Longer weekend hours at Arlington Heights library now permanent
Arlington Heights Memorial Library trustees have voted to make permanent the extended weekend hours they began testing in March.
Executive Director Jason Kuhl said patrons have been using the longer Saturday and Sunday hours as much as they said they would in an earlier survey.
"It's been incredibly busy," Kuhl said. "The study rooms have been full."
The current weekend hours are 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sundays. Previously, they were 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Saturdays and noon to 5:30 p.m. on Sundays.
This was the first significant change to the library's hours since an extra half-hour was added to the weekends about a decade ago, Kuhl said.
It reflects the increased willingness of service-oriented businesses to meet the demands of their patrons, Kuhl said. While libraries were once accustomed to operating on 9-to-5 bankers' hours, not even bankers have bankers' hours anymore, he laughed.
And library staff have been more than ready to meet the new demand.
"The people who are working here really understand what our role in the community is," Kuhl said. "They're proud to work at the library and know what the library represents."
He believes the demand for more library hours exists because people want a third place between work and home where they can be. As the number of book stores and coffee shops has diminished, people have been turning to their local libraries to be that third place, Kuhl said.
The survey that sparked the idea ended with an open-ended question that read, "I wish the library would ..." The overwhelming response was to be open longer on the weekends.
When the follow-up question was asked of which day the library should be open longer, the choice between Saturday and Sunday was almost exactly even so the additional hours were split down the middle.
Kuhl said he has no doubt that if the library were open 24 hours a day there would be people there 24 hours a day, but that isn't a realistic option for the time being. The additional personnel costs of the extra hours from mid-March to late December 2016 were budgeted at $125,000.