Checking Out the Library : More Children Discover It’s a User-Friendly Place

BEVERLY HILLS — The cat is out of the bag. The Beverly Hills children’s library has been discovered by thousands of young munchkins.

With a stock of books from A to Seuss, the library recently celebrated its most successful summer reading program ever. Nearly 1,500 children took part, almost twice the number from the previous summer, and they read more than 9,000 books in two months.

Christina Garcia, supervisor of children’s library services, suggests that the recession might have contributed to the increase by placing other entertainment choices out of reach. But surely the surge in youthful patrons is also a result of word getting out about the extraordinary children’s facility, tucked away inside the city’s sumptuous 2-year-old main library at 444 N. Rexford Drive.

The children’s library has a distinct feel of being a world all its own. As patrons walk into the main library with its high ceilings and tiled archways, the dramatic scale begins to give way as soon as they cross the lobby into the hallway of the children’s division.

The hallway narrows and the ceiling drops. The yellow, blue and salmon-colored walls are covered with original drawings of fairy-tale characters, and big, bold reading posters.

Hanging from the ceiling are nearly 700 hand-colored mobiles with snapshots of the children who finished the summer reading program. Resting on the carpet are large cardboard cutouts of animals dreamed up by staffer Maxine Meltzer. Young patrons can walk up to a gray and pink seal riding a tricycle, a puffin sitting atop a construction grader, or a sea-green fish with goggles flying an airplane.

Inside, the tables and chairs are child-size and the books on the shelves are within easy reach of small hands.

The patrons come as young as 2 years old, Garcia said. Parents bring their babies and check out the cardboard books with the colorful pictures and one or two words on a page.

The library offers two organized reading programs: the summer reading program and Storytime. During the eight-week summer program, children read a book a week and write a report on what they liked best about the book. They are rewarded weekly with a puzzle piece that they color and paste onto a mobile until they have collected all eight pieces. At the end of summer, the mobile is hung in the hallway with their picture on it through Thanksgiving.

Also part of the summer lineup is the Reading Buddy program. An older child reads at least 12 books to a younger child, and the young ones draw pictures depicting what they liked best about each book. Snapshots of the Reading Buddy graduates are also on display in the hallway.

Eight-year-old Rose Zarrinpar will vouch for the success of the summer program. She read 78 books herself.

She likes fantasy, and science books about animals, she said.

Garcia and her staff fondly refer to the third-grader as a “library kid” because she spends so much time there. During the school year, Rose said, she comes to the library to do her homework. On weekends, she said, she reads the books she wants to.

Eleven-year-old Allen Bina admits he’s hooked on mystery books. He comes to the library in pursuit of specific authors.

“I can get the books I want,” he said.

Storytime is a 10-week series offered four times a year, with separate sessions for toddlers, preschoolers, school-age children and families. The next series starts in October. The groups generally fill up as soon as registration opens, Garcia said.

Much of the success of the children’s library, Garcia said, comes from the stability of the staff and their knowledge of the collection. The appeal of the job is the contact with people--children in particular--said Garcia, who has a master’s degree in English and has been at the library for 13 years.

“Children are rejuvenating and reaffirm my faith in humanity,” she said.

Garcia said her staffers’ knowledge of the children’s collection helps them respond to a child’s interest.

“A boy came in and wanted a book on airplanes. I could think of six in our collection off the top of my head,” Garcia said. “Children come to you interested. To capitalize on their interest, you have to know what’s here. I think that’s no less than kids deserve.”

If there’s a downside to working in the children’s library, it would be that the library is almost too busy, Garcia said. The number of children and parents using the library keeps increasing, but the staff isn’t--and isn’t likely to with the budget crunch, Garcia said. “Things get hectic sometimes.”

Candice Koral, whose daughters, Katherine, 10, and Elizabeth, 4, are library regulars, started coming to the Beverly Hills library 30 years ago when she was a child and the library was located in City Hall.

“We’ve been coming here so long, we can see how it’s changed,” she said. Many more people are using the library than five to 10 years ago, and it’s putting a strain on the staff, she said.

“They’ve built themselves a better mousetrap and they’re stuck in it. They don’t have the resources to support the demand they’ve created,” Koral said.

She’d like to see more staffing but realizes the city budget is limited. “Tell people to send money,” she said, only half in jest.

The success of the summer reading program is just one indication of the heavy use the library gets. Children’s reference librarians field an average of 7,000 questions a month, Garcia said. That’s about 250 per day, and that doesn’t include the help given to children who use the library and don’t ask questions.

Overall, circulation of children’s books makes up about one-third of the library’s total circulation of nearly 600,000 books per year.

“We’re very busy,” she said.

Another fact of library life is the soaring cost of books--the average book now costs $15. “The city has always been very generous in buying books,” Garcia said, “and so we’ve always had lots of good books.” The children’s library alone has more than 35,000 books.

But there is a perception that the city and the library have deep financial pockets, she said, so people check out books and never bring them back. Sometimes the book they take is the library’s last copy and is out of print.

“Twenty-cent book fines are irrelevant--we want the book back,” she said.

Overall though, Garcia said there are very few negative things about working in the Beverly Hills children’s library.

“I love my job,” she said. “I feel like I do an important thing.”