Library

The Tredyffrin Public Library will reopen Saturday, a little bit closer to completing its major renovation project. As part of the $705,000 project that began in July and will include a large children's area, the library closed last week so that electrical work could be completed. Librarians for the Tredyffrin branch said they hoped they could avoid closing the building again during renovations that are expected to be completed in January. "We hope not to close again; it disrupts service," said Victoria Dow, assistant director of the library.

The third-grade class from Timothy Academy in North Philadelphia can hardly wait for every Thursday afternoon to arrive. That's when the class walks over to the Lehigh Avenue Branch library, near 6th Street, to take out their favorite books and play on the Internet. "The library is fun," said 8-year-old Melissa Morales. "You can learn everything on the Internet. " Yesterday, the 8-year-olds filled the library for its grand reopening, along with Mayor Rendell, other city officials and business leaders.

Haverford Middle School is bringing its library into the 20th century, Principal Michael Bianco told the school board at a work session Tuesday night. The library now boasts a small computer lab with 10 MacIntosh computers, laser printers, updated reference materials and new books, Bianco said. Bookshelves have been reorganized, and school officials have added student artwork displays and removed old furniture, he said. The goal was to make the library more usable and inviting for students and teachers, Bianco said, and it has worked.

A Jehovah's Witnesses Kingdom Hall would become the site of a new $328,000 town library if the Borough Council adopts the recommendations of a study committee. In a report presented to the council last night, a committee headed by former Councilman Joseph R. Condo, who is also a Camden County freeholder, said the borough needed a local library to cater to preschoolers, elementary and middle school students and senior citizens. The report recommends buying the Kingdom Hall building at Third and Reading Avenues for $155,000, making some minor structural changes, and stocking the building with $150,000 worth of books (10,000 volumes at about $15 each)

Over here in New Jersey, I'd like to put Gov. Whitman and a few of her associates in the corner, with big dunce caps. In an effort to "help" communities better budget their shrinking resources, Whitman's accountants have examined some local budgets and come up with money-saving recommendations. I don't know what "advice" they have meted out elsewhere, but in my town, Willingboro, they have blithely suggested we close our library. If we want, they say, we can join the county library system and journey to a neighboring town for our books.

The Gladwyne Free Library will be sporting a new look soon. The exterior of the 60-year-old stone building will remain the same, but the interior will be redesigned and modernized. And, even though a hammer has yet to hit a nail, Jack Huber, co-chairman of the capital campaign, is confident everything will be in place by the end of the year. If so, he and the board of trustees owe a great big thank you to the members of the community, who have already donated almost $200,000 toward their goal of $350,000 for renovations at the library, 362 Righters Mill Rd. "This money was raised through personal solicitation only," Huber said.

Freeman's next week will offer the complete interior of a library designed by Frank Furness at its two-day spring gallery sale of fine furniture, decorative arts and Americana. It is one of several sales next week that happily coincide with the Philadelphia Antiques Show. The library, one of more than 360 lots in the auction, consists of 12 units of carved walnut; a mantelpiece with mirror more than 10 feet high and six feet wide; 11 cabinets of varying widths, and a corner cabinet.

Faced with a proposed rent increase that would more than double the cost of housing the township library, the Newtown Township Board of Supervisors has decided to put the problem before the public. The library rents space in the basement of an office building in the Newtown Square Shopping Center. Board chairman Edward Corse told the board at an informal meeting Monday night that the new owners of the shopping center wanted to increase the rent when the lease expired in November 1987.

Local teenagers have added their voices to the cry for a community library in Horsham Township. Led by history teacher Marilyn Soufer, nine Hatboro-Horsham High School students submitted petitions with more than 1,000 signatures calling for establishment of a library. The petitions were presented to township council members Wednesday night. About 25 students collected the signatures outside polling stations on Election Day. While impressed by the student effort, council members were less than encouraging about the prospects for a library.

This evening, Gramm-Rudman meets the eggheads. And the eggheads, if they will forgive the term, are not happy. At just about dusk, when the desk lights of the Library of Congress' Main Reading Room are flicking on, when the hustle-bustle is leveling to a steady hum, when the cavernous dome overhead is taking on its nocturnal shadowing, and when the big clock is ticking off the few hours left in the day, everyone in the nation's library will...

