It's enough to make a librarian say "shhh!"
Ricky Williams reached down and removed a hard plastic children's toy from a table and let the hollow piece fall a short distance to the concrete floor.
The hand-sized piece bounced and skittered on the shiny surface for a couple of seconds creating a multitude of clattery sounds. And that was just one piece, Williams pointed out, adding that the whole tower of plastic pieces usually falls when children play with it.
"You can hear that all the way down in circulation," he said.
Williams, the director of the Pine Bluff-Jefferson County Library System, then took the same toy and dropped it onto a small carpeted area nearby. The toy took one bounce and settled, and the sound was almost inaudible.
And therein lies one of the problems with the new Pine Bluff Public Library on Main Street. The expansive concrete floor, however, was only part of the problem. Because the ceiling was not insulated to a great degree, when it rained, it was as noisy as, well, rain on a tin roof, which is basically what it was.
Earlier this year, that part of the noisy library received an upgrade, Williams said, when the Polk Stanley Wilcox architecture firm of Little Rock, which worked on the design of the library, put in a drop ceiling throughout the library building.
"It's about a thousand percent better," Williams said. "We went from about 76 decibels during a hard rain to 55 or so. That's a huge improvement."
Melissa Pickett, a lead programmer for the library, whose desk is a few feet away from the children's area, agreed.
"It's really loud when they drop a box of Legos," she said.
Williams said the architecture firm paid for the drop ceiling after he discussed the matter with them.
"We didn't have to pay a cent," Williams said. "The change was estimated to cost about $80,000. They (the architecture firm) ended up working it out. They made it right, and I appreciate that."
In addition to the drop ceiling, Williams said, "acoustical blades," devices that absorb sound, will be added to the ceiling design in order to dampen the noise level in the library even more.
As for the noisy floors, Williams said, the library is going to install carpet and vinyl tiles throughout most of the building.
The finished concrete is beautiful to look at, Williams said, but in a building where quiet is essential, the floors just add to the noise level.
"It just isn't working for a library," he said.
The library is also going to start replacing some of the old furniture that made its way to the new library, coming either from the old library itself or from donations.
The used furniture was already showing its age before being repurposed into the new building, Williams said, noting that some of it is broken and some is wobbly after being taken apart and put back together so many times.
"Nobody wants to see a $20 table in a $10 million building," Williams said. "We've got $1,200 to $1,500 chairs at tables that are maybe worth $10. We're going to change that and get the look that everybody expected."
Williams is also adding some other flourishes to the interior design. In the children's area, there will be a slide that connects an upper area to a lower area, and on the walls both inside and out there will be motivational words posted. And a long-planned cafe area downstairs will also take shape, he said.
The cost for all of the flooring work and other upgrades will be paid with some $550,000 that has not been spent from the original $13.3 million bond issuance that paid for the downtown structure and for improvements at the system's other branches.
"It's money that should have been used for the library," Williams said.
Much of the work will be put on hold until August after students go back to school for the summer. Williams is trying to engage with students who, left to their own devices, might not ever walk into a library.
But he's hoping the average student will be as taken by the library as some Watson Chapel 11th graders.
Those students came in for a recent visit, were shown all of the extras that the library has and were sold, Williams said.
"They were really shocked," he said. "They were like 'for real?' This was their first time. When they see what we have to offer, they realize we are more than just books."