Located in the heart of the campus, the Brandon Baxter Library serves the informational and recreational needs of members of the Westbrook Academy community.
The library offers students a collection of over 225,000 books in print and electronic formats and access to millions of magazine and journal articles in its paid databases. A highlight of the Brandon Baxter Library is its special collections in areas such as magic, technology, and metahuman abilities, comprising a full quarter of its holdings. Part of the magic collection is kept in a protected room, as some of its texts contain spells too volatile to be made available without express faculty permission.
On its second floor, the library houses the campus’s computer center. The computer center has a variety of Windows and Macintosh computers as well as peripherals such as scanners and printers. A small-scale supercomputer is also available for students with more advanced computing needs.
In addition to the human librarian staff, the library features an experimental system known as MELVIL, the Multifunctional Education and Literature Voice Initiated Librarian. Originally a software project by some of Westbrook’s students, MELVIL is now available 24 hours a day to provide library support to members of the community.
Mr. Brandon Baxter has the metahuman abilities of perfect recall and superspeed reading. Having read countless works of fiction and non-fiction, he is regarded as one of the smartest and most well-informed individuals on the planet. Through his consulting work as Encyclopedia Man, Mr. Baxter provides expert advice in a wide range of fields ranging from public relations to medicine. Mr. Baxter’s love for reading led him to donate the funds to build the library in 2003, shortly after the school was constructed, in hopes of encouraging a love of reading in future generations of metahuman youth.
