One year on - Roseland Library full of life in latest home

photo credit: Courtesy of KRCB/Noah Abrams

An improved-but-still-temporary Roseland Regional Library has been open for about a year on Sebastopol Road in Santa Rosa.

On a foggy mid-October morning students from Victor Guadarrama’s sixth grade class from nearby Sheppard Elementary darted around the main room. He said he thinks the library is a great resource for his students.

"After taking a survey about how many students here had actually visited it, I found that it's a very small number and they were just super excited to, to be coming over," Guadarrama said.

Serena Makofsky, Roseland’s youth librarian, said staff aim to provide a different library experience.

"This is about library, not as a building, not as an island apart from the community, but as a concept," Makofsky said. "We bring that library concept to all the classrooms, to all the community events, to all the public events."

She said fostering bilingual literacy is central to the library’s mission.

"Spanish literacy builds English literacy and English literacy builds Spanish literacy," Makofsky said. "There's a lot of families worried that it's an either or proposition, and we're here to tell them that they are the literacy experts, the reading experts, the joy in their children's lives, and that those lessons will be profound for those children."

Outreach specialist Guadalupe Guzman said the library is an accessible public space. That means providing resources for both families and homeless individuals, whomever needs services like a computer with internet access.

The City of Santa Rosa has purchased a six-acre property at the intersection of Dutton and Hearn Avenues, the intended eventual location for a permanent Roseland library, community center, and a possible aquatic center; but plans and construction remain a ways off.

As for how staff feel about where they're at now compared to their previous home in an old furniture store - Guzman put it simply:

"To move from there to here and have everybody come in and just be awed at the layout and just say, 'We really love this library,' that makes me very happy," Guzman said.