The History of the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System

Today, Prince George’s County — like all Maryland counties — has a county-run public library system. However, in much of the country, municipalities or special library districts, not counties, operate public libraries. Maryland is one of only seven states where county library systems are the norm. So how did Prince George’s County get its library system off the ground?

Part I: Origins (1908–1963)
Part II: The Building Spree (1964–1978)
Interlude: The High John Library
Part III: Budget Crisis (1979–1996)
Part IV: Renaissance (1997–2024)
Further Reading

Note: The following history was first published on Greater Greater Washington in November and December 2020 as a five-part series (Part 1; Part 2; Interlude; Part 3; and Part 4). Voices of Laurel in Laurel, Maryland later republished it in print. The version presented here has been edited and updated as of 2 September 2025.

Part I: Origins (1908–1963)

The Boston Public Library, the US’s first large, free municipal library, opened in 1854, but urban public libraries really took off after the Civil War. Public libraries opened in Detroit in 1865; Chicago and San Francisco in the 1870s; Baltimore in 1886; and Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans, Brooklyn, and DC in the 1890s.

Smaller cities and towns throughout the country opened libraries during this same period, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. The first public library in Montgomery County, Maryland opened in Rockville in 1869, followed by other town libraries in Montgomery County over the next three decades. However, Prince George’s County (like much of Northern Virginia) did not get its first public library until the early years of the 20th century.

Early Public Libraries in Prince George’s County

The first public library in Prince George’s County was established in 1908 in downtown Laurel by a citizens’ group, the Laurel Library Association. The library was housed in several different rented quarters until 1929, when a resident donated a building to be used by the library association and the Laurel Women’s Club.

In the years before World War II, three additional libraries opened in the county, all run by community groups or city governments. In 1921, the Women’s Club of Hyattsville opened a small public library in space donated in the J.C. Hawkins Electric Shop on Baltimore Avenue in downtown Hyattsville; in 1923, the city took over providing space for it in city hall.

The City of Greenbelt established a municipal library — housed in the Greenbelt Center School, now the Greenbelt Community Center — in 1939, only eighteen months after the city itself was founded. In 1942, the unincorporated community of Beltsville also got a library, established by the Women’s Community Club and housed in a room in the local elementary school. However, the school system soon took the space back and this first Beltsville library dissolved.

*The Greenbelt Center School, now the Greenbelt Community Center, was the first home of the Greenbelt library. Image by ArtistsInResidence licensed under Creative Commons.*

The State Library Law of 1945

By 1945, three counties in Maryland, as well as Baltimore City, had established library systems. Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library pioneered the trend in 1886, followed by the Washington County Free Library in 1901 — only the second county-run public library in the country. These were followed by the Anne Arundel County Public Library in 1921 and the Howard County Public Library in 1940.

In 1945, the state ensured this trend would continue when it passed a law creating a library division in the state department of education and offering matching funding to the state’s counties to support public library systems. The state agreed to provide funding for books at a rate based on county populations. To participate, counties were required to establish county library systems, pass a property tax of two cents per $100 of assessed real estate value to support these libraries, and — crucially — to make their libraries open to all.

Race and Public Libraries in Maryland

The requirement that libraries established with state funding be “open to all” meant that county library services funded by the state could not be racially segregated. This was hardly a foregone conclusion in Maryland, which had a rich history of Jim Crow laws: Baltimore banned white and Black residents from living on the same blocks in 1910, and the state did not pay Black and white teachers equally until required to by court order in 1941. The state’s schools did not begin to desegregate until after the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

Racism seems to have delayed the implementation of the public library law in some places in Maryland. In 1952, residents of Calvert County, angry that books would be available to Black residents, threatened to burn the Anne Arundel County bookmobile if it served their county. But if there was concern in Prince George’s County over the idea of an unsegregated public library system, it didn’t make it into the newspapers.

Birth of the County Library System

Unsurprisingly, a number of Maryland counties established county library systems shortly after the passage of the 1945 law. Prince George’s County, in 1946, was one of the first, following Harford County in 1945. Other counties followed: Baltimore County in 1948, St. Mary’s and Charles Counties in 1950, Montgomery County in 1951, and Carroll and Calvert Counties in 1958. Many of these library systems took over existing libraries that had been established by municipalities or private organizations.

