498 Clear Lake Public Library, Clear Lake, Wisconsin

The third stop on my Wisconsin day trip brought me to Clear Lake, where the library shares a building with the village office and the police department. Take a good look at that large window with the curved top; it adds wonderful natural light to the library..

I tried to shield the camera from the bright sun, but didn't succeed very well. Oh well, after the clouds and rain we'd been having, it would be churlish to complain in any way about a sunny day.

These days, a library without computers would be like a library without encyclopedias back in the day. Here there are three, ready for patrons to come in and use them. I saw a couple of signs representing policies that I would have appreciated when I worked at a library. One says that the computers will be turned off five minutes before closing. The second says that DVDs cannot be checked out less than 15 minutes before closing. The reason for the DVD rule is the same as it was where I worked: Cases are displayed and discs must be added by the circulation staff, and that really eats up time.

The children's area is toward the back of the library. The wooden table and chairs are classic!

Here's a closer view. The red bookshelves hold picture books, and represent a challenge facing many small libraries. Stacking picture books five shelves high limits the browsing ability of small children, but there simply isn't space to put flip bins on the floor.

Behind the wooden storage unit to the right we find...

...a collection of construction toys, waiting for young patrons to arrive and dig in. I also saw a notice about the"1000 Books Before Kindergarten" program.

Junior non-fiction is on the shelves to the right and fiction is on the stacks at the left. The presence of Captain Underpants and Junie B. Jones on the fiction display was a puzzle until I realized (I think) that all children's fiction titles, J and YA, are intershelved. There is a white metal rack visible in the background, holding CD and book bagged sets.

Back into adult territory, this area offers periodicals in a rack, newspapers on the table, adult stacks in the background...and a handy box of tissues. Adult books are in the stacks, media are shelved along the wall. I saw a reminder I haven't seen in a long time, though it's still timely, reminding patrons to avoid leaving DVDs and books on CDs in hot vehicles.

A sofa faces the adult non-fiction stacks, very nice for looking through a half-dozen books and deciding which one/s are the ones you need.

I often say that each library I visit has something I haven't seen in a library before. And here's the example for Deer Park:

10/24/2018