Summer may not start officially for a few more weeks, but the upper 80-degree temperatures and the Memorial Day holiday are the real beginnings of the summer season.  This year some of the usual signs of the season like the kick-off of the summer reading program and the annual book sale will not be occurring because of the renovations.

           

Life at the library will be a great deal more chaotic than usual for the next two months.  The construction company will be working through the library in sections at night, so we aren’t expecting any closings except for the usual holidays, but it will mean moving parts of the collections around.  They are beginning with the front of the library where the magazines, newspapers, DVDs and new books are kept so we will be packing up and moving some of these collections to the back for the first few weeks.

           

Since we have over 8,000 DVDs, we will try to keep out the most popular, but since this media is very susceptible to dirt as is your DVD player, we will be packing most of them up and moving them to the conference room.  As soon as the front section is done, we will unpack them back to their usual shelving.  So hopefully, there will be only a few weeks at a time of missing collections.

           

The West Virginia reference collection is already packed into the conference room, so I suggest that this is not a good time to start your genealogy project.  Also, the public computers with Internet access will also be unavailable in the first few weeks.  We will still have four public access computers in the back of the library available.

           

We have set up three big tables in the hallways for book sale items which are priced at $.25.  So, this is a really good time to take advantage of this.  We will leave the tables up through most of June since that hallway and the conference room are at the very end of the scheduled project.

           

Chaos is not typically a library virtue, but this summer it seems like it will be the norm.  So, we ask for your patience, and by August we will be back to normal with a nice new ceiling and flooring as well as bright new lighting.

           

To make it easier and less confusing to everyone, the library will not be charging fines from June 4^th until July 31^st.  For those binge watchers, it might be a good idea to check out some of the older DVD titles early this week because we plan to pack them by Friday.  Paperback readers will have the first couple of weeks in June before we will have to pack up that collection.

           

So, expect things to be wildly unpredictable and slowly changing at your library in this summer of 2018.