Once located in the George A. Purefoy Municipal Center, the library made the move to a former rocket factory at 8000 Dallas Parkway in early March. The new space more than tripled the library’s size, allowing library staff and guests to spread out across 158,068 square feet.
“We are thrilled at how much the community’s embraced [the new library] and is using it,” Library Director Shelley Holley said.
The breakdown
The busiest month so far has been July with 102,000 guests, Holley said. Before moving into the new space, the busiest July the library had seen was in 2019 with 81,000 guests.
“That is 30,000 more people through the doors in a single month,” Holley said. “That's a thousand people a day.”
Consistently high numbers months after the new space opened is a marker of returning guests, she said.
“It's one thing to come in and look and see what it's all about; it's another to make it a part of your routine,” she said.
What they’re saying
The higher-than-ever volume of library patrons has led to a busier-than-ever parking lot, Holley said.
“Unfortunately, at some libraries, you could fire a cannon through them,” she said. “Not all libraries experienced the level of use that we do, and we’re very grateful for that.”
The parking lot has 425 paved spaces total, not including some unpaved spaces reserved for library staff. With an average of 350 patrons walking in every hour, the spaces tend to fill up fast over the summer, Holley said.
“It's like parking in December at the mall versus parking in the mall any other time of the year,” Holley said.
Weekends during the school year are another consistently busy time for the library with 1-6 p.m. on Sundays being the busiest, Holley said.
“In that five hours we tend to see the same number of people or more than what we see on a typical 12-hour day,” she said.
A parking garage at the George A. Purefoy Municipal Center and a parking lot at the Municipal Court Building are two additional parking options available for library patrons when the main lot fills up.
“If you were parking in the mall at the back of the lot in December, that walk into the mall and into your store would probably be the same number of steps as walking from the court parking lot or the parking garage behind City Hall,” Holley said.
Library officials are looking into addressing parking demands.
Keep in mind
The high volume of guests is expected, Holley said. Computer labs, study and conference rooms, reading areas, makers spaces and a Tiny Town all draw in their own crowds every day.
“If you are comparing us to a library that only gets a few hundred people in the entire day, we look like a mob,” Holley said. “Based on the population that the library is designed to serve, we were about right because the things that drive library use—our younger families, well-educated professionals and higher incomes—are all demographics that Frisco has.”
Despite being three times smaller than it is now, the old library space was still one of the top 10 libraries in Texas for per-capita use, Holley said.
“We do not take for granted the warmth that the community has shown towards the library and how important library services are to them,” she said.
Going forward
Some of the parking congestion is expected to resolve itself eventually as summer winds down and residents adjust to school schedules. The library is also studying parking demand and availability to see if additional options need to be added in the future, Holley said.
More information on the library can be found on its website.
Editor's note: This story has been updated. The library was formerly located in the George A. Purefoy Municipal Center at 6101 Frisco Square Blvd.
