Angelly Almonte, 12, of Providence, along with fellow City Year volunteers, primes the walls of a meeting room in the basement of the Knight Memorial Library on Elmwood Avenue in Providence last month.

The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — After taking a bus cross town, Joshua Acevedo, 12, settles into his typical afterschool routine at the Smith Hill library.

He is seated at a long wooden table in the library’s main room, PlayStation 2 in hand. His older brother, Gray, is next to him flipping through the library’s catalog of videos and DVDs. Soon, their little sister, Ayda, will join them.

For the next few hours, the siblings will split their time between surfing the Web, doing homework, playing video games and listening to music, until their parents come home. They might even read a library book.

A year ago, this library’s future looked bleak. The Providence Public Library was threatening to close five of the city’s nine neighborhood branches to save money. Smith Hill was one of them.

But a group of residents, angry and frustrated, banded together to save the branches. They hired a consultant. They drew up a business plan. They received the support of city politicians.

Volunteer Michelle Walker, of Providence, cleans the brass hardware around a window at the Knight Memorial Library.

The Providence Journal Glenn Osmundson

What emerged was highly unusual. The activists created the Providence Community Library, which took over the branches and, contrary to recent trends, kept them all open. The 135-year-old Providence Public Library retained operation of the historic Central Library downtown.

Nationwide, public library systems are facing budget pressures and threats of closure even as demand for their services is growing. The Boston public library system is considering closing up to 10 of 26 branches to absorb expected cuts in state aid. In Phoenix, the library system is considering closing 6 of its 15 branches.

Norman Oder, news editor at the New York-based Library Journal, has been following the developments in Providence with wonder. “Like a lot of people in the library world, I’m intrigued and interested to see how it works out. There aren’t that many cities in a similar situation,” he said.

“It was inspiring to see a group of dedicated volunteers work so hard,” says Karen Mellor, library program manager for the state Office of Library and Information Services. “It’s also remarkable what they accomplished in a short period of time.”

This time last year, Marcus Mitchell, a corporate strategy consultant living on the East Side, found himself leading a new nonprofit organization that was looking to take over the city’s branch libraries.

Usayo Ashamu, 7, and her sister, Florence, 9, read at the Smith Hill Library in Providence, a branch library that had been targeted for closure last year.

The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

Neither he nor the three longtime city residents working with him had any experience running a library system. Yet there they were, meeting almost daily with Mayor David N. Cicilline and the City Council, holding public forums and putting together a business plan. “We had a lot of balls up in the air at once,” Mitchell says now.

Mitchell had lived in the city for barely a year at that point, but the others had clashed for years with the public library’s administration.

Ellen Schwartz, an accountant, was active in her neighborhood library in Washington Park. Patricia Raub, a Providence College professor, and Linda Kushner, a former state representative from the East Side, had both pushed the public library to open its board meetings to the public and rallied residents to oppose cuts to library services.

The public library’s board of trustees urged the city not to put the branch libraries in the hands of an unproved organization. A private, nonprofit organization, the public library had operated the city libraries for more than 100 years with funding from the city and the state.

Cicilline was initially skeptical but says he ultimately had no choice. “The [public library] made it very clear that they had no interest in the neighborhood branches,” Cicilline says now. “You can’t force them to operate a system they don’t want to operate.”

Volunteer Erica Prenda shelves magazines and books at the Fox Point Library.

The Providence Journal Andrew Dickerman

On July 1, the community library took over operation of branches. The city shifted its $3.5-million allocation for running the branch libraries from the public library to the community library, and with that followed $750,000 in state aid.

All the neighborhood libraries remained open. Following a nationwide search, the community library hired Ann Robinson from the Worcester Public Library. She took over as the full-time executive director on July 13.

Robinson, now almost eight months into her new job running the state’s largest library system (in terms of numbers of branches and employees), says it is still a work in progress.

With a $5 million budget — about $2.5 million less than what the public library had said it took to run the system — the community library has retained most of the old library staff and kept basic services and hours of operation intact. Years of budget cuts, though, have left the libraries with weak collections and old buildings in need of repair.

“The goal this year was to stabilize the system so that people would not see any disruptions in their library experience,” says Robinson.

That stability –– after years of uncertainty –– appears to have brought people back to the libraries. Circulation is up in all the nine branches from the previous year, says Steve Kumins, the library’s development director.

“These places are packed. They are used. It’s hard to imagine what these communities would have been like without them,” he said.

Sherry Russell, waiting to get on one of the free computers at the Olneyville library one recent weekday, said she realized the change only when she learned of the new computer registration process.

“Everyone’s friendly. It’s organized. It’s clean — those things are important, and they haven’t changed,” Russell says.

The library’s long-term plan is to make the neighborhood libraries the centers of their communities by offering more poetry readings, more afterschool help, more story times, and more activities for expectant and young mothers.

“We’re looking to make a different kind of library system, one that’s involved in the community, that’s involved in the revitalization of neighborhoods,” says Kushner, now a library trustee.

Despite its early success, there is no guarantee that the Providence Community Library will survive the long haul.

With the city facing another tough budget year, Cicilline says it is too early to say whether the library will receive the same $3.5-million allocation it received this year. If city or state funding is cut, the fledgling organization would have to make up the difference with fundraising.

Kumins says the library is about halfway toward its fundraising goal of $575,000. March 26 will be a big test, when it hosts its first fundraising gala at the historic Knight Memorial Library in Elmwood (for more information on the event visit www.provcomlib.org).

Meanwhile, Cicilline’s administration is working with the Providence Public Library to transfer ownership of the branches to the city, so that it can then lease them to the community library.

Mitchell, the library board chairman, is confident the community library will not only survive, but thrive.

“This time last year, there were people who doubted us,” he says. “Now, we represent the tremendous potential in these libraries. We are a model for the country. We are showing how a community can take ownership of vital neighborhood resources.”

KEY POINTS: Providence’s two library systems

Providence Public Library

Operates: Historic Central Library downtown

Staff: 55

Budget: $3.4 million

Collection: About 1 million items

Providence Community Library

Operates: Nine neighborhood libraries

Staff: 57

Budget: $4.9 million

Collection: 316,255 items

pmarcelo@projo.com