What’s old is new again.

The Library announced last month that the beloved Mid-Manhattan branch, which served about 1.7 million people last year, is getting revamped. The chosen architectural firm, Mecanoo, is known for its sleek and spectacular work at libraries such as Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C., and the Library of Birmingham in Birmingham, U.K., and the library at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

“Libraries are the cathedrals of our time,” said Francine Houben, founding partner and creative director of the firm. “It is the most important public building in a city.”

And nobody knows that better Deborah Elliott, a clerical supervisor at the Mid-Manhattan Library. Elliott, who has been with the branch for 40 years, remembers when the now-haggard building first opened.

“It was sparkling new and it was different and it was so huge. It was the only library in the New York Public Library system that was this huge. It was exciting to be working here at that time.”

Elliott, who is a lover of African-American writers and suspense novels, first found Mid-Manhattan through the reading club in elementary school.

“I’ve always been a reader.”

Not long after in July 1975, Elliott started working for the Library as a member of the summer youth corp, aka “the young kids who pull the books off the shelf, put the books on the shelf.”

She impressed her boss, and when the summer ended she was asked if she’d like to stay on as a page and later a clerk.

“I stayed here ever since.”  

She’s seen the branch go from the “fourth or “fifth floor” in an office building down the street to the old Arnold Constable department store. Moving to the six-floor behemoth was quite a shock.

“That’s a Library? That’s a Library? That’s a Library? That building is the Library?” she asked herself.

In the passing years, Elliott has seen a lot: A bomb threat on Fifth Avenue, the O.J. Simpson trial when the staff packed the library with TVs to watch the verdict, a patron who dressed as Fred Flintstone every day, a page who grew up to become a library manager, Tyra Banks studying fashion books, and a staff full of pages gawking nearby.

But it’s the self-checkout she never saw coming.

“If someone would have told me before that we would have machines that you could check out your own books. If they would have told me, I never would have believed that. That we have a system now, an automated system where we no longer have to stamp due date cards. All day, you had to stamp those little cards.”

But in some ways libraries are better: “There’s a lot of exciting things in the branches now,” she said. “You go in there, the furniture, the decor.”

And what about the $300 million renovation for Mid-Manhattan?

“I hope when it’s finished, it’ll be like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”