Branch renovations and a pivot away from books: Prince George’s County libraries since 2000

This article was first published on December 21, 2020. The history of Prince George’s Library System remains an interesting topic and we wanted to share this piece with you again.

The story of the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System in the 21st century is a story of renovations and replacements. Besides addressing maintenance backlogs in older branches, these changes have marked a more fundamental pivot: away from printed books, and toward more electronic services.

Recent years have seen a number of libraries in Prince George’s County closed for major renovations or replacements, but the series of renovations is finally coming to a close, and PGCMLS hopes to open a new branch in Langley Park in a few years. As uncertainties around the pandemic abound, it remains to be seen whether the latest period of renovations will lead into another era of growth.

Branch renovations and replacements have predominated in the 2000s and 2010s

After the lull in new library construction in the 1980s and 1990s, the end of bookmobile service in 1991, and the closures of the Suitland (1986), District Heights (1987), College Park (1994), and Magruder (1996) branches, PGCMLS began a series of major new construction projects over the past two decades.

However, unlike the construction projects of the 1960s and 1970s, which involved the opening of eleven new branches between 1960 and 1980, only one new location (South Bowie, in 2012) has opened since 1987 – a period during which the county’s population has grown by over a quarter from 700,000 to 900,000. Instead, construction projects have focused on replacements and major renovations of some of the system’s older branches.

The large number of major renovations and replacements of libraries over the past two decades are in part a consequence of the library-building boom of the 1960s and 1970s: today, libraries built during that boom are 40 to 60 years old and many of them are coming due for renovation at the same time. Furthermore, the budget crisis of the 1980s and 1990s meant that needed maintenance and renovations were put off, leading to a major repair backlog that is coming due for many buildings.

Major renovations and replacements of the system’s older branches began with the 1997-1999 renovation of the Bowie Branch, during which a temporary storefront branch was opened to provide library service to the community. A similar major renovation of the Oxon Hill Branch occurred in 2003-2004 and the construction of a new building for the Accokeek Branch, which had been the last branch permanently housed in a rented building, was also completed in 2004.

However, after the 2012 opening of the South Bowie Branch, the system’s first completely new branch since the 1987 openings of the Largo-Kettering and Spauldings branches, the library system began a series of continuous library replacements and major renovations that is still ongoing.

First, the Laurel Branch was closed and demolished in 2014 and reopened in a new building in 2016. The new Laurel Branch, which replaced an awkward building made up of a number of additions built at different times, won the 2018 American Institute of Architects (AIA)/American Library Association (ALA) Library Building Award, making it the first library in Maryland to win this prestigious award since the 1970s.

In late 2015, while the new Laurel Branch was still under construction, the New Carrollton Branch closed for three years of major renovations. Before these were complete, the Hyattsville Branch was closed in 2017 for demolition and replacement and a relatively large temporary branch opened nearby.

The 2014 decision to replace rather than renovate the Hyattsville Branch, a building with a characteristic saucer-shaped entrance and which had been slated for major renovations since 1988, provoked community outcry and the creation of an advocacy group called “Save Our Saucer.” The building —the library system’s first purpose-built library — was seen as particularly historic, and the replacement branch is slated to be somewhat smaller than the original building.

The Hyattsville project has seen severe delays: when the library closed in April 2017, it was expected to reopen in 2019, but the library is still operating out of its temporary storefront location and the new branch is currently expected to open in May 2021. The Surratts-Clinton Branch is also currently closed for major renovations that began in 2019 and are expected to be completed in December 2021 at the earliest.

The next library slated for a major renovation is the Bladensburg Branch, which is scheduled to be relocated to a temporary site in February 2021 while the current building is demolished and an ADA-compliant replacement roughly three times the size of the current branch is constructed. The new Bladensburg Branch will open some time in 2022 if the project remains on schedule. According to the county’s FY2021-FY2026 Capital Improvement Plan, the Baden Branch will also relocate from its current space in the Baden Elementary School to a newly renovated building in 2022.

Along with the scheduled renovations of PGCMLS-owned branches, Mount Rainier Branch—the one remaining library in the system that is operated by PGCMLS in a municipally-owned building—unexpectedly closed for renovation from late 2018 to early 2020.

The sudden closure was due to maintenance issues, including an inoperable emergency exit, that led the library system’s union to declare the branch unsafe to operate in 2018. Renovations were slowed by the presence of asbestos and the city’s need to find sources of funding to pay for the unexpected costs — the branch only reopened after receiving a grant from the state legislature.

