve as one large room or three small rooms, four classrooms, a children's reading area and play corner, a circulation workroom and a Friends of the Library sales area. The bottom floor also will have a place for bestsellers and an audio and visual section for the latest CDs and videos. The second floor will house three conference rooms, offices for library staff and faculty members, a teen area and six study rooms. A 3,400-square-foot room for general library space will house about 55 computers with Internet access, nearly five times the number available in the existing library. Visitors will enjoy the outside of the library as well. The building will be angled so users can view the natural habitat in the northern part of the campus. Windows will line both floors to provide natural light.
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