Do We Still Need Libraries?
By KAREN ANN CULLOTTA
Published: December 27, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/us/libraries-try-to-update-the-bookstore-model.html?pagewanted=1
Libraries See Opening as Bookstores Close
Tyler Bissmeyer for The New York Times
Vicki Culler shops for discounted books at the Friends of the Public Library in Cincinnati.
At the bustling public library in Arlington Heights, Ill., requests by three patrons to place any title on hold prompt a savvy computer tracking system to order an additional copy of the coveted item. That policy was intended to eliminate the frustration of long waits to check out best sellers and other popular books. But it has had some unintended consequences, too: the library’s shelves are now stocked with 36 copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Of course, librarians acknowledge that when patrons’ passion for the sexy series lacking in literary merit cools in a year or two, the majority of volumes in the “Fifty Shades” trilogy will probably be plucked from the shelves and sold at the Friends of the Library’s used-book sales, alongside other poorly circulated, donated and out-of-date materials.
“A library has limited shelf space, so you almost have to think of it as a store, and stock it with the things that people want,” said Jason Kuhl, the executive director of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library. Renovations will turn part of the library’s first floor into an area resembling a bookshop that officials are calling the Marketplace, with cozy seating, vending machines and, above all, an abundance of best sellers.
As librarians across the nation struggle with the task of redefining their roles and responsibilities in a digital age, many public libraries are seeing an opportunity to fill the void created by the loss of traditional bookstores. They are increasingly adapting their collections and services based on the demands of library patrons, whom they now call customers.
Today’s libraries are reinventing themselves as vibrant town squares, showcasing the latest best sellers, lending Kindles loaded with e-books, and offering grass-roots technology training centers. Faced with the need to compete for shrinking municipal finances, libraries are determined to prove they can respond as quickly to the needs of the taxpayers as the police and fire department can.
“I think public libraries used to seem intimidating to many people, but today, they are becoming much more user-friendly, and are no longer these big, impersonal mausoleums,” said Jeannette Woodward, a former librarian and author of “Creating the Customer-Driven Library: Building on the Bookstore Model.”
“Public libraries tread a fine line,” Ms. Woodward said. “They want to make people happy, and get them in the habit of coming into the library for popular best sellers, even if some of it might be considered junk. But libraries also understand the need for providing good information, which often can only be found at the library.”
Cheryl Hurley, the president of the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher in New York “dedicated to preserving America’s best and most significant writing,” said the trend of libraries that cater to the public’s demand for best sellers is not surprising, especially given the ravages of the recession on public budgets.
Still, Ms. Hurley remains confident that libraries will never relinquish their responsibility to also provide patrons with the opportunity to discover literary works of merit, be it the classics, or more recent fiction from novelists like Philip Roth, whose work is both critically acclaimed and immensely popular.
“The political ramifications for libraries today can result in driving the collection more and more from what the people want, rather than libraries shaping the tastes of the readers,” Ms. Hurley said. “But one of the joys of visiting the public library is the serendipity of discovering another book, even though you were actually looking for that best seller that you thought you wanted.”
“It’s all about balancing the library’s mission and its marketing, and that is always a tricky dance,” she added.
While print books, both fiction and nonfiction, still make up the bulk of most library collections — e-books amount to to less than 2 percent of many collections in part because some publishers limit their availability at libraries — building renovation plans rarely include expanding shelf space for print products. Instead, many libraries are culling their collections and adapting floor plans to accommodate technology training programs, as well as mini-conference rooms that offer private, quiet spaces frequently requested by self-employed consultants meeting with clients, as well as teenagers needing space to huddle over group projects.
Though an increase in book weeding these days — a practice long known in library parlance as deselection — might be troubling to some bibliophiles, library officials say, many books enjoy a happy life after being sold.
A recent visit to the Friends of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County Warehouse Sale proved to be not unlike wandering into a reader’s nirvana for Jeff Borden, 61. A writer and adjunct professor from Chicago, Mr. Borden said he and his wife, Johanna Brandon, left the November sale with shopping bags brimming with an eclectic and bargain-priced assortment of fiction and nonfiction, including the noir novel “The Leopard,” by Jo Nesbo, and “Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde” by Jeff Guinn.