When the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System (PGCMLS) was established by the county commissioners in 1946, there were initial proposals for a central library either in Hyattsville (near the county center of population at the time) or in Upper Marlboro (the county seat). However, the new library system did not have the budget to acquire or maintain a library building. Instead, the library system began more humbly: with bookmobiles. PGCMLS purchased its first bookmobile in 1947 with donations from the public and a second in 1952 with county funds.

*Children line up for a 1950s library bookmobile in Prince George’s County by National Archives.*

Early PGCMLS Branches Funded by Municipalities

In addition to bookmobiles, the library system began to operate branches by providing books and librarians for libraries in spaces provided by local communities. The Laurel library became the first PGCMLS branch in 1947 and the Hyattsville library joined in 1948, along with newly-opened branches in city-owned buildings in Fairmount Heights and District Heights.

Because of the difficulty private organizations had in finding long-term funding to rent and maintain space for libraries, the library system’s early branches were largely limited to municipalities with governments willing to pay for space. For example, the Paint Branch library in College Park joined the system in 1951 in a space rented by a community organization, the Paint Branch Library Association, but the organization struggled with funding and, in 1955, the city of College Park took over providing space for the branch.

Although these municipally-owned branches have nearly all closed or relocated to PGCMLS-owned spaces, one still remains. The Mount Rainier branch opened in a city-owned building in 1952; it is now the only remaining PGCMLS library in a building owned by a municipality.

*The Mt. Rainier Branch is the only PGCMLS branch still housed in a municipally-owned building. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.*

Takoma Park Remains an Outlier

Although the city of Takoma Park is now entirely in Montgomery County, part of the city was located in Prince George’s County until a 1995 referendum. When the Takoma Park Women’s Club organized a town library in 1935, it was located in a house on Jackson Avenue.

The Takoma Park library was evidently unusually well-funded for a privately-organized library, since it did not join PGCMLS, nor did it join the Montgomery County Library System, which was established in 1951 and absorbed its last independent library, Rockville, in 1957. Instead, perhaps in part because of the city’s unusual situation of being located in two counties, Takoma Park took over the library as a department of its city government in 1963.

Takoma Park still operates this library, making it perhaps the only public library in the state not operated by a county or the City of Baltimore. However, people who work, live, or go to school anywhere in Montgomery County are eligible to receive library cards.

Part II: The Building Spree (1964–1978)

If you visit a library in Prince George’s County, there’s a good chance that library was built in the 1960s or 1970s. Although the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System is over 70 years old, more than half of its branches were built in a span of just 16 years. Ten of the 19 current branches opened between 1964 and 1980, and another two (Hyattsville and Laurel) built during that period have been replaced with new buildings on the same sites.

Although the county’s population has increased by almost fifty percent in the 40 years since 1980, only two of the eight new library buildings built since 1987 served new communities: Largo-Kettering and South Bowie. Three others (Laurel, Hyattsville, and Bladensburg) were built to replace libraries that opened between 1964 and 1978 and three (Spauldings, Upper Marlboro, and Accokeek) were built to provide PGCMLS-owned buildings for branches that opened in rented locations before 1964.

Libraries in Rented Spaces and City Buildings

In the early years of the county library system, PGCMLS did not have the budget to rent or purchase space for libraries. Instead, the library system provided books and staffing for libraries housed in spaces provided by municipalities and and by local, non-profit library associations.

In practice, however, local library organizations had trouble maintaining funding for buildings, and municipalities took over when they fell short. For example, the Paint Branch library in College Park joined the system in 1951 in a space rented by a community organization, the Paint Branch Library Association, but the organization struggled with funding and, in 1955, the city of College Park took over providing space for the branch.

The practice of operating libraries in spaces provided by local municipalities worked reasonably well in the relatively well-off incorporated suburbs along US-1, but posed problems in the unincorporated parts of the county. The branch in unincorporated Suitland opened in 1952 in a space rented by the Suitland Free Library Association, but when the organization ran out of money in 1958, there was no municipal government to take over, as had happened in College Park. Instead, for the first time, PGCMLS took over renting space for the library.

The 1959 Regional Libraries Plan

The Prince George’s County Commissioners considered using county funds to build regional or “area” libraries as early as 1955. However, it did not actually adopt plans to do so until, in 1959, the Maryland-National Capital Parks and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC) released a proposal for library construction in Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties.

The plan called for five regional libraries in Montgomery County — expansions of the Bethesda and Silver Spring libraries, as well as new libraries in Rockville, Wheaton, and Bells Mill (Potomac) — and four newly-constructed regional libraries in Prince George’s County, at Prince George’s Plaza, in District Heights, in Oxon Hill, and in Defense Heights (Landover Hills). In addition, it called for seventeen smaller branch libraries in Montgomery County and eleven in Prince George’s County, along with the closure of the Bladensburg, Hyattsville, College Park (formerly Paint Branch), Forest Heights, and Suitland branches.

The “First Regional Library” in Hyattsville

Elizabeth B. Hage, who became director of the library system in 1957, was a strong advocate of expanding the system, and pushed for the $1 million bond issue that allowed a version of the M-NCPPC plan to be implemented. The first of the new regional libraries opened in 1964 adjacent to Prince George’s Plaza in Hyattsville with 42,000 square feet of library space, far larger than the one- and two-room spaces that housed the library system’s other branches. PGCMLS originally intended to name the new library after the recently-assassinated president, John F. Kennedy, but the Kennedy family expressed concern about overuse of his name and so the branch was instead named the “First Regional Library.”

The former Hyattsville Branch Library, built as the “First Regional Library” in 1964. The iconic flying saucer entrance was intended to convey a sense of “space age” modernity, and has been preserved on the site of the replacement library. Image by the author.

With the opening of the new Regional Library, the Hyattsville and College Park branches, both located about a mile away in the two cities’ municipal buildings, were originally expected to close, but community opposition to this kept them open. The former Hyattsville branch was renamed the “William Pinkney Magruder Memorial Branch,” after the wealthy landowner who had donated money to the city for the construction of a library building in the 1920s.

(Today, Magruder is better known for donating land for a park to the city of Hyattsville with a condition that the park be named after him and only be used by “Caucasian” residents. In 2021, the city succeeded in having having the long-unenforceable racial restriction removed from the deed and renaming it after late Hyattsville resident David C. Driskell.)

In 1966, the First Regional Branch was renamed the Hyattsville Branch, and three additional regional libraries opened over the next few years: one in Oxon Hill to replace the Forest Heights Branch (housed in the Forest Heights Community Center) in 1967, one in Bowie (which had just seen the development of a large Levitt and Sons subdivision, rather than in District Heights as originally proposed) in 1969, and one in New Carrollton (rather than nearby Defense Heights as originally proposed) in 1971.

Local Branches Get New Buildings in the 1970’s

While the regional branches were under construction, PGCMLS also began constructing custom-built libraries for local branches, a change from its previous practice of operating in borrowed space. Other new local branches, including Upper Marlboro—in 1960, the first branch to be established solely at county expense—were established in rented spaces with the intention of constructing new buildings when funds became available.

The first of those custom-built libraries opened in Laurel in 1969 to replace the small building that the Laurel Branch — the first public library in the county — shared with the Laurel Women’s Club. In 1970, the Greenbelt Branch relocated from rooms in the Greenbelt Center School to a newly-built building next door, and a new building for the Hillcrest Heights library, which had been housed in rented space since 1963, opened in 1976.

*The Hillcrest Heights library opened in this location in 1976; it had been housed in rented space since 1963. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.*

Whether they had new buildings or not, local branches moved during this time to being operated as satellites of the four regional branches in Hyattsville, Oxon Hill, Bowie, and New Carrollton. In addition, because the newly-built buildings were much larger than the rented spaces that had previously housed PGCMLS branches, the library system was able to increase the number of books and types of services provided.

Centralized Planning Changes PGCMLS’s Geography

The change from locally initiated and funded branches to building new branches according to a countywide plan and with county funding somewhat changed the geography of the library system. While most of the system’s earlier branches were located in incorporated municipalities near the District border — the county’s oldest suburbs and the ones that could most afford to provide space for a library — the county began to open libraries in newer, unincorporated areas. One of the first of these, in Hillcrest Heights, opened in 1963 in rented space and then moved to a newly-constructed building in 1976.

Along with the replacements for branches housed in non-PGCMLS-owned spaces, newly-constructed libraries in new locations opened in Glenarden in 1979 and Surratts-Clinton in 1980. The Baden Branch, which opened in 1970, is somewhat of a special case, as its space was custom-built for PGCMLS but is in a building that also contains the Baden Community Center and Baden Elementary School.

In 1978, the Bladensburg Branch moved from rented space to : a former schoolhouse originally built in 1925 for the Bladensburg Academy private school. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.

At the same time as PGCMLS was constructing a number of new buildings, the Bladensburg Branch was being relocated. That branch, which had opened in 1964 in the rented space that had housed the library system’s administrative offices before the opening of the First Regional Branch in Hyattsville, was relocated in 1978. Its new location was, until its replacement in 2021–2024, the oldest building in the PGCMLS system: a renovated school building that, until 1925, had housed the 19th and early-20th Century Bladensburg Academy private school.

Interlude: The High John Library

In the late 1960s, the town of Fairmount Heights, in central Prince George’s County just outside the District of Columbia, was the site of an important but controversial experimental library that is still well-known by librarians, but has largely been forgotten about in the county. The pilot program at the “High John Library” was one of the first in the country to combine a public library with specialized services for low-income communities. While its implementation was far from perfect, its goals pioneered a model that exists around the US to this day.

Fairmount Heights Gets a New Library

In 1948, the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System (PGCMLS) opened its first newly-established branch in a room in the Town of Fairmount Heights municipal building. The municipality continued to host the branch until 1959, when it moved to a building rented by the library system. However, the branch closed only two years later, in 1961, due to low patronage, making it the only PGCMLS branch to close until the budget crisis of the 1980’s and 1990’s.

In 1967, six years after the original Fairmount Heights Branch closed, a new public library opened in Fairmount Heights. Called the “High John Library” after an African-American folk hero, the branch was a pilot project of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s Office of Education, the University of Maryland’s College of Library and Information Services, and PGCMLS.

Pioneering Libraries as Outreach to Under-Served Communities

The High John Library was intended as an outreach program to provide library services tailored for the under-resourced, low-income, and predominantly Black community in Fairmount Heights. This was a revolutionary idea at the time, as the prevailing orthodoxy among librarians was that librarians were guardians of knowledge who should cater to middle- and upper-middle-class needs and expectations. Services planned for the library included cultural services for adults, children’s storytelling and films, measles vaccine outreach, and field trips for children.

Due to difficulties in obtaining funding for the original plan, however, the High John Library was established primarily as a learning laboratory for the University of Maryland’s Master’s in Library Science graduate students, with most of the staffing done by students. The program was more focused on the library students’ experiences than on the Fairmount Heights community it was intended to serve, and the students’ culture shock limited their effectiveness at providing library services. To this day, the project remains the only attempt by a university library science program to operate a public library.

The library, which was located in a rented three-bedroom house, was run loosely and informally, with wooden tokens rather than library cards to check out books, a staff room with no door, picture books scattered in a sandbox-like arrangement instead of shelved, and no traditional cataloguing. It primarily served children and young adults, partly because the project’s organizers felt that population would be more open to a library run by outsiders.

Patronizing the Library’s Patrons?

From its inception, the High John Library project was shaped more by its organizers goals and assumptions than on the needs of the community it served. The organizers did not consult with the Fairmount Heights community was not consulted before the opening of the library because they believed that residents were tired of “surveys and promises, plans and proposals.”

Furthermore, the faculty running the project had a limited and stereotyped understanding of the community. After the University of Maryland’s involvement in the library ended, the school of library science dean, Paul Wasserman, complained that the project had not reached the truly deprived, but only “the white Negroes — the ones who are after the usual middle class values,” suggesting a rather disturbing and patronizing view of the community the library had served.

John Colson, a University of Maryland Library and Information Sciences professor who had not been involved in the project, published criticisms of the High John project including that it was planned without community input and based on “criteria developed by liberal, white librarians with only marginal knowledge of the community,” rather than a true collaboration between the librarians and the community they hoped to serve.

The Collapse of the High John Project

Federal funding for the High John project dried up after eighteen months at the end of 1968 and the University of Maryland abandoned the project. PGCMLS continued to provide library services in the three-bedroom house that had hosted the project for another year, before abandoning the location as inadequate for running a library.

*In the 1960s, the Washington Post called the High John Library “gaudy” and “hip.” Image by The Washington Post’s Panorama, January 9, 1969: G1.*

After the project collapsed, PGCMLS director Elizabeth Hage sharply criticized the University of Maryland faculty for their conduct on the project. She accused the university of “dropp[ing] the project like a hot cake” when federal grant money was cut off after eighteen months, leaving the library system to pick up the pieces and find funding to maintain services.

While it seems to have been poorly conceived, the High John Library was popular with Fairmount Heights residents: Hage reported that the project’s collapse led to “bitter disillusionment [in] a community that had grown to regard the branch as a bright spot in an otherwise poverty-ridden and long-neglected area.”

Fortunately, the closure of the High John Library in 1970 did not spell the end of library service for Fairmount Heights. A year later, in 1971, the third attempt to establish a PGCMLS branch in Fairmount Heights — now named the Fairmount Heights Branch at the request of the local community, and fully integrated with the rest of the library system — opened in a trailer while today’s building, which was completed in 1974, was under construction.

*The current Fairmount Heights Branch, which opened in 1974. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.*

High John’s Legacy and Lessons

After the University of Maryland School of Library and Information Sciences abandoned the High John project, it did continue attempts to train librarians to serve low-income, disadvantaged urban communities, this time with stronger and better-articulated social justice goals. The Urban Information Specialist Program that followed the High John project was based on educating librarians to advocate for the communities they served and to help ensure their access to information they needed, while also recognizing patrons as active decision-makers who best understood what their communities needed.

Although the University of Maryland’s High John project only lasted for three years, it had a permanent effect on the library science profession. In the 1960s, librarians largely saw themselves solely as the keepers of books and archives and libraries generally did not have community-driven missions or try to serve as social resource centers. Many professional critics of the project argued that it was inappropriate to educate library students specifically to work in under-served communities and objected to the library’s use of language tailored to the community.

In response to this backlash, students and faculty involved in the project organized a series of protests that pushed the American Library Association to create its Social Responsibilities Roundtable, which still exists today and promotes social responsibility, equity, diversity, and inclusion as core values of librarianship.

In recent years, more and more US libraries have embraced their role as social service providers. Today, libraries serve as a hub for internet access, English as a second language, civic space, career services and literacy. Some serve free meals to children in the summer; others host free legal clinics. In 2018, the Chicago Tribune estimated that more than 30 library systems had social workers on staff.

The High John project seems to have had a positive impact on the development of modern librarianship, and on the approach by the University of Maryland School of Library and Information Sciences (now College of Information Sciences) to educating future librarians to serve disadvantaged communities. However, the project also serves as a lesson in how not to do public outreach work, the need to collaborate with communities in developing services for them, and the need to plan such projects for the long-haul rather than creating and then quickly abandoning them.

Part III: Budget Crisis (1979–1996)

The 1960s and 1970s saw major growth in the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System (PGCMLS), both in the number of branches and in moves to new, larger buildings that allowed more comprehensive library services. But at the end of the 1970s, that growth ground to a halt when residents passed a racially-motivated referendum limiting the county’s taxing authority. That restriction, a form of which exists to this day, brought about an era of austerity for the library system that lasted a generation.

Budget Struggles in the Wake of TRIM

The construction of new library branches in Prince George’s County significantly slowed after the 1970s, in part due to the county’s severe budget struggles in the aftermath of the 1978 passage of the “Tax Reform Initiative by Marylanders” (TRIM) restriction on the county’s property taxes. TRIM, passed five months after California’s infamous Proposition 13 property tax restriction, initially limited Prince George’s County’s total property tax revenue to its 1979 value of $143.9 million, regardless of inflation and increases in home values.

TRIM passed just as Prince George’s County began a demographic transition from majority-white to majority-Black. A major motivation for its passage was the desire of white voters to limit funding for a public school student body that was becoming increasingly Black and integrated — four years earlier, in 1974, Prince George’s school system had become the largest in the country to be subject to a court-ordered busing desegregation plan.

