Yorkville Public Library - part 1

This is the first of what will be a series of posts on southern Illinois libraries from a road trip I took recently.

The first of these first-time visits was to the Yorkville Public Library in Kane County. My first guess was that the building on the right was the original library, and the different-looking building on the left was a later expansion. Nope -- the small building on the left was the original library and the rest is all expansion!

 Here's the entry way, with a nice display case and wall monitor. The changing display on the wall goes through all the services of the library (making a good case for why they quintupled it in size!), but it scrolled through so slowly that I got impatient waiting for it to feed back through for pictures.

 The real architectural highlight here is the interior brick wall that separates the lobby/circ area from the stacks. Further down that way is YA.

This is the Children's area, as seen from the lobby. As you can see Children's is really given the main focus here, with YA off to the side and the adult books upstairs, much the reverse of how many libraries are laid out.

A close-up of the Children's computers, and those unusual stools instead of chairs.

Puzzles as an interactive display is definitely becoming a popular thing, as you see here, in front of the Large Print area (where those more likely to sit around doing puzzles will come for their books).

I like this stencil work around the doorway to Administration. It's cute, but "second star to the right" is about the worst possible directions for finding your way in the Administrative area.

Past Admin is this gallery of pictures, detailing the history of the library.

My first picture from upstairs, looking down at YA from the top of the stairs. I'm not sure what's causing that reflective quality, as I don't remember there being glass there...

I guess I'm a sucker for dark brown, but I like the upstairs furniture.