Posted: 03/11/2008
LORAIN, Ohio – For 50 years, residents of North Ridgeville have seen their library go through as many changes as the city has.
A town that started out as a rural farming community is now a diverse city of 27,000.
As the city grew, so did its library, steadily outgrowing location after location. This year the city celebrates the fifth anniversary of its fourth and perhaps most impressive library facility yet, and library lovers are invited to join the North Ridgeville Branch of the Lorain Public Library System as it marks 50 years in town and five years in its newest location on Bainbridge Road.
After nearly 27 years with the North Ridgeville Branch, Branch Librarian Supervisor Karen Sigsworth said her most memorable experience was working with the Citizen Task Force that was formed in 1998 to plan the new library.
“We had a group of citizens that met on a regular basis, and we asked them if they thought the library was adequate enough to meet their needs, and what they wanted to see in a new library,” she said. “They came up with a lot of ideas we were able to incorporate into the final plan. It was an exciting process.”
Voters overwhelmingly supported a 1.5-mill library operating levy on the ballot in 1999. A donation of 3.8 acres of land by the city also made the visions of a new library a reality. The City leased the property to the library for 100 years and waived the building and utility fees during construction.
Before North Ridgeville Mayor David Gillock came into office in 2004, he was on the board of LPLS as a trustee and participated in the original effort to build the new library.
“I think most voters realize that a library is money well spent to provide a supplement to formal educational programs, a research facility and current informational technology that allows everyone to have access to today’s equipment and media, as well as access to current literature, movies and CDs,” Gillock said. “I believe the people of North Ridgeville also recognize that a modern library is one of those community assets that really can have an effect on overall property values within a community.”
The new library celebrated its grand opening May 4, 2003. Its construction cost totaled $4.7 million - $300,000 less than estimated. The 27,500 square foot building was outfitted with 36 computers for public use and 12 in a lab that can be used for training and classes. Patrons also enjoy a convenient drive-up service to pick up or return materials, a large multi-purpose meeting room, more children’s programming and the heavily requested glass-enclosed quiet reading room
where visitors can cuddle up on a comfy chair with a book or magazine found among the library’s expanded collection.
“We try to keep up with what the people are interested in,” Sigsworth said. “As the city has grown we find that we’re in a convenient location for everyone, centrally located in the city.”
Gillock himself boasts about the library’s many modern amenities and accessibility. When he has the time, he enjoys reading his favorite magazines and books in the library’s new quiet reading room. And, considering that more than half of the people in Lorain County live within two miles of one of the Lorain Public Library System’s six county-wide libraries, Gillock said the new North Ridgeville library location was an answer to many residents’ wishes.
“It is important that a city has a library that is easily accessible to its residents,” Gillock said. “Many residents do walk to the library and the North Ridgeville library is close enough that it is part of the neighborhood, not a distant destination.”
Garalynn Tomas has been an active LPLS volunteer for more than a decade. She is president of The Friends of the North Ridgeville Library Inc., serves on the boards of both the Lorain Public Library System and The Foundation of the Lorain Public Library System Inc., and chaired the levy campaign for the new library.
“That was the first levy we had to support the operation of the library in North Ridgeville,” Tomas said. “It took a lot of people on a lot of different levels, but here we are five years later with what we still consider a brand new building.”
A nurse anesthetist, Tomas often travels across the country for her job. Whenever she can, she said, she likes to visit other libraries – because she’s an admitted library junkie, and also to compare other libraries. To her surprise, many could not hold a candle to the North Ridgeville Branch Library.
“You see night and day differences in resources available to other communities,” she said. “That’s why we have tried to impress upon legislators in Ohio what great resources libraries are.”
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Contact: Terri Frederick, Lorain Public Library System, 440-244-1192, ext. 230 or tfrederick@lpls.info