Marin Library Debuts Green Books Section

Published: February, 2009 

It’s the only one in the Bay Area that I know of, says Omar Pena, Green Building Program Coordinator for the County of Marin’s Community Development Agency.

Marin’s Green Living Library was originally housed in the lobby of the Community Development Agency’s Civic Center office, where a modest selection of titles purchased by the agency were made available to contractors, developers, designers and homeowners for on-site reference.

When interest in sustainable building and design exploded a few years ago, the agency decided it was best to transfer the collection to the library’s Civic Center Branch so that titles could be checked out overnight. There’s a lot of useful information there, says Branch Manager Damon Hill. You can’t expect someone to sit down with any book while here in the branch and absorb it all. Especially if you’re working on a project, it’s better to be able to take the book with you and bring it back later.

After making room for the Green Living Library just inside the main entrance, the library decided to expand the collection’s focus, and related titles from the library’s general collection were re-filed in the newly created green section.

The Green Living Library now includes nine categories: energy efficiency, renewable energy, architecture & design, green building materials & techniques, landscaping, green living, sustainable business, hazardous waste and environmental justice. The collection has also grown from fifty-or-so titles to nearly five hundred, many of which were just added last year during an aggressive acquisitions push. In 2008, the library used $1,000 from its own budget and another $1,000 donated by the Friends of the Marin County Free Library, to infuse the Green Living Library.

The idea of ‘green’ is an evolving one, and the definition of what is green continues to broaden, says Hill. If we want to keep this collection vital and keep the information current, we have to continue to grow it.

According to Hill, as the size of the Green Living Library has grown, so, too, has the number of people who use it regularly. It’s become very popular, he says. Most people who come into the library have a look around in that section. That’s why we put it right up front. And we see all kinds of people checking out titles—designers, contractors, homeowners, students.

Hill and Pena agree that the ideas and information contained in the Green Living Library’s titles are only useful if they reach the general public. So both men are doing what they can to let people know that the answer to just about any green question is available at the Green Living Library. Technical assistance is a big part of my job, so I refer people to the library all the time, Pena says. It’s a great tool to have at our disposal. In fact, I use it quite a bit myself, when I have questions.

And I promote it whenever and wherever I can, adds Hill. I want to see people use it more, and I want to see it continue to grow and expand in interest.