The entrance doors at the Margaret Reed Crosby Memorial Library in Picayune have been a lingering concern for Carol Phares, Pearl River County Library System director. However, plans to upgrade the doors to become handicap accessible are in progress.

Doing this requires automatic doors being installed at the entrance facing Goodyear Boulevard and the second set of doors from the foyer to the main library area.

Phares said that after the plans were finalized to install the automatic doors, a domino effect of things that needed updating around the library started to surface.

“It’s like the story written by Laura Numeroff of the mouse that was given a cookie. Once you give him a cookie, he wants a glass of milk and once he gets that, he wants a straw and so on,” Phares said.

Along with the doors, practically the entire foyer at the Margaret Reed Crosby Memorial Library will be updated.

The current plans are to clean the showcases, sand them down and refurbish them to make them shine again, Phares said. Also, the doors that lead into the public bathrooms and Holland Hall have undergone the same transformation, providing a clean and shiny finish. The walls of the foyer will also be repainted to give the entire room a “fresher look,” Phares said.

“These things haven’t been redone like this since the library was built practically, so we thought this would be a good time to make that happen,” Phares said.

Along with the automatic doors, new posts will be installed at the entrance with a handicap accessible button to open them. That feature will give people who are wheelchair bound or use a walker an easy and safe way to visit the library. Buttons will also be placed on the inside of the doorway. The aluminum door frame has cleaned and polished in preparation for installation. Phares said she plans on the first automatic door to be installed by the end of January, but there is no estimated time for the completion of the rest of the work.

Phares and the Friends of the Crosby Memorial Library are currently looking into ways to finance a new floor for the foyer. However, she said the price of a new floor is too expensive for the Friends of the Library to pay themselves.