Owings Mills Library Ramping Up for Spring Opening

As construction continues on the Metro Centre at Owings Mills, the town is getting closer to having the county’s largest public library.

The Owings Mills Branch of the Baltimore County Public Library, expected to open in spring 2013, will boast a 142,000-item collection, 58 public access computers and many more amenities.

“We’re really excited about it,” said Barbara Salit-Mischel, the branch’s manager. Salit-Mischel, who was most recently the manager of the Randallstown branch and was the manager of the Reisterstown branch before that, presented a brief overview of the library at Monday night’s Reisterstown-Owings Mills-Glyndon Coordinating Council meeting.

The library’s 25 full-time employees have almost all been hired, and Salit-Mischel is getting them ready and planning the library’s shelves as she and the community await the completion of the new building.

The branch includes quiet study rooms, a café, a children’s area and will share common areas and meeting rooms with the Community College of Baltimore County. The library will occupy the building’s first three floors, and the community college will have 27 classrooms on the building’s fourth, fifth and sixth floors, totaling 120,000 square feet.

The Metro Centre project will be a high-density office, retail and residential project, known as transit-oriented development. The 45-acre site will hold 1.2 million square feet of office space, 300,000 square feet of retail space, 1,700 apartments, the 120,000-square foot community college and library building, and hotels with up to 250 rooms.