Ballarat Library to re-open tomorrow

FROM tomorrow onwards, thousands of people are expected to visit the redeveloped Ballarat Library daily to read and borrow books, to play, study, and learn.

City of Ballarat executive manager libraries and lifelong learning Jenny Fink led a tour through the two-story community resource centre this morning, which has been a worksite for 15 months.

“This is a wonderful day, and to be opening up the library tomorrow, I’ll have a tear in my eye from excitement,” she said. “It’s an incredible experience walking into this building.

“If you can remember what it looked like beforehand, to what it looks like now, it’s been a labour of love.

“The staff have worked for weeks to put this library back together. They’re so thrilled to open tomorrow.

“They’ve just been smiling.”

The new library includes a children’s area with a learning lab, cubby, tiered reading area, and sensory area, enough benches for hundreds of people to work at, a lounge overlooking the courtyard, a lift, and teaching spaces.

“Our children’s section is an imaginative, lovely space,” Ms Fink said. “We’ve got trees, nooks to sit in, cubby houses to play in, and we hope families will fall in love with this space.

“On a Sunday afternoon… they can come in to the library, perhaps have a picnic in here, and play.”

The upper level, which was previously municipal offices, is a fully public floor, with meeting rooms, workstations, a youth and function space with a kitchen, and a maker space with sewing machines and 3D printers.

Also part of the designs are a new entrance, a coffee cart operated by Lilly’s Cafe, open spaces and quiet areas, all abilities bathrooms with a shower, and parents’ rooms.

In the central atrium is a large staircase, aiming to entice library-goers upstairs, and tiered seating for events and talks.

Now it’s ready to open, about 70,250 items from the collection have been returned to the library.

The collection includes 18,000 adult fiction books, 4000 young adult texts, 17,500 children’s books, 1800 audiobooks, and much more.

“The staff have worked for weeks to put this library back together,” Ms Fink said. “Libraries have got thousands of different components, and they were all packed away in boxes, and stored across Ballarat.”

A Heritage Room has been created for historic item-viewing, family research, and exhibitions.

The new seating areas are expected to accommodate more-than 400 people, compared to the 130 the library had before.

There are 101 solar panels on the roof, most of the main flooring is Marmoleum which is a material made from wood flour and linseed oil, and high-traffic carpeted areas have a goat hair fibre floor covering.

The project cost $7.48 million, with $6.98 million from the City of Ballarat and $500,000 from the State Government’s Living Libraries Infrastructure Program.