I walked into the public library last Monday, and all of the books on the first floor were gone. In their place were stacks of 2 x 4s and an architect’s rendering of a library renovation. If I read the diagram of the new floor plan correctly, and I think I did, most of the books are never coming back. In their place will be a meeting room, a lounge, and a series of small independent shelving units arranged at various angles. Even if all of those shelves are to be used for books, they will not hold one twentieth the number of books that were in the room only two weeks ago. Basically the space is being repurposed from a book repository to a contemporary community center.
As I was studying the new layout, one of the librarians walked up and asked me what I thought. I immediately asked her where the books were going.
She replied, “Before the non-fiction was upstairs, and the fiction was down here. Now everything will all be upstairs.”
“Will it all fit?” I asked.
“It’s all up there already. We did have to shrink our collection a little bit, but we were due to do that anyway.”
I pointed at the shelving units in the drawing of the new layout and said, “I assume those are book shelves. What will go on them?”
“I’m not sure. New acquisitions for sure, but other than that, I don’t know. It is supposed to be done by January, and then we’ll see.”
I’m not sure that I like having the main collection of books on the second floor. No, let me restate that. I’m sure that I don’t like it. It somewhat relegates books to a secondary role. Soon the main floor will be for socializing, while the books for solitary reading will be tucked away out of sight. When people step into a small town public library, shouldn’t they be immediately surrounded by books? Even if they are there to use a computer or pick up a DVD, the design of the building should force them to walk past the reason that libraries were created in the first place.
Libraries have always been a kind of drop-in center, but they were a drop-in center focused on books. Now not so much. When I sat down to write this blog, I wondered whether librarians are being trained to handle their new roles as social directors. I went to the website of the University of Wisconsin’s Library and Information Studies Program and discovered that library schools, while now much more about digital information than cataloguing, are still focused on content. There is nothing about clientele service. There was a capstone course called User Experience, but just the term “User” suggests that the course is about people sitting in front of a computer terminal and not people interacting with each other.
I like 90% of the innovations that libraries have made in last twenty years. I check out DVDs and audio books. I use the online catalog from home, and I renew my books without taking them back to the library. I was thrilled when my library started a hand tool library – and now that I avoid getting up on ladders, I borrow their 20-foot tree branch trimmer at least once a year. I do think that they made a mistake in doing away with library fines, but I was told by a librarian that the few dollars collected from fines was never worth the hassle. I will adapt to this latest trend in library design, but just for today I will complain that I have to walk up a flight of stairs if I want to be with the books.
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