If University students take a moment away from their books to tour downtown Eugene, they could end up with many more books by visiting the Eugene Public Library.
“It’s a chance for students to get off campus,” Ward 3 City Councilor David Kelly said. “Downtown Eugene has a lot to offer students, and comparatively few that I’ve talked to over the years spend time downtown or have even been downtown.”
The library opened at its present location, 100 West 10th Ave., near Lane Transit District’s downtown station, in late 2002. The new building has won awards and has a full floor of extra space, currently used as city offices, so the library can accommodate its expanding collection of books and other media.
“This is a town piece that U of O students can be proud to be part of,” Library Director Connie Bennett said.
Bennett said she hopes that
University students are taking
advantage of the Eugene Public
Library’s services: “It’s something that comes with residency
in Eugene, and it’s a great
place to come.”
But why go downtown with the Knight Library right on campus?
“The collections are vastly different,” University Librarian Deborah Carver said. “They are complementary, but overlap very little.”
While the Knight Library offers more help for classes, Carver explained, University students might use the Eugene Public Library for its selection of popular books and music — “things that would apply to your general recreational interest rather than your scholarly interest.”
“It can be a specific kind of tool that students can use for recreation and classwork, and it’s just a nice place to be,” Kelly said. “You can take coffee into the book stacks as long as it’s got a lid on it,” he said, adding that the library includes an in-house coffee shop.
Like the Knight Library, the Eugene Public Library’s catalog is Internet-accessible so patrons can search for and reserve library items at home.
Bennett said the Eugene Public Library has services for children, which students with families might find useful, as well as a strong
fiction department with a reader’s advisory desk.
“If you like [Dan Brown’s] “The Da Vinci Code,” but you read it and you want to read something else, they can help you,” Bennett said.
Bennett helps the library select new books by reading book reviews and looking at shelves of new books in stores, and readers are welcome to suggest books for ordering at the service desks.
Bennett’s favorites among the library’s newest selections are Charles V. Ford’s “Lies! Lies!! Lies!!!: The Psychology of Deceit” — about the social role of lying — and Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life,” which discusses the social trend to value increasingly the freedom to create.
The Eugene Public Library is open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Monday through Thursday and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday through
Sunday. The library is open 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. the first Friday of every month, when it features free music, literary, artistic and cultural events in the evenings.

Eva Sylwester is a freelance reporter
for the Emerald.