Main Library
The Main Library building opened on December 15, 1903 in downtown Rock Island. When the library first opened it was called the Rock Island’s Temple of Literature, but the name has been changed to the Main Library since the introduction of the branches. The current layout of the library has changed from its original opening in 1903. The basement houses the large Children's Department, including children's study area and children's computer lab. The basement has its own Circulation Department, bathrooms and an art exhibit titled Story Mountain, which was completed in 1985. The main floor or first floor houses the reference and circulations Departments, computer lab, and a small local history collection of Rock Island history. The main floor houses the fiction-mystery, romance, western, new, DVD & VHS, newspaper & magazine, and reference collections. The second floor houses the business office of the Rock Island Public Library, local art exhibit room, and the non-fiction collection. The basement, first, and second floors each have study areas and wireless internet. During the winter and fall months the library is open seven days a week and during the spring and summer the library is open six days a week, closing on Sunday. An addition was added to the Main library in 1986 and it was extensively remodeled in 2006. The Main library's phone number is 309-732-READ, which was designed so patrons would be unable to forget the number. The Rock Island Public Library is a member of PALS (Prairie Area Library System) a consortium 186 lending libraries.
Read more about this topic: Rock Island Public Library
Famous quotes containing the words main and/or library:
“Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world.... [ellipsis in source] He was always dominated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street.... He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)