News-Current Report
BEAVERCREEK — The Beavercreek Community Public Library location of the Greene County Public Library will be receiving a grant of $48,600 from the Ohio Development Services Agency’s Local Government Innovation Program.
The library was one of 12 grants given by the agency to help local communities across the state increase efficiencies, cut costs and provide improved public services.
The grant money will fund strategies to analyze, map, and improve the services at the Beavercreek Community Library. Overall the library’s goal is to improve the patron’s library experience by assessing the efficiency of the library’s day-to-day operations.
In the next year patrons can expect to see a new floor plan for the library that maximizes the best use of space. They can also expect for library materials to be handled in a more efficient way that reduces errors and increase access to the collection.
Greene County Public Library will have to fund 10 percent of the project and provide progress reports to the Ohio Development Services Agency throughout the year. As the busiest location in the Greene County Public Library system, the Beavercreek Community Library is the ideal site for this project, according to the Deputy Director Elizabeth Cusack.
The Beavercreek library has the most checkouts of any of the county’s seven locations and last year over 8,200 people attended programs hosted by the library.
“Unfortunately, many of those programs had to be held offsite due to the lack of space within the library,” said Cusack. “With this grant, we have the opportunity to work with a consultant to evaluate our physical space and how work is performed to improve our service to the community while reducing costs.”
The initial stages of the process are expected to begin early this fall.
The Greene County Public Library system is available on the Internet at www.greenelibrary.info. The library system consists of seven locations: Beavercreek, Jamestown, Cedarville, Fairborn, Yellow Springs, Xenia and Bellbrook.
