BonnerSprings.com

Besides books and a catalog, there's at least one essential, non-human feature for a library: a means of storing and displaying those books.

At its Monday night meeting the Bonner Springs City Council approved a bid for shelving for the city's new library. The bids submitted by two companies for the shelving came in higher than the library's architects had estimated, said Kim Beets, director of Bonner Springs Library. That's because of the increase in steel and fuel prices, she said.

The new library "was designed around the shelving," said Beets, so that all shelves could be seen from the central desk. So she called the lowest bidder, Scott Rice Office Works, and negotiated a $4,900 price reduction, by reusing all of the current library's steel shelving, and eliminating some of the new library's planned online catalog stations and decorative tops for the children's shelves, which brought the shelving cost down to $142,569.

The bid includes the design and installation of all new shelving, end panels, online catalog stations, delivery and installation of existing library shelves, and the manufacture and installation of custom shelving and kiosks.

The total furniture and equipment budget for the new library is $225,000, which includes money for computers and interior signs. The furniture package selected by the library board and staff was estimated at $148,982, Beets' report said, a reduction of $94,556 from the original package selected, making for a combined shelving and furniture cost of $291,552.

To make up for the $66,552 difference between that cost and the budgeted amount, Beets said, "the library board and I got creative and worked out a solution."

That includes doing away with a planned $20,000 book-security system and $50,000 in planned purchases for the new library collection on opening day.

Book-security systems often go unused, Beets' report said, because of their error rate, and the systems also imply a mistrust of patrons.

The new collection for the library's opening day, Beets wrote in her report, is the "most flexible part" of the new library's budget, because additional collections can be added as funds become available.

Beets also recommended looking at the net interest earnings of $185,000 from the $3.5 million bond issue for the new library as a source for funding the opening-day collection.

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