Library reaches fundraising goal Northeast Harbor collection to move to new space, set up endowment

MOUNT DESERT – Thanks to more than 580 donors, including some local businesses, millions of dollars have been raised for the library in Northeast Harbor, according to library officials.

Robert Pyle, director of Northeast Harbor Library, said that the library’s campaign committee has reached its goal of more than $5 million, $2 million of which will go toward an endowment while the rest will pay for the new building the library hopes to move into later this year.

“We’ve just finished up a $5.5 million capital campaign here,” Pyle said last week. “It took us around five years to raise the money.”

O.P. Jackson and Moorhead Kennedy, chairmen of the library’s campaign committee, indicated in a prepared statement that the fundraising effort officially began in October 2004 but that a “quiet” campaign started years before then.

“In fact, if all the pledges come in on schedule and as promised, we will exceed our goal,” Jackson said in the release.

A new library building, under construction where the old library stood at Joy and Summit roads, is expected to be completed by the end of this year and officially open in 2008. The 14,000-square-foot building will be approximately twice the size of its predecessor, which was structurally unsound and not up to modern building standards, library officials have said.

With 42,000 volumes in the library’s catalog, plus thousands of photographs and hundreds of maps, the new structure should have enough space for its collection and programs for at least the next 15 years.

Pyle noted recently that the library is an institution that everyone in town supports. The local elementary school may be the domain of year-round residents, he said, and the local swimming and yacht clubs are dominated by seasonal inhabitants.

“The library belongs to no element of the community. It’s everybody’s,” he said. “I think that is one of the things that makes it special.”

The new building and endowment are outgrowths of a long-range study of the library that began in 1995 and ended in 1998. An endowment, the study indicated, would ensure the library’s financial stability and limit the amount of money the library would have to ask for from voters each year at Mount Desert’s annual town meeting.

Library officials said that in addition to being handicapped accessible, the new library will house the Center for Maine Studies, which will contain bound books of Maine nonfiction, and more room for children’s services.

And because more people and organizations have been donating their archives to the library, it will also have a climate-controlled archival space.

“The archive has been growing quite significantly,” Pyle said. “We have upwards of 3,000 photographic images, many of them now digitized, and we have 8,000 documentary archives.”

If ongoing fundraising efforts are successful, the library also will contain a “unique resource for gardeners” on the second floor, the statement indicated. The gardeners’ section would contain books, drawings and other research materials.