The purpose of the $4.1 million renovation and reorganization at the Carnegie Library branch in Oakland was to make it easier for patrons to find books, recordings, movies and magazines.

Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette Anne Candreva, director of information technology at the Carnegie Library, unveils the marquee near the library's entrance, which is part of the new additions at the Oakland branch. The marquee's animated messages tell visitors about current and upcoming events. Click photo for larger image. Online graphic See a graphic that details changes at the Carnegie Library.

"People find this building to be quite confusing. They often don't leave the first floor," said Anne Candreva, director of information technology.

A whole new system of signs uses moving text on electronic marquees, liquid crystal display panels as well as light-emitting diode strips that show information crawling across a screen. Images pressed between green glass also serve to direct people to the right department.

By next year, Candreva said, the library may be wireless, but that is a major task because the building is chock full of steel, necessitating the placement of "just a zillion" hidden antennas.

People who enter the building through its main entrance on Schenley Drive will encounter an electronic marquee that announces daily and future events.

Sheila Jackson, director of the library redesign, focused on the logistics of reorganizing 3.1 million volumes. Red-haired and energetic, the librarian worked with 50 full-time employees to achieve the reorganization.

Jackson said the task reminded her of The Fifteen Puzzle, a game children and adults play. Made up of small tiles numbered 1 through 15 and a sixteenth blank tile, the puzzle requires players to push the numbered tiles into the empty space with the goal of putting the tiles in numerical order.

The puzzle Jackson and her staff had to solve entailed creating blank spaces so they could move entire collections of books, which they arranged in entirely new ways.

"We had gardening books in the music and art department, but the new books were in science and technology. People had to run from pillar to post to get the stuff that they needed," Jackson said.

Step one was creating space in which to work.

"We had trucks of journals we couldn't shelve because our book collections were jammed to the gills," Jackson said.

In March 2003, about 100,000 bound volumes containing the library's historic journal collection were moved to the Allegheny branch on the North Side.

"Now they are in a nice order in an air-conditioned area," Jackson said. Library patrons can make an appointment to view materials from those volumes at the Allegheny branch. Through the Inter Library Loan Service, historical materials also can be delivered to the Oakland branch.

In the Oakland branch's north wing on the second floor, Jackson and her staff created several staging areas by removing tables from the music and art department and the Pennsylvania Department and installing extra shelving in those spaces.

"This enabled us to start moving things," Jackson said.

While much of the reorganization is complete, some work remains. Today is the first day library users can see how the newly renovated building looks.

Here is what patrons will find:

The first floor contains new and featured books, magazines, DVDs, CDs and videos, a large customer service desk, the children's department, a coffee shop run by Crazy Mocha Coffee Co. and a new elevator that takes people to all of the library's collections, which are housed on three floors.

On the second floor, a large room once known as social sciences is filled with computers, long tables and green desk lamps. That room, now called reference services, includes humanities and social sciences. Later this year, science and technology will become part of reference services. In January, reference books from the art and music department also will move to the reference services room.

The music and art department, which is on the second floor in the building's north wing, will become a quiet reading room with no computers. The library's international poetry collection will be housed there, and concerts may be held there, too.

A large room once devoted to music reference will be the new home of the audiovisual department, including more than 21,000 CDs as well as videos, DVDs and books on tape and compact disc. That department will have its own checkout desk.

Next door to the audio visual department in the last two rooms of the north wing will be the musical score collection. Patrons will still be able to take out a score, don headphones and play a keyboard that only they can hear.

Next year, when science and technology moves to the reference services department, the third floor will be painted and portions of it will receive new carpeting. Once that work is finished, the Pennsylvania Department and the microfilm machines will move there.

The second-floor space housing the Pennsylvania Department will become home to overflow reference materials, including big sets of specialized encyclopedias on almost every imaginable topic, vertical files that hold pamphlets and clippings as well as print indexes such as The New York Times Index, Biography Index and USA Today Index.

By January, the library's administrative offices, now on the second floor, will move to the building's basement. That space is available because the computer and technology support for the library moved out last week to a building next door to the Carnegie's West End branch.