Last month, the Cobb County Library System broke ground at the East Marietta branch on 2051 Lower Roswell Road, to begin construction of the new East Marietta Library and Cultural Center. This 28,000 square-foot building will cost $10.6 million and is being funded through the 2016 Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax and the Georgia Board of Regents. A total of $8.6 million will come from the SPLOST program.
Cobb County Library Director Helen Poyer said the new facility will feature traditional library services and creative space for all ages. “East Marietta [library] will be transformed into a ‘Knowledge Library’ for discovery and 21st century skills development,” she said. “This will be a unique facility – a destination – for all of Cobb County.” The new facility will include classrooms, an art gallery, black box theatre, outdoor amphitheater and music practice rooms. It is scheduled to be completed in summer 2017.
While the existing East Marietta Library is the seventh busiest in the county with about 55,000 patron visits annually, the building itself is considered outdated, having been built in 1967. The older building will remain open while the new library is constructed. The new joint-use library and cultural center, according to Poyer, “will incorporate traditional library services such as story times, reference assistance and book discussions, with new technologies for collaborative creativity, such as 3-D printing, audio/ video recording, a black box theater and an outdoor amphitheater.”
The East Marietta library will remain open during the new construction, and Poyer expects the project to be completed early summer 2017. “The combined library and cultural center is designed to serve the neighboring community, as well as be a destination for all Cobb citizens,” Poyer said. Cobb County Commissioner Bob Ott agrees. “What the county is doing is combining uses so that you’re not just putting bricks and sticks up for a library,” he said.
“We’re building something that can be used for other things. It’s going to become a community center that also happens to have a library as a part of it.” Local parent, Shannon Galbreath, said she welcomes the change as good news, as previous threats of Cobb library closure jeopardized one of her children’s favorite activities. “The story times (at the library) were our big adventures out of the house,” she said. “The library for me as a mom has been my sanity, and reassurance that I can fuel my kids with something as rich and pure as a love of reading, in the midst of a society obsessed with technology and screen time.”
Poyer stressed, though, that libraries aren’t just a place to check out a paperback anymore. Libraries offer free, open access to information in a way that no other public, community-based facility does. They are also one of the only places still open to the public that allow patrons to use all of their services without the expectation that they also purchase something, and that’s something that won’t change, even with the new multi-use facility.
“We like to say we’re more than just books,” Poyer said. “We’re navigators. We help connect people to the information that’s out there.”
“A few years ago when there was talk about closing some of our libraries, our patrons came out,” she said. “People came out saying how much they loved the library and how valuable we are in the community.” Poyer said libraries continue to enjoy that kind of support today.
“We’re very fortunate,” she said. “We have strong advocates for library services in Cobb County and I think we do a great job of providing outreach and talking about how valuable we are to the people. We have a rosy future ahead.”
Article written by Beth Ward
Reprinted from EAST COBBER’s May 2016 issue