“The books are piling up all over the house,” said Mr. Borden, who estimated that the couple spent about $50, money that officials said will be given to the library system to finance programs including its children’s story time.
“Great fiction is still being written, as well as rotten fiction,” Mr. Borden added. “To my way of thinking, you need to get them in the door of the library first, and if someone’s search for ‘Shades of Grey’ leads them to read D. H. Lawrence, well, that’s not a bad deal.”
Gretchen Caserotti, the assistant director for public services at the public library in Darien, Conn., said, “We are terrifically excited about the sea change at libraries, and rethinking our model in a new world.”
The Darien library has a three-requests policy similar to the one in Arlington Heights.
“The library should be as they say, a third place — you have home, work or school, and then you come to the library because it is the center and heart of the community,” Ms. Caserotti said. “Our staff is 100 percent committed to hospitality, customer service and welcoming people to the library as if they were visiting our home. We need to remember it is their library, not ours, and they are paying for it.”
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토론1
Failing to Close the ‘Digital Divide’
Susan Crawford is a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School, and a contributor to Bloomberg View and Wired. She is the author of "Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age."
DECEMBER 27, 2012
For a growing number of Americans, a library is for Internet access. According to a Pew survey last month, more than a quarter of all adults used the Internet at a library during the past year. The numbers are higher for blacks and Latinos than they are for whites. Indeed, whites may not know or understand how important library Internet access is to minorities: 92 percent of blacks and 86 percent of Latinos said it was very important for libraries to offer free access to computers and the Internet, while only 72 percent of whites did.
Users of public library Internet connections tell surveyors that they're applying for jobs, doing homework, getting information about health care, finding out about government benefits and managing their finances. And because almost a third of Americans (again, more blacks and Latinos than whites) don't subscribe to our country's expensive Internet access at home, librarians say that they're scrambling to fill the gap left by our nation's yawning digital divide.
A recent study by the Information Policy & Access Center at the University of Maryland reports that the demand for libraries’ limited resources has outstripped the supply of both computers and bandwidth: 87 percent of urban libraries report having insufficient computers, and only 17 percent of rural libraries offer broadband speeds greater than 10 Mbps, compared with 57 percent of urban libraries.
In the 21st century, high-speed Internet access is almost as essential as electricity. That libraries serve as the provider for millions of Americans isn't something to celebrate. It's a sign that we're in trouble. We're depriving people of basic information access that is central to every policy we care about – including health, education and national security – even though every American should be able to communicate reliably and access information at any time.
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토론2
It’s Not Just Story Time and Bookmobiles
Buffy J. Hamilton is a school librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Ga. In January she will become the learning strategist for the Cleveland Public Library. She is on Twitter.
UPDATED DECEMBER 28, 2012, 3:36 PM
Contemporary libraries have shifted from warehouses of books and materials to become participatory sites of culture and learning that invite, ignite and sustain conversations.
The media scholar Henry Jenkins has identified that such participatory sites of culture share five traits:
· Creating learning spaces through multiple participatory media;
· Providing opportunities for creating and sharing original works and ideas;
· Crafting an environment in which novices’ and experts’ roles are fluid as people learn together;
· Positing the library as a place where members feel a sense of belonging, value and connectedness; and
· Helping people believe their contributions matter by incorporating their ideas and feedback.
Modern libraries of all kinds – public, school, academic and special – are using this lens of participatory culture to help their communities rethink the idea of a “library.” By putting relationships with people first, libraries can recast and expand the possibilities of what we can do for communities by embodying what Guy Kawasaki calls enchantment: trustworthiness, likability, and exceptional services and products.
Libraries in various communities provide enchantment through traditional services, like story time, bookmobiles, classes and rich collections of books. However, libraries are also incorporating innovative new roles: librarians as instructional partners, libraries as “makerspaces,” libraries as centers of community publishing and digital learning labs.
While libraries face many challenges – budget cuts, an ever-shifting information landscape, stereotypes that sometimes hamper how people see libraries, and rapidly evolving technologies – our greatest resource is community participation. Relationships with the community build an organic library, that is of the people, by the people and for the people.
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토론3
More Relevant Than Ever
Luis Herrera is the city librarian of San Francisco.
