Survey: What is Your Dream For the Future Library?

Roughly two and a half years after the Los Angeles Public Library severely cut back on its services, the public is being invited to help develop a long-term strategic plan aimed at creating “the library of the future.”

The LAPL has launched a survey—both online and on paper—comprising three questions aimed at helping the countywide system serve the public better.

Here’s what the LAPL wants to hear about from its patrons:

1. How has the Library touched your life (one sentence)?

2. What is your dream for the future library (one word or one sentence)?

3. If you currently don’t use the Library, or rarely use it, what one thing would bring you to the library more often?

The Eagle Rock branch of the Los Angeles Public Library gets an average of 1,700 visitors weekly, according to a recent count, Branch Manager Sonja Hannah told Eagle Rock Patch.

“We’re getting a lot of complaints about the homeless,” Hannah said, adding: “The restroom is cleaned every day but unfortunately we can’t be there all the time, and the storage of their carts outside and bringing their materials into the library is kind of a difficult issue.”

Every LAPL branch has its unique characteristics. Among a range of other visitors, the Eagle Rock branch has long attracted school students who either do their homework there or wait to be picked up by their parents after school.

Participation among young adults in the Eagle Rock Library is “very active,” said Hannah, attributing the phenomenon to the fact that there are three large public schools within a radius of 200 yards to half a mile of the library. (The schools are: Eagle Rock Elementary, Dahlia Heights Elementary, and Eagle Rock High.)

Is the Eagle Rock LAPL branch safe, welcoming and inviting to all its patrons? What kind of adjustments do you think the library needs to make to accommodate everybody while ensuring that no particular section of the neighborhood populace feels inconvenienced, left out or aggrieved?

Those are the kinds of issues that library patrons can respond to in the LAPD survey. Click here to enter your reponses. Or visit the Eagle Rock Library to fill out your responses on paper, ideally by the end of this week.