The Martha’s Vineyard Preservation Trust will explore the possible acquisition of the Carnegie building which houses the Edgartown Public Library, if the town moves ahead with its plan to relocate the library to a new site.

Chris Scott, executive director of the preservation trust, confirmed this week that the preservation trust board is due to discuss the matter at a meeting this morning. Mr. Scott said he thinks it is “quite likely that [the preservation trust board members] are going to be very enthusiastic about answering Edgartown’s call for partnership.”

The library design committee will further address the idea at their meeting on Monday.

A plan that would lead to the preservation trust acquiring the historic red brick Carnegie building on North Water street hinges on several contingencies, chief among them whether voters fully back a proposal to move the library from its current location to a new facility next to the Edgartown School. If that plan is approved the next question will be what to do with the Carnegie building.

Mr. Scott said the building meets the trust’s criteria for acquisition: It is a historically significant building that served a public use, as well as an “architecturally handsome” building right in downtown Edgartown and one of the rare brick buildings on the Island.

The library was built in 1905 through a $4,000 donation from industrialist Andrew Carnegie and a $1,000 gift from Edgartown resident Caroline F. Warren. Between 1886 and 1919, Mr. Carnegie donated $40 million to pay for 1,679 new library buildings across the country.

Now, Edgartown’s Carnegie library “needs help,” Mr. Scott said. “Its use seems to be passing it by now.”

Plans to either renovate or relocate the library have proceeded in fits and starts for the last few years, with the town purchasing the adjacent Captain Warren House with plans for expansion. But the 20,000 square-foot building that the library needs, and state requirements for parking availability, muddied the proposal.

In July, the town was placed on a wait list for a state grant for $5 million to build a new building in place of the old Edgartown School on the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road.

If the town approves relocating the library — it could come before the annual town meeting in April — the next piece of the puzzle is what to do with the original building. The Council on Aging strongly rejected the idea of moving there from their spot in The Anchors, Mr. Scott said, and the library board voted against making the building a branch of a main Edgartown library.

At a recent library building committee meeting, talk turned to the building’s “history of public use and cultural and educational use,” Mr. Scott said, and the Martha’s Vineyard Museum’s now-planned move to Vineyard Haven. The museum’s relocation “would really leave Edgartown substantially without a cultural facility that interprets its history,” he said.

The library “has had this rich history of public use and cultural and educational use, and so would a nonprofit organization be best?” Mr. Scott said, recounting the conversation. “And slowly everyone at the committee began rotating around and saying ‘How about the preservation trust, would you be interested?’” Mr. Scott is a member of the building committee; he said if the trust decides to become involved he will resign from the committee to avoid any conflict.

While the trust’s goal is not to preserve every building on the Island, he said, the organization does step in when other options have been exhausted.

“Good preservation starts with a careful look at the historic use,” Mr. Scott said. “and oftentimes if you can adapt that use to today’s society, today’s demographics, that’s the best preservation.”

In the case of the Edgartown library, he said, the building’s history as an educational and cultural hub could play a role.

The preservation trust has traditionally acquired historically significant Vineyard buildings, like the Old Whaling Church, the Grange and Alley’s General Store in West Tisbury, and the Flying Horses Carousel in Oak Bluffs, and ensured that the places continue in their original functions. The trust took ownership of the Vineyard Gazette building in November 2010 following the purchase of the newspaper by new owners.

If the trust expresses interest in the Carnegie building, the community can begin imagining what it wants the building to be. Mr. Scott said. The organization would pull together a committee to discuss how to approach use of the building, and important stakeholders would need to weigh in — including the board of selectmen, the North Water Street neighborhood, and other residents.

“Obviously it’s an educational and cultural hub for the town. So I would say that’s a great place to start . . . . It needs to be certainly appropriate for the neighborhood, it needs to be respectful of the architecture and the history of the building, and the trust would want it to be an amenity for the town — a useful, valuable, contributing historic structure,” Mr. Scott said.

The trust, or another party, could acquire the property through a lease, sale, or a gift. “I have tremendous confidence in the good will of local government here, that we can work something out,” Mr. Scott said. “We’re not worried about it.”

But the details of acquisition are premature, Mr. Scott said. First up would be town decisions about the fate of the building, with the preservation trust facilitating that discussion, Mr. Scott said. Once the town reaches a consensus, he said, the town will solicit proposals for the property.

And if the voters don’t approve funding for a new library, the entire discussion would be moot.

“We’re being asked to be helpful in the process. Now might that ultimately result in the trust being the steward of the building, it might. But it might not. What I’m primarily focused on, assuming that everybody wants us to continue to play the role, is that it be a good process, and that it be a public process, and that we come up with a good solution,” Mr. Scott said.

Regardless of what happens, he said, “The town isn’t going to abandon the Carnegie. It’s not going to fall by the wayside.”