By Logan Wells, News Director | Logan@kymnradio.net
The Northfield Public Library is looking to expand what private meeting space it offers and, in particular, have more small meeting rooms. Currently, the library has only one space, the Bunday Room, which can accommodate up to 65 people and has been quite popular. In 2024, the Bunday Room had 222 different outside groups booking the space.
Library Director Natalie Draper said that the new meeting space will be in part created by moving the Teen Room. She noted that no collection space was being sacrificed in the move either:
“So that’s where some of the moving the teen space to a larger space is going to then restore the pie room to being a meeting room again. So that’s like, and that’s a nice big eight-person meeting room… And it’s been a really good teen space for us, but the teens have frankly outgrown it, which is a great problem to have.” – Natalie Draper, Northfield Library Director on KYMN In The Morning
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Draper stated that the library had received a grant to cover the costs of the work and purchase new bookshelves. The new shelves would be for the children’s space, and be on wheels, to allow them to be easily moved out of the way when a program was needed in the space, further helping move more children’s programs out of the Bunday room.
Draper said that while they wanted meeting and programming space, they were also trying to find ways to work within their building and be flexible:
“The thing I’ve seen in a lot of new libraries is that they can accommodate really big programs, like 200, 300-person events, but you don’t want to have these huge spaces that mostly sit empty. So we only have 15,000 square feet to play with. So if we wanted to have a larger programming space, if we could have all of our freestanding shelves be mobile, right, you can just move that out of the way.” – Natalie Draper, Northfield Library Director on KYMN In The Morning
The Northfield Library is open Downtown Monday – Thursday, 9am to 8pm, Fridays 9am to 6pm, Saturdays 9am to 5pm, and Sundays 1pm to 5pm.
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