The Existing Structure
The existing building was surveyed by the Town Engineering Department in 1995. They determined it was 26, 390 square feet, as detailed in the “Existing” column of the chart below. The building is woefully inefficient, with 58% of its building mass made up of corridors, mechanical spaces, fireplaces, the elevator and the mass of its walls.

Poor efficiency is bad enough, but the building is also fragmented to an extreme degree. It is a warren of small rooms and areas that are hard to navigate and hard for staff to control.
The narrow stack wing in the center is a choke point. The Children’s room is isolated on the lower floor. The reference room overflows into the reading room. The reference and circulation desks oversee the same space in the building. Very few of the relationships between spaces work well. Non-fiction is split in half. Young Adult space doubles as the
general study area. The building feels crowded, broken up and disorienting.

The Proposal
Replacement of the two-level 1958 addition and the four-level stack wing with an addition matching the original three levels of the 1904 building will be a huge advantage both to users of the building and staff. Finding one’s way around will be much easier. The prime entry leads to the borrowers’ desk, where it will be easy to see new books, fiction, the children’s room entry, media and the stairway to reference and non-fiction. The reading rooms and local history are in the quieter, more remote areas of the old building.

Staff will be able to react easily to changes in service demands between children’s and adult circulation, and the reference desk will control Young Adults, reference and non-fiction from a central position.

Key Areas

• Adult areas add quiet study, comfortable seating, more room for reference and local history, plus a Young Adult room.
• Children get a much larger preschool area, more seats, and a story-hour room.
• Space for media is more than doubled.
• Overcrowding of Fiction and Non-Fiction stacks is alleviated, and seating space is placed convenient to these areas.
• Staff space doubles, with offices for the Assistant Director and Administrative Assistant.
• Dismal meeting space becomes varied and useful with a multi-purpose room, a conference room and a Friends Book Sale room.