Holding property tax revenue constant while the county’s population was rapidly growing led to severe cuts to many county services and increases to fees. PGCMLS started charging overdue fines for the first time, and removed librarians from the system’s smallest branches, which were now only staffed by circulation assistants.

Beltsville Nearly Loses its Chance at a Library

These budget cuts also brought the library system’s rapid expansion to a standstill. After a 1974 referendum authorized the sale of bonds for the construction of a new library branch in Beltsville, PGCMLS had opened a temporary Beltsville branch in a set of interconnected trailers on Old Gunpowder Road. But in January 1979, shortly after the passage of TRIM, the county government suspended the planning of the branch due to anticipated financial shortfalls.

The Beltsville library was saved by community activism, cost-cutting, and the fact that the county police wanted a station in the Beltsville area at the same time. Instead of a new library building, in 1983, work began on renovating the former Chestnut Hills School building in Beltsville to serve as both a county police station and a library branch.

Beltsville was supposed to get a new library in the 1970s, but budget cuts almost shuttered it altogether. The building shown here exists only because of community activism. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.

TRIM’s Noose is Loosened

By the early 1980s, the scale of the damage done to the county’s budget and services by TRIM was widely apparent. With the support of then-County Executive and later Governor Parris Glendening, voters passed a 1984 a referendum to change the property tax restriction to a limit on the property tax rate, while allowing assessed values and overall revenue to increase. Financial struggles, however, continued.

The Spauldings Branch, which opened in 1987, replaced the District Heights and Suitland Branches, which had been housed in non-PGCMLS buildings. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.

In 1987, two new branches did open: the Largo-Kettering branch opened in a rented storefront, and the Spauldings Branch opened in a custom-built building. But the opening of the Spauldings branch came with the closure of two branches located about a mile away from it in different directions: the Suitland and District Heights branches. When the First Regional Branch in Hyattsville opened a similar distance from the College Park and downtown Hyattsville (later Magruder) branches in 1964, the older branches remained open, but the funding situation in the late 1980s made it impossible to keep the Suitland and District Heights branches open alongside Spauldings.

The 1991 Budget Crisis and its Aftermath

Financial issues continued to worsen for PGCMLS in the early 1990s, and in 1991 the library system faced the worst financial crisis in its history. The Largo-Kettering Branch, which had only opened four years earlier, was nearly closed to save money, and was only saved by community activism.

Bookmobile service, which had shifted to focus on providing book access to under-served suburban communities as the county’s rural population shrank, had suffered since the 1970s, and no new vehicles had been purchased since 1975. The 1991 budget crisis was the final straw for the beleaguered program, and it was eliminated that year.

The 1991 budget crisis also led to significant staffing cuts and service reductions, which predictably led to falling library usage. To save money, and because of reduced usage, the College Park Branch closed in 1994 and the Magruder Branch closed in 1996.

The Largo-Kettering branch is housed in the lower level of a nondescript office building in an office park in Largo that was purchased by PGCMLS in 1993. The library system headquarters were relocated from the Hyattsville Branch to the upper level of the building. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.

Three branches did receive larger spaces during this period, however. An expansion of the Laurel Branch opened in 1993 and, in the same year, the Largo-Kettering Branch moved from a rented storefront to an office building purchased by PGCMLS, the other half of which was used for new administrative offices. Then, in 1995, the Upper Marlboro Branch was moved from a rented storefront to the renovated New Deal-era post office that had recently been vacated by USPS.

The Upper Marlboro Branch is one of the few PGCMLS branches in a pedestrian-oriented commercial strip: in 1995 it was relocated from a rented storefront to the renovated former Upper Marlboro Post Office, built in 1936 as part of the New Deal. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.

Technological Changes in the 1990’s

Although the library system closed as many branches as it opened between 1981 and 2012, the 1990s also brought about significant technological changes that improved patrons’ ability to find books. The library system put its catalog was put online 1992 and, in 1994, made public databases available online as well. All branches had full internet access by 1998.

In 2000, Marina, a web portal that allows anyone with a Maryland public library card to request books from anywhere in the state, became available to the public, making inter-library loans possible without a librarian to facilitate them.