Renovations have supported a pivot away from printed books.

The recent renovation and replacement of so many branches has allowed the library system to more easily implement a change in priorities for space, reflecting a change in the focus of the libraries’ services from serving as repositories of books to a broader provision of services.

Although printed books remain an important part of PGCMLS’s mission, customer demand for study rooms, meeting spaces, and computers have increased significantly in recent years. As a result, the newly built or renovated branches have somewhat reduced shelf space for books, but increased space for computer terminals, study rooms, and meeting spaces.

The balance of space in renovated branches varies depending on what has historically been in demand in a given community. Computers are particularly important in lower-income parts of the county, where many residents do not have computers or reliable internet connections at home. Meanwhile, meeting rooms are broadly popular because of the shortage of affordable space for non-profit groups in the county to organize meetings.

In addition to computers, PGCMLS is also working on providing other technology that many residents do not otherwise have access to. The library system provides 3D printing at all branches and there are plans to install a laser cutter at the Fairmount Heights branch.

The design for study spaces has also changed over time. When the South Bowie Branch opened in 2012, it had large group study rooms to encourage collegial learning. However, they have largely been used by one or two people at a time, so more recent renovations have prioritized smaller but more numerous study rooms. In addition to study rooms for adults, the new Hyattsville branch will include “tutor rooms” in the children’s area for grade school students to work with tutors.

Reductions in the number of physical books has been a trend among public libraries generally as electronic materials and the provision of computer and internet access have become more important, but it is a trend that PGCMLS has taken much further than other neighboring libraries.

Over the fifteen years from 2003 to 2017, collections of physical items were reduced at the Montgomery County Public Library by 22% (from 2.51 to 1.96 million items), at the Fairfax County Public Library by 28% (from 2.59 to 1.87 million items), and at the District of Columbia Public Library by 59% (from 2.54 to 1.05 million items). Over the same period, PGCMLS reduced its physical collection—which was already significantly smaller than those of the neighboring systems—by 68%, from 1.97 million items to just 630,000 items.

New branches in the future?

The current round of library renovations is expected to finish with the reopenings of the Surratts-Clinton and Hyattsville branches and the replacement of the Baden and Bladensburg branches. Once these are completed, the next item in the library system’s capital improvement plan is construction of the first completely new PGCMLS branch in over a decade.

Work on the new branch, to be built about half a mile from a Purple Line station in the low-income and largely-immigrant community of Langley Park, is expected to begin in late 2022 or early 2023. The Langley Park Branch is intended to double as a community center, and will have substantial office space for community groups alongside the usual library facilities.

New branches are also planned in the fast-growing communities of Glenn Dale and Brandywine outside of the Beltway, along with a larger replacement for the Hillcrest Heights Branch. However, it is hard to predict how much these projects may be affected by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the county and state budgets.

Sources

Much of this account depends on information from the internal PGCMLS document “History of Prince George’s County Memorial Library System,” which was provided to me by the librarian John M. Krivak from the Hyattsville Branch and by the library system’s public relations department.

Michael B. Gannon, PGCMLS Chief Operating Officer for Support Services provided me with information on the current status of library renovation projects and the decision process that goes into the design of the library system’s new and renovated branches.

Information on library system collections is from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ 2003 and 2017 Public Libraries Surveys.

Information on current library construction and renovation projects is in the Prince George’s County FY2021-FY2026 Capital Improvement Plan.

A number of newspaper articles also provided useful information for this article:

• “Maryland is the first to formally implement a borrowing program that unifies libraries in a statewide system, officials say,” by Jamie Stiehm, Baltimore Sun, (8 April 2005).

• “Readers can Borrow All Across Maryland,” by Yian Q. Mui, Washington Post, (10 April 2005).
• “County’s decision to rebuild rather than renovate library is a mistake,” by T. Carter Ross, Hyattsville Life and Times, (9 July 2014).
• “Bladensburg Library to be demolished, replaced,” Prince George’s Sentinel, (14 March 2018).
• “Despite delays, city library thriving in temporary location,” by Ben Simasek, Hyattsville Life and Times, (14 October 2018).
• “Mount Rainier library re-opens with new look, new tech,” by Michael Theis

This is the fifth article in a series about the history of the Prince George’s County library system. Read parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.