Fully booked

From chips and drinks to Chaucer and Dickens, this Ranui dairy will be remodelled as a new building for Waitakere. Joanna Davies reports.
Ranui Library car park is always full. People stream in and out of the building with bags of returns or newly borrowed books, some call in at the cafe next door and read them over a coffee.
It is a popular meeting place for local people, but the space which curves around the community house's hall is a bit small to house an increasingly busy library. Now, after years of waiting, Ranui residents are to get a new library building, across the road from the present one. Construction could begin next year.
Rose Christie-French says the move is a big step for the area.
"We've been asking for a new library for a very long time," she says.
"I remember when we got our first library over 10 years ago. It was a container in the car park of the community house. A little lady used to sit in the container three days a week and issue books."
Since then the library has moved into a permanent building, but it is the smallest library in the old Waitakere City area, and does not have a computer learning centre.
"A lot of the people in Ranui come from big families and they might not have computers at home," says Ms Christie-French, who used to be a school librarian. "We really need an IT suite and a librarian who can help people use it, because not everyone has internet access here."
Land across the road, on the site of the old Price Cutter dairy, has already been bought for the new library and the Auckland Council is tendering for architects to design it.
In the council's draft annual plan for 2011-2012, $4.1 million is set aside for the library, which was originally a Waitakere City Council project.
"The catchment area for this library is big because it's the closest library for Swanson, Bethells and Waitakere village, too," says Ms Christie-French.
Auckland Council's manager for north and west libraries, Mirla Edmundson, says the current library is very popular but too small to meet the needs of the community. "This is an exciting step for the project and we are delighted to have reached this milestone," she says.
The council estimates $3 million will be spent on the new building.
Henderson Massey Local Board chair Vanessa Neeson is looking forward to the construction starting.
"We are extremely pleased that the time is drawing closer to when Ranui residents will receive a brand new and suitably improved library to serve their community."
Next chapters
Auckland Council is moving on with legacy projects elsewhere in the region.
It has budgeted $12.5 million for a new library at Massey North in the new Westgate Town Centre development, and spent $2.9 million on Te Atatu Peninsula's library, $2.2
million on the library in Wellsford, and $1.6 million on Mt Roskill's library. Altogether, $12
million will be spent renewing the region's libraries.