Welcome to Upper St. Clair Township Library’s new ‘neighborhoods’
New portable racks in the adult nonfiction room of Upper St. Clair Township Library allow for the opening of space for programming.
Daniela Chiriac will perform Aug. 7 at the library.
Riversong String Ensemble will perform Aug. 14.
Everyone knows what a library is supposed to look like: long rows of bookshelves extending from floor to ceiling, with titles arranged according to Melvil Dewey’s 19th-century decimal system.
Now that we’re well into the 21st century, Helen Palascak wanted to give Upper St. Clair Township Library a makeover, particularly the adult nonfiction room.
“It’s such a great collection, and it’s such a great resource,” the director of the library said. “So I wanted to make it a more attractive space. I wanted to showcase what we have.”
Patrons now will find titles grouped by “neighborhood,” stored on shelves that stand only a couple of feet tall, helping to present a brighter and more open environment than the traditional setup offered.
“The idea is to help people find the area they want and then see related books. For instance, the parenting neighborhood has books that are pulled from every Dewey number in the collection,” Palascak explained, from child psychology in the 100s to babies’ names in the 900s.
“It’s all right there for the parents, and they don’t have to go 10 different places in the library.”
The response has been almost uniformly positive, with some patrons making new discoveries because of the new setup.
“I had one woman stop by the door here,” Palascak said about her office, which is near the nonfiction section, and say, ‘I’m always reading fiction. I’m always on the other side of the library.’
“But the room looked so inviting that she walked in there. She walked around, and she was leaving with three nonfiction books in her hand. And she had no intention of taking out nonfiction books when she walked in. That, for me, is the perfect resolve for what we were attempting to accomplish here.”
Providing new furniture in Upper St. Clair marks a first in this country for Opening the Book, a British library supply firm that established a North American base in Williamsport in 2016, a step that Palascak had been anticipating for several years.
“I heard the principals of the company speak at a conference and really liked their concept of how to market books,” she recalled. “And so I was following them and looking at their furniture and saying, ‘I want this furniture here.’ I couldn’t buy it until last year, so we were very excited.”
Many of the new pieces are portable, and the flexibility allows for uses of space that weren’t possible in the past. As a result, the library has a new spot for hosting programs in the nonfiction room, including an Acoustic August series of concerts on each Monday evening of the month.
“Being a cultural hub of the community has always been part of libraries’ mission, and today, as technology changes and our information landscape changes, libraries are really interested in re-examining how we can play that role,” Walker Evans, programs and outreach services librarian, said. “We’re interest in creating opportunities for our community to come together and have cultural experiences that they might not have access to otherwise.”