Norman Jordan picked a heavy leather-bound book at random from the Cape Elizabeth Historical Society’s collection and scanned the fading, perfectly measured penmanship of the clerk who recorded the town’s oaths of office in 1938.

“William Clifford III,” he said softly, reading aloud the record of Clifford’s swearing-in as a Cape Elizabeth police officer.

He chuckles. “I knew him.”

The descendant of one of Cape Elizabeth’s many established, well-known families, Jordan knows a lot about the town and its people. He knows who married whom, what building was moved when, and a few tales of piracy and scalping, as well.

But Jordan’s knowledge is increasingly the purview of Cape Elizabeth’s oldest residents. While many towns have small museums showcasing local history, Cape Elizabeth’s Historical Society is crammed in two closet-like rooms in the basement of Thomas Memorial Library.

There are boxes of period dresses and antique quilts, but no place to display them. Pictures are kept tucked away in a large cabinet. Some 300 letters from a Civil War soldier to his family are kept in a “Priority Mail” box. Records of births, marriages, deaths and government affairs dating back to the 1700s line the walls, their stories hidden to all but a few history buffs and genealogists who stop by.

“We need more room,” Jordan said. “We have no place to put pictures. If someone gave us a grandfather clock or something now, it would wind up in my barn … The library needs more space, and the historical society badly needs more space.”

Those concerns are not falling on deaf ears. The Town Council has put together a study committee to examine the library’s needs and see if it’s time for another addition. Even Councilor Jim Rowe, chairman of the finance committee and a fiscal conservative who likes to see town spending increase no faster than the consumer price index, says the library is “busting at its seams.”

“Library science has changed over the years and become totally different,” Rowe said. “(A library is) not only a dispensary for books.”

Upstairs and across from the historical society’s boxes and archives, along corridors and stretching toward the ceiling in tall stacks, the Thomas Memorial Library’s collection is in a similarly cramped, if more visible, predicament.

“There’s simply no room to add any more,” said Jay Scherma, library director. “I have been tweaking this building now for 12 years, and I am pretty good at space management. I’m out of ideas.”

It’s not that the population of Cape Elizabeth has grown – it hasn’t grown much, if at all, in the last 20 years – but that the services the library provides have diversified, Scherma said.

When the building got its last major renovation, in 1985, no one imagined that audio-visual materials would become “huge,” Scherma said, or that the 20 public computer stations that have been set up along the walls would be fully occupied many summer afternoons.

“We’ve got the building shelved about as tight as you can shelve it and still have seating,” he said. “Because we have no area to put things, we’re forced to rob from Peter to pay Paul.”

In other words, when something new comes in, something else goes. When there’s no place to put the Maine collection other than in a small conference room, the library loses that conference room. To accommodate audio-visual equipment several years ago, Scherma cut the library’s reference collection in half.

“If you’re here on a busy day after school, the young adult room, there’s not a chair to be found in there,” Scherma said. “They’re sitting in the corridors all the way to the bathroom.”

The town has already taken the first “baby step” toward expansion by purchasing a small, abutting parcel of land behind the building, he said. Now, it’s up to the study committee to recommend a course of action.

One course of action that would be guaranteed to be controversial – and one that no one seems willing to propose – is actually replacing the current library with a new building.

Two old schoolhouses connected in 1985 by a long hallway, the library has its fair share of architectural quirks and shortcomings. But it also has a fascinating history.

In 1857, a young schoolteacher named William Widgery Thomas taught in a circa-1840 schoolhouse on Bowery Beach Road for one term, for the sum of $122.50. He then found a more lucrative calling in international politics, and the next time he and the schoolhouse crossed paths, it was 1917 and the school had been moved to a farm and was apparently on its way to becoming a pig barn.

Thomas purchased it back from the farmer, returned it to its original location, repaired it, stocked it with books and furniture, and donated it to the town in 1919, saying he hoped it would prove “a little lighthouse of knowledge” for the citizens.

“I have built a lighthouse and furnished the lamp,” he told residents at the library’s April 22, 1919, dedication, “but it is for you, inhabitants of Cape Elizabeth, to keep the lamp burning so that it shall shine over this town forever.”

The library enjoyed popularity for some time, according to town historians, until the gas rationing of World War II began to discourage people from driving to Bowery Beach Road. So, in 1944, the town moved the building to its present location on Scott Dyer Road, next to what was then the Pond Cove School Annex.

In 1957, the town added on to the back of the building, and in 1984, the Town Council authorized spending up to $590,000 to connect the library and the Pond School Annex.

Today, the two schools can still be easily identified by anyone walking in the main entrance. To the left, a set of two doors – one for the boys and one for the girls – marks the front of Thomas’ schoolhouse; to the right, a larger pair of doorways stand at the entrance to the Pond Cove School Annex. Although it is larger, the Pond Cove School Annex was also originally an 1840s-era, one-room schoolhouse. Two more rooms were added later.

“The two buildings have quite a lot of history to them,” said Councilor Mary Ann Lynch. “I certainly don’t see those two buildings being knocked down, and I think any construction would have to be done, I would think, with care, in terms of the historic character of the buildings.”

It will be quite some time, though, before the council and voters have to make any major decisions. According to Councilor Anne Swift-Kayatta, the council’s representative on the newly formed Thomas Memorial Library Study Committee, the committee has until May 1, 2009, to recommend a plan of action for the library to the Town Council.

The committee’s first step will be to select a consultant to help with assessing the library and planning for future needs. The committee will seek funds from the Thomas Memorial Library Foundation to pay for the study.

Over the coming year, the consultant and the committee are expected to analyze the library and design a program and a facility that will meet the town’s needs for the next 30 years. The committee will also examine whether the historical society “should have space in the library or, if not, where it should have space,” Swift-Kayatta said.

Swift-Kayatta said it is “way too early to tell” whether the committee will recommend a new library, addition or renovation.

Scherma has no doubt about what the library needs.

“If there was a way to use this building that we haven’t figured out, we’d love to hear that,” he said. “(But) I think there is going to be a need for some additional space. It’s a wonderful building and I would hope we can integrate it wisely. At the very least, no matter what happens, we’ll keep the building that William Widgery gave us.”

Thomas Memorial Library Facts:

Total lendable items: 52,800

Items checked out annually: 125,200

Staff: 8.5 positions

Square footage: 13,250

Budget: $477,739 ($52.58 per capita)