By Kathy Kurtz Ferrari
Staff Writer
2/4/10
Sean Kelly comes to the Milton Public Library to study almost every day after school. The Xaverian Brothers High School junior, who lives about a mile from the library, knows a good thing when he sees it. “I love it,” said Kelly, as he entered the library on a recent Friday afternoon. “I can get my work done and walk home when I’m done. Since the new library opened, I come almost every day.” He’s not alone. Since the library reopened last April, after a renovation that took almost two years, more and more people are rediscovering the facility, located at 476 Canton Ave. “I think each month so far, since we opened in April, has been the record high months going back as far as we can go, in terms of borrowing,” Library Director Phil McNulty explained, as he looked over a handout sheet detailing month-by-month activity at the library. From April, when the building reopened, to December, more than 200,000 books were checked out, a 46 percent increase from all of 2008.
“It’s a very substantial growth,” said Adam Sholley, president of the Milton Library Foundation, the library’s fund-raising arm.
Also demonstrative of the library’s increased popularity is the level of computer usage at the facility, with statistics proving a 74 percent increase in usage, in comparison with the same months from the prior year. The library has 28 public Internet-access, multi-purpose computers dispersed throughout the building, with another half-dozen public catalogue computers.
While walking around the sleek yet welcoming building, visitors are greeted by well-organized stacks holding the library’s collection, and it’s hard not to note the obvious care designers and architects took in planning the layout. But what also seems to echo in the halls is the adage, “If you build it, they will come.”
“I have been up several times just on the weekends, which is when I typically get up here, and I’m always impressed with the different groups of people,” Sholley said. “You have young families; senior citizens reading quietly in the corner, in one of the reading rooms; you’ve got kids doing their homework. You come up to the second level and it’s very busy, with kids running back and forth.”
McNulty would agree that the increased usage also comes with other issues, as the library has attracted a large group of middle school-aged children – sometimes 30 to 50 at a time – who enjoy the comforts of the teen room on the second level.
“It’s the most difficult group to manage, especially with that number, and we’re not in a classroom situation here, where there’s someone watching them all the time,” McNulty said. “But since the fall … if a kid comes in after school unattended by a parent, we’re asking them to sign in, and it’s been having a couple of benefits. It puts the kid on notice that if something happens, we’re going to call the parents.”
The library staff feels that the system is working, and they are able to get to know the students a little better this way.
“They know they’re accountable for a certain level of behavior,” Sholley said.
As was the hope of members of the foundation board, the library has become a destination for many people in the community, whether to attend a meeting in one of the conference rooms, or to find a needed volume for a book club meeting. It has also become a location for author lectures and for artists to display their works.
“We had originally envisioned the library in its new form to become kind of a cultural center,” Sholley said, noting a number of recent art exhibits, including the current student exhibit run by the Friends and Advocates for the Visual Arts. Various authors have been guests for the new speaker series, including Larry Tye, who spoke about his book “Satchel,” and writers from The Boston Globe who collaborated on the Ted Kennedy biography “The Last Lion.”
Currently, the library foundation is working on its annual appeal to raise funds to add more materials to the library’s collection, including new books, CDs and DVDs, and also to fund the speaker series. The funds will also be used to create an endowment that will be invested to generate future income, and cut down on reliance on town funds. A town-wide mailing was sent out at the beginning of December as part of that effort.
“We’ve been very pleased with the results [of the appeal] to date,” Sholley said. “Despite a very rough economy, we are almost even with our goal, which was $20,000. We’re about a thousand dollars off of that right now. …It’s never too late to donate.”
The speaker series has been very popular, and the Keys Community Room, located on the basement level, has often been filled to capacity with audiences anxious to hear from best-selling authors and speakers.
“And those are free. Part of the intent with those is to get people to come up to the library and experience the library,” Sholley added.
But residents don’t seem to need that kind of enticement to enter the doors. Any given day, a cross-section of the community can be found in every corner of the library. Some are looking for specific titles; some come with youngsters eager to check out their first book; others, such as lifelong resident William Hayes, return again and again to relax and quietly read the daily newspaper.
“I’ve been coming here for 75 years,” said Hayes, as he sat near the fireplace in the restored section of the library. “It’s a beautiful library we have. They sure did a nice job.”
The library is open Monday through Wednesday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Thursday, 1 to 9 p.m.; Friday, 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m.