Business booming at city's new library

Posted: Sunday, July 28, 2002

Claudia Cooley joined a fast-growing group of library users Friday when she applied for a membership at the new Southwest Branch Library.

She is part of an estimated 1,200 people a day visiting the library, about twice the attendance of the old Southwest Branch Library, said Donna Littlejohn, director of library services.

Making her first visit Friday, Cooley brought her 6-year-old daughter, Ali, and decided to get a membership after looking around for a few minutes.

"It's really easy to find everything," Cooley said. "We'll probably be making frequent visits here."

Many more of these new visitors to the Southwest Branch Library also are getting library cards.

Since the library opened June 19, Littlejohn said about 300 new members a week are getting cards, compared to only about 10 to 15 a week at the old Southwest Branch Library.

She said these numbers leveled off some since the opening, but the increase in attendance and new membership is more than what library officials expected.

"I didn't anticipate so many new users," Littlejohn said. "It's very gratifying seeing our citizens using our libraries as much as they do."

She attributes the increase in visitors to the library's location, greater number of parking spaces and more Internet access.

The 20,000-square-foot library has meeting room space and an audio/visual area.

She said visitors are taking advantage of everything the facility has to offer.

"It's been real interesting to see," Littlejohn said. "They're not really singling out certain services. They seem to be using all services."

The increase in visitors has resulted in an increase in staffing, Littlejohn said.

One permanent staffer and two temporary ones from the Central Branch Library have been transferred to the Southwest Branch, she said.

Aiesha Ronje said she visited the old Southwest Branch Library about once a week before the new one opened.

Ronje said she goes to the new library about two or three times a week.

"I first came here because I wanted to see the new layout of the library," Ronje said. "It seemed more comfortable."
http://amarillo.com/stories/2002/07/28/new_lib.shtml
amarillo.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-41
39355
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:A6MDOT447DTFAV6YEWLSZGACXJB5CNPH
<urn:uuid:4b560cbb-f61e-48ac-8885-ccafd4c7b524>
2014-09-17T06:03:51Z
216.116.229.139
sha1:GR6YY6UWX5OU7FNQJHMR3T3F3ORJAKER
<urn:uuid:2c20e0f1-8380-484f-9d82-ec2bbbd80160>
http://amarillo.com/stories/2002/07/28/new_lib.shtml
length
response
<urn:uuid:8a71c831-909c-46a1-ac12-f833e6fb7dd2>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-196-40-205.us-west-1.compute.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-41
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for September 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf