The Place of Books Re-imagined
Although I am excited to wake up every day, I am particularly excited to get out of bed on this morning, even if it is particularly cold out. Today is the 15th anniversary of my library’s founding, so we are having a special celebration to commemorate the event. Ten years may not seem like a long time, but things back then were much different than they are now. When the library I work at first opened, libraries weren’t so popular. They were seen as symbols of an ever fading archaic past filled of superstition and mundane boredom. It isn’t like it is now where people all pay for libraries out of their own pocket. No, back then they had to use tax dollars to pay for libraries, and those that were around weren’t used very much. It wasn’t till a group of librarians (including myself) got together and talked about how we would augment the life of the library by reinventing it a little. Because of our changes, libraries today are much different than they used to be.
The first thing we had to change off the bat was the books. Since we realized that so few people still read from hard books, we decided that the best thing to do was just to get rid of them all, except for those that were very old and therefore had some intrinsic or historical value which can still be found in the back corner of my library. To replace them, we instead began to offer codes that would allow people to access certain books while they were within a certain radius of our library. The benefit of this is that we now have nearly every single book ever written available for use in our library, and our list expands every day. We also offer access to all major scholarly journals and library databases, although with all the fare share practices alive today these aren’t really that hard to come by today.
Of course, we realized that to be truly successful, we needed to think beyond just books. After all, people could just pay for books themselves in their homes (granted, they still may not have access to as many as we had). To expand, we decided to look towards the other main institutes of learning and scholarship out there: schools. After some research, we found out that schools were always trying to expand their STEM curriculum as it is a very hot field in today’s world, but they didn’t have the means or resources to do it. We saw this as a perfect opportunity to expand our library by adding to it something that is both scholarly and something people would find use in. After about our year our library was the first in the country to have its own STEM lab complete with a state of the art facility and grad student TA’s would split their time between the local university and our library teaching where they taught mostly high school students. It was a complete success and hundreds of libraries across the country followed suit.
As I’m sure you can guess, we didn’t stop there, and shortly thereafter we had installed a 3-D printing facility to capture people’s curiosity and promote technology, a media production lab and even a classroom that had a new guest lecturer every week.
As you can see, our library has changed a lot over the years, going from a room that lent books to a place that uses information and technology to supercharge people’s fascination with learning. And for this I will celebrate.
