ALTON – The Hayner Public Library District, which serves the approximately 46,000 residents of Alton, Godfrey, and Foster Township, recently completed a building program developed to assist the Board of Trustees as they determine the best course of action for the District’s facilities.
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In April 2024, the District hired Fred Schlipf to assist in writing the building program, a comprehensive plan outlining the District’s goals, requirements, and functional needs of a potential new facility. Schlipf has been a library school faculty member for over fifty years, currently serving as an Adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of the book The Practical Handbook of Library Architecture: Creating Building Spaces That Work, the definitive resource for library architecture.
For nearly eighteen months, Mr. Schlipf, the Board of Trustees, and the Library’s Executive Director Mary Cordes, reviewed the District’s current building facilities; analyzed the District’s current collections, services, and programs; interviewed library employees to ascertain the needs of each department within the Library; and reviewed the Library’s mission, values, and service roles within the community.
The District’s long-term lease with Alton Square Mall will end in 2028, and the Library must give Hull Property Group, the owners of the Alton Square Mall, a year’s notice of the District’s intention to remain at the mall or leave. Hayner Library first moved to the Alton Square Mall in 1985. The District pays over $20,000 per month, plus utilities, to rent the Alton Square Mall location. The Library is also responsible for all maintenance and repairs within the Library’s mall facility.
The District’s Downtown Library, located at 326 Belle Street, is no longer conducive to the ever-changing needs of a public library. The Genealogy & Local History Library, housed in the District’s original library building at 401 State Street, has outgrown its space, with more room needed to house, maintain, and preserve the history of Alton, Godfrey, Foster Township, and surrounding areas. The Library’s administrative offices, IT department, and Technical Services department are also housed in the basement of the Genealogy & Local History Library; all three of these departments have outgrown their spaces.
All of these issues, combined with the Board of Trustees concern regarding the long-term viability and future of the Alton Square Mall, led the Board to perform their due diligence in considering all facility options, including the possibility of a new library building, which would combine the collections and staff of the Downtown Library and Hayner Library at Alton Square Mall into one facility, and utilize both levels of the Genealogy & Local History Library for genealogical and local history purposes.
“The Library is such a tremendous asset to the community,” says Executive Director Mary Cordes. “We provide so many wonderful programs, services, and materials for patrons of all ages and interests. Having the ability to offer them all under one roof would be a game changer.
“We have a great staff who work tirelessly to provide the best library services possible to our patrons. But right now we spend a lot of our time going back and forth amongst locations, duplicating materials, supplies, utilities, and services, and generally trying to make the buildings work when they’re overcrowded and no longer fit the needs required by our patrons. As great as our services currently are, I can’t imagine the positive impact we could have on our community if we had one large facility.”
The Board of Trustees stresses that the completion of a building program in no way guarantees that a new library building is imminent. The Board will not make such a decision until it is confident that it is in the best interest of the taxpayers of the District.
“We’re excited to begin work on this project,” says Board of Trustees President Kevin Botterbush. “The Trustees are committed to performing our due diligence to ensure we’ve gathered all of the information needed to make the best possible decision for the taxpayers of our District. We want to give the residents of the District the best library possible.”
The Board of Trustees voted to hire an architectural or design-build firm to assist in identifying potential building sites, creating architectural renderings, determining the cost of a new facility, facilitating public engagement, and investigating avenues of funding.
Transparency is also paramount to the Board as it moves forward with reviewing the District’s facilities and the viability of possibly building a new library for the residents of the District. Every step of this process, including the hiring of Mr. Schlipf and architectural or design-build services, has been posted on the District’s Board meeting agendas. The Board will also begin to seek input from community stakeholders in the future.
Hayner Library’s current collection houses nearly 210,000 physical items among the three library facilities. During Hayner Library’s last fiscal year, the Library circulated almost 249,000 items. As a member of the Illinois Heartland Library System, Hayner loaned nearly 60,000 items to other libraries through interlibrary loan services and received over 25,000 items through interlibrary loan. The Library answered over 6,400 reference questions, and patrons accessed the Library’s computers over 22,000 times.
The Library also provides a Library of Things (nontraditional library items such as outdoor games, instruments, projectors, sewing machines, telescopes, fishing rods, and much more), one-on-one tech help, programming and story times for children, adults, and teens, community resource guides, voter registration, printing, copying, faxing, and scanning services, delivery services to patrons who are unable to visit the Library due to temporary or long-term disability, several e-book and audiobook platforms, streaming television and movies, databases—including digital archives of The Telegraph, yearbooks, city directories, historical photographs of the Riverbend, and much more.
You can learn more about the library’s programs, collections, and services at www.haynerlibrary.org.