Perhaps Jason Kaye should take a break from the "activism" and do some serious fact-checking before dispatching ill-informed missives. As a regular patron of the Free Library system, all I could do was continually shake my head at his May 16th article. If he's looking for a combination Kinkos/Staples/Best Buy/Starbucks, then perhaps the Free Library, or any library system, isn't for him, because that's not what a library is about. A library system should attempt to fulfill the needs of as many of its patrons as possible (keeping in mind that you cannot please everyone)

Over a decade of multi-million-dollar philanthropy, Nicholas and Athena Karabots of Whitemarsh Township, Montgomery County, have channeled much of their largesse to major urban institutions the likes of the Franklin Institute, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and the Museum of Art. But no project has gotten the kind of hands-on attention the two have lavished on a tiny, little-known library in Lafayette Hill, less than four miles from home....

A recent opinion piece called into question the Free Library's place in our digital world. A quick stop on freelibrary.org — our "online branch" which receives 8 million unique visits annually — immediately highlights just how relevant and digitally savvy the Free Library is. There, users will quickly and easily find access to: More than 30,000 ebooks for checkout; Streaming and downloadable popular music; Hundreds of podcasts from...

A RECENT OPINION piece called into question the Free Library's place in our digital world. A quick stop on freelibrary.org — our "online branch," which receives 8 million unique visits annually — immediately highlights just how relevant and digitally savvy the Free Library is. There, users will quickly and easily find access to: More than 30,000 e-books for checkout. Streaming and downloadable popular music. Hundreds of podcasts from our renowned Author Events series, which are downloaded at a rate of 26,000 per month.

To say that the Free Library of Philadelphia is doing a subpar job at adapting their service platform for the 21st-century patron would be an understatement. There are more free books you can download from Amazon.com than from the Free Library's website. The library bureaucracy has parallels with the VHS tapes that are most likely collecting dust at your local neighborhood branch: They take up precious space and have over-extended their stay in the system. The current library administrators have proven time and again to present a short-sighted yet costly vision to the Philadelphia community.

A drug overdose may have caused the death of a homeless man found early this morning on the steps of the Norristown Public Library, according to Montgomery County officials. Norristown Police Chief Russell Bono said a security guard making rounds at 7 a.m. found the 46-year-old man on the rear steps of the library at Powell and Swede Streets. The body was surrounded by empty drug packets, Bono said. Police were withholding the man's identity until his family could be located.

CHILDREN'S AUTHOR Maurice Sendak began his life in Brooklyn and lived in Connecticut until his death Tuesday, but his heart — his work — lives on in Philadelphia at the Rosenbach Museum and Library . The museum has more than 10,000 pieces of Sendak's work, spanning his career from the '40s to the early 21st century, and will mount a memorial exhibition in June. Reacting to the beloved author's death, the museum opened its doors for free to the public yesterday and will again Wednesday from noon to 8 p.m. The gallery is exhibiting "From Pen to Publisher: The Life of Three Sendak Picture Books.

The Philadelphia Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, the nation's oldest book collection serving the visually impaired and one of only two in the commonwealth, is slated to be dramatically diminished this week, as services and the collection are slashed. The plan calls for moving most reading materials to the smaller, less-used Pittsburgh branch; foolishly dumping half a million recorded cassettes; and halving the caring, veteran staff that helps disabled patrons in 29 counties.

QUOTH THE RAVEN, "Nevermore. " So says Edgar Allan Poe anyway. But what does "Nevermore" sound like with a Philly accent? Because the raven — yes, that raven — that inspired Poe's most famous work and the title of the new John Cusack-starring thriller — resides right here in town. At the Rare Book Department in the Central branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, to be exact. Despite being an English bird by birth, the raven has resided at the library since 1971, when Col. Richard Gimbel, of the famed department-store dynasty, bequeathed the raven to the library.

YOU WOULD think that in this day and age - when Exxon/Mobil commercials tell us American children are dumber than paste - parents would be happy that their children were reading anything longer than a tweet, but for the second year in a row, Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy was among the most "challenged" books, as reported Sunday by the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. The ALA defines a challenge as "a formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that a book or other material be restricted or removed because of its content or appropriateness.