When Antonia Stephens first became director of the Hyannis Public Library in 2020, she eliminated a uniformed security guard.
“I didn’t want people coming in here immediately thinking there may be a problem,” she recalls, a concern that deepened as ICE upped the ante.
She still has someone keeping an eye, but no uniform.
“We have people who misbehave, or have crises,” she acknowledges. Not surprising; after all, this is the Cape’s urban library.
Hyannis attracts older people who have been coming for decades, immigrant families with curious kids, tourists, alongside homeless people looking to read the daily paper, sit in a safe nook, charge a phone.
Libraries have always been oases.
As digital technology redefines how we get information, the question is whether we still need “repositories” for knowledge -- as civilizations have deemed crucial for millennia.
Hyannis has embarked on a $10-million reconstruction to address that question. Re-designed spaces are meant to embody priorities, values, and uses that remain vital in the heart of Hyannis, in many ways at the beating heart of the Cape.
Antonia Stephens is an intriguing person to define and drive that effort.
Her background is not library administration; she co-majored in biology and dance, the kind of eclectic combination Benington College is famous for. She came to the Cape in 2001, volunteered and then moved into paid positions at several of Barnstable’s seven libraries.
When she landed the director’s job in Hyannis, she knew the town and knew she was facing immediate challenges:
A restrictive building. Safety issues, things falling apart, systems 50 years old, no cohesive model. Even so the library counts almost 44,000 visits a year (that’s visits, not humans).
Her board was ready for a capital campaign, but Stephens needed to define the vision, and conjure space.
“One thing I knew we didn’t need right off was an atrium,” she smiled. “Go to the mall if you want an atrium. Then flexibility. There’s only one thing in here with one job and that would be the fire extinguisher.
“Shelves and tables on wheels, rooms adaptive; a theater, lecture hall … Do we need a community room? No, that needs to be integrated into everything we do. But we do need a teen space, including gaming by the way; they’re going to do it anyway, so better here surrounded by books and materials and other people.”
Notice not much talk about stacks, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, quiet cavernous spaces dormant much of the time but providing access to tomes.
“We still need that,” says Stephens, but digital changes so much. Rows of CDs, books on tape, gone to streaming. Racks of print magazines, no longer. Yet the library remains a place where people connect to information, for example a reference desk.
What emerges is a gathering space, not a zone of “shhhhhhh.” New architectural plans accentuate that in 16,000 square feet.
Stephens hopes to keep the library open in transition. This means a lot to people otherwise not well-represented; if the library closes, an important corner of their safety net is removed.
But a library is not a shelter nor a childcare facility -- though at times it can and should provide both. Neither can it remain a hushed bastion of accumulated wisdom – though at times it can and should provide that.
Stephens hopes the new urban library in Hyannis becomes a template for how to incorporate evolving elements — off Main Street, beside a parking lot.
