Site for temporary main library decided

Location in core to be announced later this week

The Windsor Public Library board has selected a new location for its central branch, but the location won’t be revealed until later this week.

At a meeting Tuesday afternoon, the board picked one of two options on the table, but city council must approve the location.

“Both are in the downtown core and both are good temporary options, and when I say temporary, three to five years, and both have different cost possibilities,” said Mayor Drew Dilkens, who chairs the library board.

“One would cost us more, one would cost us less, so the board went through all of that material and we hope to have an announcement later this week.”

The library must move out of its current location at 850 Ouellette Ave. by the end of June 2019 because the Downtown Mission is purchasing it for $3.6 million for its new headquarters.

The existing main branch, opened in 1973, has 107,000 square feet on three floors. Dilkens said the new temporary main branch will be roughly the size of the Budimir or Riverside branches, in the neighbourhood of 10,00012,000 square feet.

“It’s more your traditional branch size,” said Dilkens. “So what we would look at doing is push out some of the resources that are at the central branch to the other branches in the system, at least temporarily, so that we can deal with the temporary move.”

The library was originally looking to build a new branch of about 75,000 square feet, but recently discussion has begun with St. Clair College to partner on a new 90,000-square-foot building for the library and classroom space.

The city’s archives are currently housed in the basement of the central library and will be moved to a new home. “How do we look at merging the archives with the museum, so that all archival material, all museum material will be stored in one location?” Dilkens asked. “They ’re all city assets basically so how do we keep them together and make sure the collections are unified?” Dilkens said the library administration will not necessarily be located in the new temporary main branch. “The administrative offices may not be located in the branch, and frankly we were looking at that before,” Dilkens said.

“We had built extra space at city hall. We have options in there.”

Dilkens said the new temporary main library branch will also have adequate parking.