A Library From the Future Arrives In Denmark | Michaela Cavanagh | Dec 20, 2016

Public libraries | Library Design | Library Trends | Technology in Libraries

In Aarhus, Dokk1 merges old and new concepts of how a public place for learning should function.

Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects

 

 

It’s hard not feel as if you’ve just visited the library of the future after spending a day at Dokk1.
In a formerly industrial part of Aarhus, egg chairs are now sprinkled around the periphery of the massive new “hybrid library.” There, a three-ton tubular bell called The Gong echoes through every time a child is born at the local hospital. Outside, a ferry to Copenhagen comes and goes from the harbor while kids and adults play across a field with teeter-totters, a tire swing, and a huge slide in the shape of an eagle.

Opened in 2015, Dokk1 is more than Scandinavia’s largest library—it’s a community hub that meets the changing needs of Denmark’s second largest city. Last summer, Dokk1 was named the Public Library of the Year by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). As the notion that libraries simply serve as a home for books dissolves, Dokk1 merges old and new concepts of what a library should be. Read more...

Has the library outlived its usefulness in the age of Internet? You’d be surprised by Donald A. Barclay

April 28, 2016 6.09am EDT
U.S. institutions of higher education and U.S. local governments are under extraordinary pressure to cut costs and eliminate from institutional or governmental ledgers any expenses whose absence would cause little or no pain.

In this political climate, academic and public libraries may be in danger. The existence of vast amounts of information – a lot of it free – on the Internet might suggest that the library has outlived its usefulness.

But has it? The numbers tell a very different story.

In spite of the findings of a survey in which Americans say they are using public libraries less, the usage numbers reported by libraries indicate the opposite. Read more...

Libraries are no longer cold, forbidding spaces. Howard County Library System Follow, CC BY-NC-ND

Meet the man who is turning D.C. libraries into a national model by nevin Martell march 31

Richard Reyes-Gavilan, executive director of the D.C. Public Library system, is changing the way the city’s residents interact with its libraries. (Greg Kahn/GRAIN/for The Washington Post)

A year ago, Richard Reyes-Gavilan was standing in an upstairs dining room at the Hamilton, a trendy downtown eatery. He’d come to talk to a roomful of business owners and civic leaders about that building.

“I’m sure you’re all familiar with MLK,” says Reyes-Gavilan, the executive director of the D.C. Public Library, using shorthand for the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the dreary, well-worn, four-story central library two blocks west of Verizon Center. Despite being designed by celebrated 20th-century modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the boxy structure is known less for its collection and more for its down-on-their-luck clientele who has inspired a lengthy list of restrictions on behavior such as bringing in bedrolls or “emanating an odor that can be detected by a reasonable person, from six feet away.”

“It was outdated the day it opened,” he tells the room. “It has been an unloved structure for a long time.”

He pauses.

“But it has always had potential.” 

Read more...

What Libraries Can (Still) Do James Gleick

Deutsches Historiches Museum/Arne Psille/Art ResourceHeinrich Lukas Arnold: The Reading Room, circa 1840

Of the many institutions suffering through the world’s metamorphosis from analog to digital (real to virtual, offline to online), few are as beleaguered as that bedrock of our culture, the public library. Budgets are being slashed by state and local governments. Even the best libraries are cutting staff and hours. Their information desks are seemingly superseded by Google, their encyclopedias are gathering dust. And their defining product, the one that lines their shelves, now arrives in the form of a weightless doppelgänger that doesn’t require shelves.

In the technocracy, all the world’s information comes to us on screens—desk, pocket, wrist, goggles—and no one trudges through wind and rain with library card in hand to find a single worn object. After all, when you want the text of Magna Carta, you don’t track down the original. Same with books? “Libraries are screwed,” said Eli Neiburger, a Michigan library director, in a much-quoted presentation at a Library Journal conference in 2010. “Libraries are screwed because we are invested in the codex, and the codex has become outmoded.”

So is the library, storehouse and lender of books, as anachronistic as the record store, the telephone booth, and the Playboy centerfold? Perversely, the most popular service at some libraries has become free Internet access. People wait in line for terminals that will let them play solitaire and Minecraft, and librarians provide coffee. Other patrons stay in their cars outside just to use the Wi-Fi. No one can be happy with a situation that reduces the library to a Starbucks wannabe.

Perhaps worst of all: the “bookless library” is now a thing. You can look it up in Wikipedia.

