Cincinnati and Hamilton County Library leaders and architects will talk Thursday afternoon about what renovations and changes are coming to the Main Library. Director Paula Brehm-Heeger says there's a Zoom meeting to keep the community up to date on what work is coming and how it will impact operations.
"Come the end of September, service will change a little bit here at the Main Library. We'll be doing that work on our larger, South Building, so that building will be closed for service, but we'll be here in the North Building, still offering service," she says. "We're doing all we can so no one is surprised and so they also know why we're doing it."
The work is part of the library system's 10-year master plan, designed to update and improve facilities across the county. Voters approved the funding mechanism three years ago.
"We passed a local levy, 1-mill in 2018, and those dollars are a big foundation for what we're doing in renovating all of our locations," Brehm-Heeger says. "We just finished Price Hill, we're underway in Walnut Hills. We're underway in Deer Park… Madisonville. We'd love to do all of our locations. We're doing what we can with the dollars, and also with our capacity."
She says the Main Library accounts for about half of the system's overall square footage.
The Zoom meeting is scheduled from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. "We usually give an opportunity for people to chat or send questions. Sometimes we have an opportunity to answer them in session, or sometimes we do a follow-up, and do our best to take the information and answer what we can," Brehm-Heeger says. "We have contact information that we will reiterate in the engagement session, so if someone's in the session and they don't think of a thing or it occurs to them later, we do have the chance for them to follow up with a question at a later time."
