PACKET EDITORIAL, May 7
By: Packet Editorial
We’ve heard from a lot of folks around town these past few weeks how absolutely wonderful it is that the Princeton Public Library is now in the Princeton Shopping Center. It’s so convenient, they say. Parking is so easy. The Cafe is right there. Wouldn’t it be marvelous if the library just stayed in the shopping center?
No, it wouldn’t.
Last year, the library’s board of trustees after interminable discussion, in which the entire community availed itself of countless opportunities to participate wisely chose to rebuild the library in downtown Princeton. And, for a whole host of reasons, that is still where it belongs.
First of all, the library serves as an important anchor for Princeton Borough’s central business district. It is an extremely popular destination, drawing people from throughout the Princeton area who also shop at nearby stores, do business at nearby banks and offices, linger over a latte at nearby coffee shops and eat at nearby restaurants.
More importantly, the new, improved library that will rise on that now-empty lot at the corner of Witherspoon and Wiggins streets will offer much more in the way of space, services and programs than either the old facility or the temporary quarters at the shopping center could ever hope to provide. Among other things, the new library will have its own cafe, a spacious browsing area, a 150-seat meeting room, group study rooms, a computer training center, a separate study area for teens and a children’s area three times the size of the old one.
It also will have significantly more space for books, reference materials, magazines, videotapes, CDs, DVDs, computer terminals in short, all the resources today’s patrons expect from a library. The old library already had run out of space to put its growing collection of books, much less all the additional resources required of a modern library. And, while it may not be apparent on the surface, the shopping center location can’t even come close to accommodating what the old library did.
Consider this: The library now occupies 20,000 square feet of space in the shopping center. That’s about 25 percent less space than the old library occupied and that, in turn, was half the size of what the new library will be. (The old library, by the way, was built to house 80,000 books; the library’s current collection exceeds 140,000.)
In the shopping center, there are fewer computer terminals than there were in the old library. There is no separation between the adult and children’s areas and many adults are complaining about the noise level. The bookshelves, even in the children’s area, reach as high as 8 feet, making many volumes inaccessible, and the aisle widths are extremely narrow, making browsing nearly impossible. There is no meeting room. There is practially no place to sit. In the old library, the staff was cramped; in the shopping center facility, the staff is stuffed into dank, closet-sized offices in the basement.
In truth, the only real advantage of the shopping center location and it’s an advantage only if one happens to be driving there is the availability of free parking. (For walkers, of whom there are a great many in both the borough and the inner ring of the township, the downtown location is, in fact, distinctly preferable.) Even for drivers, with plans progressing for a new garage to be built on the site of the present Park & Shop lot where rates may be deeply discounted, as they have been in the past, for library patrons there should be ample, affordable parking directly adjacent to the new downtown library.
Don’t get us wrong. We fully agree that the shopping center space is a terrific location for the library temporarily. As a permanent site, however, it is even more inadequate than the old library was. If you don’t believe us, take a real close look around the place and then wait until you see what the new library has in store when it opens its doors at the end of 2003.