Read more: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/oct/26/what-libraries-can-still-do-bibliotech/

An Innovative Library Lifts the Fortunes of a Chinese Town

Li Xiaodong, a prize-winning architect, was inspired by the branches of local fruit trees, which he used to cover the Liyuan library's roof and exterior walls. Credit Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times

JIAOJIEHE, China — Nestled among the shimmering chestnut, walnut and peach trees of a deep valley surrounded by craggy hills, the tiny village of Jiaojiehe suffers from being close to the nation’s capital. The young flee easily to the big city, leaving the elderly behind, lonely and poor.

In today’s China, villages like this often try to engineer a sense of well-being by opening a new medical clinic, say, or by upgrading the water supply.

But Li Xiaodong, an award-winning architect who fuses traditional Chinese ideas of design with Western themes, had a different idea for Jiaojiehe. He was captivated by the potential he saw in the village’s most abundant natural resource, the branches of its thousands of trees, which the locals harvest for fuel.

So he built a library — with a twist. At its base, it is a steel and glass box in the vein of a Philip Johnson open-plan creation from the 1950s, but its exterior walls and roof are clad with fruit-tree twigs

Read more:

http://nyti.ms/1H408BG

Wait. Stop. What is a photocopy? Three insights from our Library Student Advisory Board

September 10, 2014, 4:04 pm  By Brian Mathews The Ubiquitous Librarian
 
The mission of our Library Student Advisory Board is to help us gain a better understanding of the student experience at our university. We talk about a lot of different ideas and issues. I want to share three that surprised me.

Photocopying? We were talking about printing and I asked the students if they ever photocopied (we have all-in-one machines that do printing, copying, and scanning) and the students were silent. After some strange looks someone finally asked what’s a photocopy?

Apparently everything is a print these days. Reproduction of a page of paper doesn’t seem to be a very common activity. I explained what it was and felt like I was describing a telegraph. I guess with journals migrating to predominately digital formats that most undergrads do not need to photocopy articles. Most of their own content is digital as well — so there is no copying notes, forms, or anything like that. Next time I might tour them around the microfilm and VCRs.

Note: the grad students knew about photocopying

Reservable study space? No thanks. Last semester I asked them about offering a few desks or study carrels that students could reserve. Instead of hunting around for a quiet place to read, what if you could schedule it? The group was unanimously opposed. They felt this was fine for group spaces because people needed to assemble at an appointed time, but they didn’t want to see this for individuals. They preferred the first-come-first-serve approach and said that it is hard to predict in advance exactly when you might study; the logistics involved didn’t seem worthwhile.

Share my data, please. Another theme we discussed was personal data. Students said it would be helpful to have a simple dashboard where they could see how busy the library is at a given time. They were not particularly interested in desktop computer availability (which is easy to provide) but more focused on the inventory of quiet area seating and group tables. An engineer in the group started mapping out how we could do this with sensors but with 1,000+ seats that could be challenging.

The suggestion that received the most traction was requiring students to swipe their ID cards when they accessed the building. They do this now at the gym, residential halls, and various computer labs: it’s not usual. I brought up the concept of privacy but that didn’t resonate with them. The consensus was that if the data could be compiled and shared in a meaningful way (generally displaying the busyness of the building) that it would be valuable to them.

Secondly, they thought it might be useful for the library and other campus planners to gather accurate demographics: how many first-year students are using the library, how many engineering students, how long people tended to stay in the library, etc. We talked a bit about the value of these analytics— they brought this up, not me.

The eye-opener for me was how surprised they were that we were not already collecting this information. We do require students to swipe their ID after midnight, but they were advocating for something more. It’s always interesting to see things through the ever-changing eyes of the user.

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The Time Machine (2002) Full Library Scene

No copyright infringement intended.

The Future of Librarians in an EBook World - Technology - The Atlantic Cities

The Future of Librarians in an EBook World - Technology - The Atlantic Cities

• Sarah Goodyear
• Feb 04, 2013

(Chris Tumbusch/Pierce County Library System

“There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.” So wrote the steel baron and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who donated a great part of his vast fortune to establish some 3,000 such libraries around the English-speaking world, from his native Scotland to Fiji, and in 47 of the United States. Carnegie believed that libraries should be more than just repositories for books. He envisioned them as community centers as well, and many of them serve that purpose to this day.

But libraries in the 21st century face challenges that Carnegie could not have anticipated, and have struggled to retain their central role to the lives of cities and towns. One of the most profound realities libraries face is the move of readers away from printed books. In 2010, only 6 percent of Americans owned a tablet or e-book reader. By 2012, that percentage had jumped to 33 percent.  Read more...

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