We are so excited about the opening of our new Administrative Offices later this year!
Our current Administrative Offices have been housed at Eastlake City Hall since 2015. We are deeply grateful to the City of Eastlake for this partnership opportunity.
In 2021, during the pandemic, we purchased the old Citizens Bank building at 38115 Euclid Ave. At that time, we were beginning our plan for the renovation of our Eastlake Library. With that renovation complete in the summer of 2023, we moved forward with plans for the renovations of our new Administrative Offices.
Our Administrative Offices house roughly 20 WEPL employees, including Library Administration, the Finance, IT, Marketing & Outreach, HR, Materials and Processing (MAP), and Interlibrary Loan Departments (ILL), along with our Children’s Services Manager.
In many ways, the Administrative Offices are where library materials are born and make their way into community members’ hands.
MAP receives, barcodes, and prepares all newly purchased library items (books, magazines, DVDs, CDs, video games, toys, and more) that get shelved at all four of our Library buildings.
Additionally, we receive, process, and deliver all ILL materials from other libraries through our membership in CLEVNET.
Our delivery crew, staffed by our Maintenance Department, makes ten deliveries per week, Monday–Friday.
In 2024, we entered 5,930 new items into our catalog, received 138,208 bags of materials from other libraries, and sent 218,171 bags of materials to other libraries.
Features of the New Administrative Offices
In addition to giving us a permanent home for this section of the WEPL staff, this new space offers opportunities for us to deepen our connections with the community. They include:
- A large green space in front of the building that we will upkeep and continue to use for Willoughby Public Library programming, with hopes of extending this for programming for other community partners.
- Solving a prior parking shortage for people who wanted to use our Willoughby Library.
- A community space available for periodic public use by outside groups for meetings of 50 people or less.
- Permanent home for W-E Library Boosters book sales.
Who We Are Working With
We received several bids from general contractors and went with Lakeland, from Painesville, who was the lowest bidder.
We are working with GPD Group, the same architects we worked with on the Eastlake renovation.
To read more about our new Administrative Offices, check out this feature in the News-Herald.
Not a Herald subscriber? You can click here to read the Herald (and past issues) for free with your library card.