DECEMBER 27, 2012
The public library is a true American invention. Perhaps no other place captures the values of freedom of expression and democracy like this venerable institution. Libraries represent what we should never take for granted: the freedom to read, the freedom to choose and the freedom to share our ideas. The library’s mission to provide free and open access to information in all its myriad formats remains constant.
But libraries across the nation are in a state of transformation. A key issue is the transition of the publishing industry from print to electronic materials, especially as the industry grapples with allowing libraries to buy and circulate e-books to meet the growing demands of readers.
Libraries are a place for personal growth and reinvention, a gathering place for civic engagement.
Libraries are successfully moving from analog to the digital age by providing access to a broad range of digital and multimedia tools that will prepare future generations with 21st-century technology skills. Across the nation, public libraries are the No. 1 point of online access for people without Internet at home, school or work. One hundred percent of public libraries now offer access to the Internet and 90 percent offer technology training. Libraries are finding creative ways to address patrons’ technology demands. Several years ago, San Francisco Public Library began allowing patrons to check out laptop computers to use in the library. This is now the highest-circulating item in our system.
Visit a public library today and you will see a hub of activity. In San Francisco, our computer labs thrive as drop-in resource centers for job seekers and small business entrepreneurs. Librarian-led workshops teach basic computer skills (in Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish and Russian) and help avid readers of all ages to download free library e-books onto tablet computers and other devices.
Libraries are more relevant than ever. They are a place for personal growth and reinvention, a place for help in navigating the information age, a gathering place for civic and cultural engagement and a trusted place for preserving culture. While the technology for accessing library materials has changed and will continue to change, our mission – to inform, to share and to gather – will not.
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토론4
For Gathering and for Solitude
Matthew Battles, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, is the author of "Library: An Unquiet History." He is on Twitter.
DECEMBER 27, 2012
The library is very nearly unique in its flexibility both as institution and metaphor. Books and the places that keep them have taken many forms, and yet, whether it’s the rarefied milieu of the Vatican or the sleepy stillness of a small-town reading room, we tend to subscribe to a set of norms: studiousness, solitude and quiet above all. These connect the sense that all these disparate places really are one place, consistent across times and cultures.
But libraries are very different, not only from one institutional context to another, but also over the course of their long history. Throughout that history, the qualities we ascribe to them have shifted and changed as well. Libraries constitute archaeologies of knowledge, reflecting not only cultural memory, but also the changing import of information, learning and literary expression in different times and places.
We still need spaces for making knowledge and sharing change, and some of those, surely, we will continue to call “the library.”
Are books repositories of all that is good and true, or shifting signifiers whose meanings change from one reader to the next? Is reading a means of individual development, ethnic acculturation or the expression of intellectual freedom? These ever-changing values play across the catalogs of standing collections and inspire new institutions to emerge.
In their long history, libraries have been models for the world and models of the world; they’ve offered stimulation and contemplation, opportunities for togetherness as well as a kind of civic solitude. They’ve acted as gathering points for lively minds and as sites of seclusion and solace. For making knowledge and sharing change, we still need such places — and some of those, surely, we will continue to call “the library.”
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눈에 띄는 댓글 몇 가지
- Perfect Gentleman
- New York
Wrong, wrong, wrong! Libraries have been around for thousands of years, and they will live on long after the latest Internet fads fade away. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, my local library was one of the only places in the neighborhood that had power. And guess what? It was packed with people watching TV, listening to music and the news on the radio, using computers, charging their phones, and just gathering in a place that had light and heat and camaraderie. Long live the library! NY Times, pick that!
- newreview
- Santa Barbara, CA
As a former librarian -- also former book seller and current Kindle owner -- there is NO replacement for the public library in its value to our society and culture. As a kid, libraries held total wonder for me, a place where you could come home with a huge stack of books -- treasures, they surely were -- spend a week or two devouring new facts and experiences, and then take that stack back to the library and exchange it for another stack. What a concept! The lucky kids had parents who would take them every week. Sure, we bought and owned books, too, but nothing can compare to having access to an enormous collection of books no bookstore has -- or those one will never find browsing Amazon. Libraries are treasures of democracy.
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