Library Building Nostalgia

Library buildings are lovely, and most of us feel a great sense of nostalgia for the experiences we've had there, but we are shifting to a culture that is far less dependent on physical buildings and more reliant on virtual networks. To overlook that the Millennial generation feels none of what we feel for library buildings is to perpetuate the belief that "libraries are irrelevant."

 

This blog post from Phil Bradley's library weblog makes an elegant argument about why libraries are more than what our publics are currently seeing...

 

A library is not...

a building. Sure, there are some lovely wonderful buildings which house libraries, and we don't have to go back too far to see when the building that housed a library was essentially a temple of worship to the book. However, while a library needs a building (although I'm not going too far down that route any longer, since a case can easily made that it's no longer true), it can't define the library. Sure, it can help with the concept of a library, and it can assist in the role of the library - they used to be quiet buildings with loud rooms, but now they're more often than not a loud building with quiet rooms, but a building full of books, neatly arranged with helpful people doing things for the members/clients/etc could quite easily be a bookshop.

A library is not a collection of books. It's also not a collection of resources either. We cannot define ourselves by the artifacts that we use. We should - hopefully - have long gone beyond that - into other media to begin with, but then, as society has started to leave physical objects behind with the increased use of music files instead of CDs and films on demand instead of DVDs and knowledge 'in the cloud' instead of on CD-ROM, so has the the library and the librarians. We're not in the book business - we have *never* been in the book business. We're in the knowledge business, helping, assisting and facilitating what our members and our communities want.

http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2011/10/a-library-is-not.html
 

Kansas City Public Library
 

As pictured above, the Kansas City Public Library is an example of a beautiful library facade - it immediately evokes all the nostalgia that Baby Boomers and Generation X feels about their community libraries, but as Mr. Bradley points out - libraries are more than a collection of books. Furthermore, as more electronic resources come online and available through the cloud, the more this facade will begin to appear old-fashioned and antiquated; a symbol of a bygone era. Libraries deserve better.