Talkeetna eyes new library

TALKEETNA - The public library serving the northernmost regions of the Mat-Su Borough is hoping for an upgrade.

"We've gone through what they call the pre-development phase," Talkeetna Public Library librarian Ann Yadon said. "In the pre-development, what you do is you look at the sustainability and the feasibility of a new facility."

The idea, Yadon said, is to build a newer, larger facility on borough land near Talkeetna Elementary School and next door to the town's community playground. The library has applied for a state matching grant of $2.8 million. With a local contribution - a lot of which will come in the form of in-kind contributions like land the building will sit on or from private donations - that should be enough to see the project through design, into construction and move everything into the new building.

Right now, Yadon said, the library is in a 2,580-square-foot building, half of which is a 1950s-era house moved to the site. The other half is an addition built in 1985.

"It's extremely well-used," Yadon said. "When you look at the borough statistics, we're actually probably one of the most heavily used libraries in the borough system."

It pencils out to something on the order of 35,000 annual visitors. If that's surprising, Yadon said, you need to take into account who is using the library. She serves people in an area stretching south to Caswell and, though Trapper Creek has a library, Talkeetna regularly gets people from that area on days the Trapper Creek facility is closed, and even sometimes farther north. People come in from Chase, which is off the road system, and homesteads along the various rivers.

What the library wants is a new, 7,840-sqare-foot facility that should meet the town's needs for years.

"It should get us 20 years out," Yadon said. Things can change, but, "We hope it wouldn't be any sooner than 20 years that you would have to do something with it."

Part of the scoping the library has already done includes getting an architect's mockup of what a new building might look like.

"USKH did a really good job for us and we have a concept that everybody seems to like," Yadon said.

She said it's not true in Talkeetna that library use is declining in the age of the Internet. Her numbers actually show a year-to-year increase, she said.

Rural libraries in particular have changed rather than shrunk. Yadon said her operation now is more akin to a community resource center. People come to use the Internet or look up needed forms and documents. They still often leave with books, but sometimes those books are digital. That's another area where the current facility is simply inadequate. It's just not wired to handle the kind of Internet use the community would like.

"We are maxed out on that kind of connection and we have no farther places to put stuff," she said.

Talkeetna has been looking at the possibility of a new library for years. Back in 2008, she said, a consultant asked the community where they'd like to see a new library. Almost everyone who responded said it should be somewhere in the vicinity of the old one.

Contact Andrew Wellner at Andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.