HEBER SPRINGS — Frequent visitors of the Cleburne County Library will have to find their way to a new location to check out their favorite titles. While its permanent building is being expanded and renovated, the library has temporarily relocated to 102 E. Main St. in Heber Springs.
Zac Cothren, library director, said the building that now houses the temporary library was the former district court building.
“The courtroom now [houses] our adult fiction stacks,” Cothren said.
The library was closed for about a month while volunteers and library workers moved the almost 45,000 books from the old building to the temporary location.
The actual moving of the books took about a week, Cothren said. Following the move to the temporary location on Feb. 19, Cothren said, library attendance had slowed down but has recently started to pick up again.
“Some people are just now realizing we’ve moved,” Cothren said.
The library’s renovated facility, at 1010 W. Searcy St., will have 6,000 square feet of new space, in addition to the building’s original 5,000 square feet.
“The original building is being gutted down to the foundation and being completely remodeled,” Cothren said. “We were cramped in our former library building, and this temporary space [wasn’t] designed to be a library,” Cothren said. “We had to make the best use of the space that’s available.”
Cothren said the new facility will have a portion of the building just for children.
“This will separate [the children’s] part of the building from the overall part of the library,” Cothren said.
The new library, which will be named the Cleburne County Mary Wold Memorial Library, will also have a program room that will seat about 50 people.
“[The program room] will have an access door that goes out into an outdoor program space,” Cothren said.
The library previously didn’t have a space dedicated to hosting programs.
The new library will have complete new furnishings for the building, along with new computers for patrons to use.
“We’re going to have roughly probably triple the amount of computers we have now,” Cothren said.
Cothren said the reading tables in the new building will have tabletop power outlets for laptops.
“Our old facility only had one or two electric outlets the public could use,” Cothren said.
The Mary Wold Memorial Library is scheduled to open in early 2014, Cothren said.
Staff writer Lisa Burnett can be reached at (501)244-4307 or lburnett@arkansasonline.com.