The Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore will close its Pratt Exploration Center branch July 1. The center, which opened in the Port Discovery children’s museum at Inner Harbor in 1998, is the Pratt’s smallest branch, with only 5,000 books. It has attracted thousands of visitors a year, though critics claim that it serves more tourists than residents.
Library activists cheered the announcement, saying that more service needs to be in the city’s neighborhoods, especially after the Pratt closed five branches last summer. But they criticized the library’s plan to move most of the center’s programs and resources to another non-neighborhood location-the central library in downtown Baltimore.
“It needs to go in our neighborhoods,” Jane Shipley, an activist with Save Libraries/Save Lives, told the May 15 Baltimore Sun. “Those kinds of services need to be in the neighborhoods where children can get there on their own. No children live around central.”
Mona Rock, Pratt Director of Communications, said that eliminating the Center would make more resources available to neighborhood branches. “The Port Discovery location was wonderful,” she said. “A lot of people really loved it. But we want to make sure we don’t have to close any branches and take anything away from our neighborhoods.”
Posted May 20, 2002.