Friday, July 08, 2005
Convenience
After reading so many things about merchandising libraries, I was struck by how SLO's branch breaks the No.1 rule - it's inconvient to get to. Imagine what we could do with a large single-story building out by Home Depot and Costco where people actually go and there's parking to be had! Such a layout would offer a world of opportunities to arrange the collection in new ways - and probably make it much easier to staff too. Lynn
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4 comments:
Hi Lynn,
That is a good point... if we had easy access in terms of parking it would make coming to library easier for our patrons. The first key in marketing... location, location, location!
And staff would certainly appreciate easy and free parking.
I still think we should have beat out that Chinese Place for the old CarlsJr on Madonna Rd. Of course that might have been too close to fiction and I might have been drowned in Laguna Lake.
It is interesting to hear about your parking woes. I think Atascadero is thinking about heading downtown, but parking is definitely a concern. Are there any other DISadvantages to being located in a downtown area?
Monday through Friday I believe parking is a sever problem in downtown San Luis. Have you ever tried to park here between Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas? The parking garages help some, but even those fill up about mid day. We are in competition with a lot of government workers with both the city and county buildings within a block of eachother. For me, I rarely come downtown except to come to work, and I suspect there are a lot of people who feel the same way. I believe a large library located somewhere on a major bus route and near someplace like Costco or Madonna Plaza would better serve the majority of the city's residence.
There are advantages with being downtown - esecially for Mission School - there's no doubt about that, but I'm beginning to doubt that they're worth the hassle of getting to this building. I do believe it would be nice to maintain a storefront type branch in this area where people could have Internet access, a reading room and pick up requests.
I admitt openly my main reason (besides parking) for wanting to get out of this building is that I don't feel the building is conducive to the type of library we seem to be leaning towards for the future. I dream of a large, single floor building that would be easier and cheaper to staff plus give us the range of space to build the kind of spaces that would attract the public to us.
Hope I haven't run on too long. Lynn SLO
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