rev:text
| - North York Public Library is a palace of books on the subway line. I didn't know a thing about it until I was looking for a few volumes that were only available there. Did everyone else know about this but me? You go to North York Centre on the subway, walk upstairs, and there are five floors of books, including an amazing Canadian History/geneaology area on the fifth floor.
I found staff very helpful when I was researching up there. It's my first real research in that field, and I was a bit lost. One librarian put me onto some supremely useful sources, including a searchable online archive I could access from home. On a different day, another librarian actually brought a favourite book over to me at the photocopier, because he wanted to share it with me, and he thought it might be useful. I mean, how's that for amazingly, wonderfully helpful?
At TRL, I had to wait an hour to be told that they couldn't find the books I'd requested from the stacks, and the rest showed up on the wrong floor. At NYCentral, my requests showed up in minutes.
The library itself looks a lot like the Toronto Reference Library downtown. It feels more closed-in because it's part of a mall, but the ring-shaped floors surrounding a central court and the carpeted staircases are the same.
I don't know why they sequester the YA fiction and half of the graphic novels across the hall at the "teen zone," or whatever it's called. When I was there, the jukebox-filled hangout area had four asian businessmen chatting in it. They've also put a thousand or two novels on the main floor, calling them 'great reads' or something. Are they better reads than everything on the entire fiction floor? You got me. I understand that they're trying to make it accessible, but it seems weird, carving things up into upstairs fiction, downstairs fiction, teen fiction, etc.
On the whole, a great library. I can't believe how much the TPL has to offer people, most of it for free. People should come use it more!
|