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A new Virginia Room
The final touches are being made to the new City of Fairfax Regional Library for its Jan. 26, 2008 official opening, and perhaps one word that best describes the interior of the red-brick building at the corner of North Street and Old Lee Highway is “cavernous.”
Looking up from the ground floor inside the main area of the 44,450-square-foot structure, an impressive array of timber supports seem almost to defy gravity while holding the giant, steeped roof. Architecturally, the space evokes the sense of a cathedral dedicated to the written word.
The second floor mezzanine provides a bird’s eye vista of the rows upon rows of handsome shelving below, arranged diagonally for the most part. Altogether, shelving within the confines of the new library can hold up to 200,000 books and other items.
Taking up most of the mezzanine area is the Virginia Room, which the Fairfax County Public Library system describes as containing the “county's foremost collection of books, photographs and manuscripts related to Fairfax County history, government, and genealogy.”
“We’re not beautiful yet,” said Virginia Room Librarian Suzanne Levy on Dec. 15 during a sneak preview of the building.
Movers are currently in the process of transporting materials from the library’s previous location at the corner of Whitehead Street and Chain Bridge Road in Fairfax City, so the new library, including the Virginia Room, is not yet filled, and probably will not be filled to capacity for some time.
“We have room to grow on the shelving area,” Levy said. “We also had an awful lot of material in storage at the county archive. We’re bringing all that back to make it more easily available to the public.”
As a countywide resource, the Virginia Room is probably the first place where individuals come when researching their family tree of ancestors who resided in Fairfax County, and for history writers either fact-finding or fact-checking.
To better assist library patrons in their genealogical and historical research, the new Virginia Room now has capacity for a collection of 20,000 books. Instead of just two public computer workstations, there are 16, some of which are dedicated for access to a genealogical database.
The Virginia Room’s microfilm collection of newspapers and other documents previously spread over two floors at the old library have been combined into a single area. There is even dedicated wall space to display a gallery of framed maps and pictures.
In addition to expanded offices for the Virginia Room’s staff of five and more space for volunteers performing data entry and photo and document scanning, the new Virginia Room has an ample-sized rare books room with climate and humidity control, plus its own separate fire protection system.
On compact shelving operated almost effortlessly by hand cranks are stored such things as original early 19th century handwritten correspondences and documents of prominent Fairfax County families, as well as rare photos from later in the same century.
Levy said the Virginia Room is in possession of a black medical bag and account books that once belonged to a county physician name Dr. Jones who practiced in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
“We aren’t going out and actively seeking these materials, but we graciously consider accepting them if they’re offered to us,” Levy said. “The focus of this collection is really on Fairfax County families.”
The widow of Jim Tingstrum, the longtime photographer for the old Fairfax Journal newspaper, recently donated about a dozen boxes of Tingstrum’s photographs, negatives and slides dating as far back as the late 1950s and early 1960s.
“We can’t wait to get into these,” Levy said.
She said that with a two-story parking garage with 199 spaces -- whereas the old library had only 34 spaces -- complaints about parking would no longer be in issue for library patrons, and the Virginia Room may see an increase in visitors.
“I think people are going to be curious to come in and see as more word gets out about the expanded size of the Virginia Room,” Levy said.
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