Simi Valley’s Abridged Library : Quake: A bookmobile is brought out of retirement and parked outside the damaged building. Thousand Oaks hopes to reopen its facility in March.

Librarian Wayne Boyd finds he is satisfying some of the people some of the time.

“It’s going pretty good,” said Boyd, who is running the temporary bookmobile parked outside the earthquake-damaged Simi Valley Library. “Most of the people are pretty happy.”

The white, bus-like bookmobile will remain in the library’s parking lot through Feb. 28, when officials hope to reopen the Tapo Canyon Road facility. The library sustained more than $300,000 worth of damage, including broken windows and a cracked floor, during last month’s earthquake.

In Thousand Oaks, city officials are setting their sights on a mid-March reopening for their facility, which received about $2 million in water and ceiling damage.

“We’ve transferred all of our services to the Newbury Park branch,” said Steve Brogden, deputy library director. “Overall, the situation--as bad as it is--could have been much worse, and we just feel very lucky that the damage was as limited as it was.”

While many of the books in the Thousand Oaks library remain out of reach for readers, Simi Valley residents are even more hampered because their 140,000-volume resource has been reduced to a bus carrying only a few thousand books.

“It’s sort of like putting 10 pounds of sugar in a three-pound bag,” said Dixie Adeniran, director of the county’s Library Services Agency, which operates libraries in Simi Valley, Moorpark and other cities in Ventura County with the exception of Thousand Oaks, Santa Paula and Oxnard.

Adeniran said the county decided to dust off its bookmobile--taken out of service last summer because of budget cuts--in an effort to give Simi Valley residents some service in a convenient location.

“It was an attempt to allow people to have access to a selection of reference materials and a collection of the most popular reading materials,” she said. “We’re improvising.”

Simi Valley resident Debra Norris and her three young children browsed through the bookmobile Wednesday, the third or fourth time they have visited the temporary facility.

“I read them stories all the time,” Norris said as her children offered their favored selections. She said she was glad library officials decided to bring out the bookmobile rather than just refer patrons elsewhere.

“This way, people can kind of put their orders in and look around,” Norris said.

Boyd said he is not taking requests for titles not stocked in the bookmobile, but he is keeping track of popular subjects and general interests among residents and using the information as he restocks the shelves each morning.

“We had a lady in here yesterday, who came in and said, ‘Oh, you don’t have anything.’ I said, ‘Well, what do you like?’ And she said she liked mysteries. So I took her back to our mystery section and she said, ‘Well, these aren’t paperbacks. I can’t read them in bed.’ So, now, we have paperback mysteries.”

Beyond mysteries, Simi residents are showing an interest in titles dealing with earthquakes and home repair, officials said.

“We’ve tried to concentrate on books that will help people get their houses together and their lives together and offer some recreational reading so they can focus on something else,” said supervising librarian Dale Redfield.

Meanwhile, Thousand Oaks residents are crowding into the Newbury Park Library and anxiously awaiting the reopening of their main facility.

“The foot traffic has doubled at Newbury Park,” Brogden said. “Bear with us and we’ll get things back to normal as fast as we can.”

Thousand Oaks officials hope to fund the library rehabilitation through federal disaster aid from FEMA, insurance money and private efforts in trying to raise $250,000 toward reconstruction, Brogden said.

“The community support we’ve had through all this has been fantastic,” he said. “It’s just nice to see that the library is as appreciated as it is and we return that appreciation.”

The Newbury Park Library is open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays.

In Simi Valley, the bookmobile is open from noon to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, and Saturdays.

Simi Valley residents can also use the fully functional Moorpark Library, open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays to Wednesdays, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursdays and from noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays.

Fortunately, the Moorpark Library sustained only minor damage--mostly fallen books--and reopened the day after the earthquake. But the facility is still in need of assistance--in the form of money to support a long-awaited expansion.

Ventura County Supervisor Vicky Howard on Wednesday announced plans to hold a telethon this spring aimed at raising money toward the expansion. Howard said she hoped the televised event could be held in April and be broadcast through the city’s government access channel.

The supervisor said she came up with the idea after a similar library telethon in Ventura raised more than $40,000.

“I believe the residents of Moorpark will support a local telethon,” Howard said in a prepared statement. “Especially if the funds are used to improve the library.”