2008 Library of the Year

I went down to Denver last week to see the Broncos/Cowboys football game. Way fun!!

On the way south, we stopped in Cheyenne to spend the night with friends. We had some free time in the afternoon, so we went to visit the Laramie County Library, the Library Journal and Gale Cengage's 2008 Library of the Year.

As we walked about the three story building, we uttered plenty of oohs and aahs. We entered the building through the coffee shop and walked down a large hallway which had displays and access to a meeting room before we actually entered the circulation area. This area has many self check-out machines and we got to see a self check-in system live for the first time. I've read plenty about them, but actually seeing it work was cool. The library has a large windowed area where patrons can see what happens after they return their books on the conveyor belt system. We visited with a patron who had just returned some books and she showed us her receipt for returns. She said she'd only had one incidence where the system did not read the barcode correctly, and she just went straight to the circ desk where they got it fixed right away.

The first floor of the library includes an info desk right as you walk in the door, large print materials (nice so the older patrons do not have to travel upstairs), AV collections, separate room for the Friends book sale, circ area, magazines, newspapers, and fiction. Each floor has a huge circular desk in the middle with large "Ask here" signage for patrons needing assistance. Each floor also has self check-out machines, library catalog computers, restrooms, meeting rooms, a copy room area where you can make copies, pay for copies made from computers on that floor, and even pay fines using a credit card.

The second floor is all about the children and YA's. There are so many neat things, I hope I can post pictures because words won't describe it well enough. The giant chessboard in the middle of the floor was the first thing I saw. The YA area is separate and the teens have their own lounge.

Third floor houses the non-fiction, special collections area, reference collection, and a huge computer lab with 50 machines and a classroom with a large screen for trainings. Second and third floors also have individual study rooms. The study rooms are all glass, and I'm guessing that gives the librarians a good line of sight to make sure nothing "against the rules" is going on inside the study rooms, especially in the teen area. LOL The elevator is also glass, and I'm sure it provides lots of entertainment for the small children to watch it go up and down.

Here is the library map. Notice how everything is color coded. The walls outside the meeting rooms are actually lavendar just like the map. We chatted with the gal at the info desk a bit. She mentioned that every staff person, from the maintenance staff to the library director, spends one hour per week at the info desk greeting patrons and helping to direct them. I thought this was really cool. In my opinion, library directors/managers who work at a public service desk have a better feel for what the patrons and staff need.

Last stop of course was the coffee shop, where they make a really good mocha!