Another component of statewide library integration came about in 2005 when Maryland became the first state to implement a statewide borrowing program with the “MPOWER” common library card. Although the state’s library systems have returned to issuing their own library cards, residents of all of Maryland’s 23 counties and Baltimore City are still eligible for cards in every public library system in the state.

Part IV: Renaissance (1997–2024)

The story of the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System (PGCMLS) in the 21st century is a story of renovations and replacements. Besides addressing maintenance backlogs in older branches, these changes have marked a more fundamental pivot: away from printed books, and toward more electronic services.

Recent years have seen a number of libraries in Prince George’s County closed for major renovations or replacements, but the series of renovations is finally coming to a close, and PGCMLS hopes to open a new branch in Langley Park by the end of the decade. As uncertainties around the pandemic abound, it remains to be seen whether the latest period of renovations will lead into another era of growth.

The Need for Branch Renovations and Replacements

After the lull in new library construction in the 1980s and 1990s, the end of bookmobile service in 1991, and the closures of the Suitland (1986), District Heights (1987), College Park (1994), and Magruder (1996) branches, PGCMLS began a series of major new construction projects over the past two decades.

However, unlike the construction projects of the 1960s and 1970s, which involved the opening of eleven new branch locations between 1960 and 1980, only one new location (South Bowie, in 2012) has opened since 1987 – a period during which the county’s population has grown by over a quarter from 700,000 to 900,000. Instead, construction projects have focused on replacements and major renovations of some of the system’s older branches.

The large number of major renovations and replacements of libraries over the past two decades are in part a consequence of the library-building boom of the 1960s and 1970s: today, libraries built during that boom are 40 to 60 years old and many of them are coming due for renovation at the same time. Furthermore, the budget crisis of the 1980s and 1990s meant that needed maintenance and renovations were put off, leading to a major repair backlog that has due for many buildings.

A Return to New Construction with Major Renovations

Major renovations and replacements of the system’s older branches began with the 1997-1999 renovation of the Bowie Branch, during which a temporary storefront branch was opened to provide library service to the community. A similar major renovation of the Oxon Hill Branch occurred in 2003-2004 and the construction of a new building for the Accokeek Branch, which had been the last branch permanently housed in a rented building, was also completed in 2004.

The South Bowie Branch, PGCMLS’s newest branch library, was built as part of a commercial development on Central Avenue just west of US-301. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.

However, after the 2012 opening of the South Bowie Branch, the system’s first completely new branch since the 1987 openings of the Largo-Kettering and Spauldings branches, the library system began a series of continuous library replacements and major renovations that is still ongoing.

First, the Laurel Branch was closed and demolished in 2014 and reopened in a new building in 2016. The new Laurel Branch, which replaced an awkward building made up of a number of additions built at different times, won the 2018 American Institute of Architects (AIA)/American Library Association (ALA) Library Building Award, making it the first library in Maryland to win this prestigious award since the 1970s.

*The grand opening of the new Laurel Library in November 2016. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.*

In late 2015, while the new Laurel Branch was still under construction, the New Carrollton Branch closed for three years of major renovations. Before these were complete, the Hyattsville Branch was closed in 2017 for demolition and replacement and a relatively large temporary branch opened nearby.

Replacing Hyattsville’s “First Regional Library”

The 2014 decision to replace rather than renovate the Hyattsville Branch, a building with a characteristic saucer-shaped entrance and which had been slated for major renovations since 1988, provoked community outcry and the creation of an advocacy group called “Save Our Saucer.” The building —the library system’s first purpose-built library — was seen as particularly historic, and the replacement branch is slated to be somewhat smaller than the original building.

*A digital rendering of the under-construction replacement for the Hyattsville Branch. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library system.*

The Hyattsville project has seen severe delays: when the library closed in April 2017, it was expected to reopen in 2019. However, contractor delays followed by the COVID-19 pandemic caused the project to take much longer than planned. The new Hyattsville branch finally opened — with the saucer now the centerpiece of a garden behind the building — at the end of March 2022. The major renovation of the Surratts-Clinton Branch that began in 2019 also took five years, with the library finally reopening in March 2024.

