IRVINE : Building a Heritage of Satisfied Readers

To city resident James Lee, the Heritage County Library is more than a building full of books.

“It’s my second home,” the 30-year-old accountant said recently as he stretched out with a Time magazine in the library’s periodicals section.

Lee has been a loyal library patron for four years, ever since he used its newspaper classifieds to find a job. Since then, books and magazines from the library have helped Lee select stock investments and pick a new car. He also credits the library with turning him into a “Stephen King fanatic.”

Lee is not alone. The Heritage library is one of the busiest in the county. About 600,000 volumes are checked out from the Culver Drive branch each year.

Librarians said the library’s popularity should come as no surprise, considering that Irvine is home to a major university and is the high-tech capital of Orange County.

“Irvine is a reading community,” said Librarian Barbara Brook. “Some communities focus on best-sellers, some on children’s books. This is a community that reads heavily in fiction and nonfiction. It doesn’t have to be on a best-seller to get taken off the shelves.”

Heritage is one of the county’s three “regional” libraries. The other two are in San Juan Capistrano and Garden Grove. Regional libraries have larger budgets than smaller branches and focus resources on specialized collections.

Heritage’s focus is on business materials. Reference Librarian Tom Finch said the collection draws many professionals seeking information on starting up companies and securing venture capital.

“We have many people coming in who look like they’ve come from Brooks Brothers,” Finch said.

The library has compact-disc technology that allows patrons to access business data bases. It also stocks a wide variety of business reference books, including the not-so-common Moody’s Manuals, which list the history and financial records of major corporations.

Heritage also boasts a children’s section as well as a used bookstore that generates revenues for the library.

“We have an interesting and multiethnic clientele,” Brook said. “With the businesses and the university, Irvine isn’t your typical suburb.”