Mount Rainier Nearly Loses its City-Owned Branch

Along with the scheduled renovations and replacements of PGCMLS-owned branches, Mount Rainier Branch — the one remaining library in the system that is operated by PGCMLS in a municipally-owned building — unexpectedly closed for renovation from late 2018 to early 2020.

The sudden closure was due to maintenance issues, including an inoperable emergency exit, that led the library system’s union to declare the branch unsafe to operate in 2018. Renovations were slowed by the presence of asbestos and the city’s need to find sources of funding to pay for the unexpected costs — the branch only reopened after receiving a grant from the state legislature.

Post-COVID Renovations and New Branches

Fortunately, the first post-COVID branch replacement did not continue the trend of extreme delays seen with Hyattsville and Surratts-Clinton. The Bladensburg branch was relocated to a temporary site in early 2021, followed by the former building’s demolition and the construction of an ADA-compliant replacement roughly three times its size. The new Bladensburg branch opened in late 2023. Then, in 2024, the Baden Branch relocated from its original location in a building shared with Bladen Elementary School to a renovated space in the community center next door.

A rendering of a two-story modernist building with angled outcroppings, including one resembling a ship's prow. A sign reading "Bladensburg Branch Library" is visible over the entrance. — *A digital rendering of the new Bladensburg Branch library, which opened in 2023. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library system.*

Other than the South Bowie branch, which opened in 2012, PGCMLS has not opened new locations since 1987, with building funds instead spent on renovating and replacing existing branches. However, the library system’s fiscal year 2026 budget includes funds for the completion by the end of the decade of a new and long-awaited branch in Langley Park, one of the densest and poorest parts of the county, with a large immigrant population.

Unfortunately, though, the new Langley Park branch will not be located in a new building, as originally planned. Instead, due to funding constraints and delays — construction on a new building was originally slated to begin in 2022 — it will open in leased space. It remains to be seen whether the other three branches listed in the budget — new branches in Brandywine and Glenn Dale and a replacement for the Hillcrest Heights branch — involve new construction or rented space. Estimated completion dates for these projects are also not available.

A Pivot Away from Printed Books

The recent renovation and replacement of so many branches has allowed the library system to more easily implement a change in priorities for space, reflecting a change in the focus of the libraries’ services from serving as repositories of books to a broader provision of services.

Although printed books remain an important part of PGCMLS’s mission, customer demand for study rooms, meeting spaces, and computers have increased significantly in recent years. As a result, the newly built or renovated branches have somewhat reduced shelf space for books, but increased space for computer terminals, study rooms, and meeting spaces.

The balance of space in renovated branches varies depending on what has historically been in demand in a given community. Computers are particularly important in lower-income parts of the county, where many residents do not have computers or reliable internet connections at home. Meanwhile, meeting rooms are broadly popular because of the shortage of affordable space for non-profit groups in the county to organize meetings.

In addition to computers, PGCMLS is also working on providing other technology that many residents do not otherwise have access to. The library system provides 3D printing at all branches and there are plans to install a laser cutter at the Fairmount Heights branch.

A “virtual reality roadshow” at the South Bowie Branch in 2016 was just one of many library programs with an expanded focus beyond physical books. Image by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System.

The design for study spaces has also changed over time. When the South Bowie Branch opened in 2012, it had large group study rooms to encourage collegial learning. However, they have largely been used by one or two people at a time, so more recent renovations have prioritized smaller but more numerous study rooms. In addition to study rooms for adults, the new Hyattsville branch will include “tutor rooms” in the children’s area for grade school students to work with tutors.

Reductions in the number of physical books has been a trend among public libraries generally as electronic materials and the provision of computer and internet access have become more important, but it is a trend that PGCMLS has taken much further than other neighboring libraries.

Over the fifteen years from 2003 to 2017, collections of physical items were reduced at the Montgomery County Public Library by 22% (from 2.51 to 1.96 million items), at the Fairfax County Public Library by 28% (from 2.59 to 1.87 million items), and at the District of Columbia Public Library by 59% (from 2.54 to 1.05 million items). Over the same period, PGCMLS reduced its physical collection—which was already significantly smaller than those of the neighboring systems—by 68%, from 1.97 million items to just 630,000 items.