San Francisco’s new library has opened in the midst of a coast-to-coast library boom. Cities are racing to rewire and even rethink their libraries, rounding up all the new tools they can afford to get ready for a new millennium. Even libraries in struggling communities are getting on board: last week Microsoft chairman Bill Gates unveiled a $10.5 million program called Libraries Online!, aimed at helping 41 North American libraries expand their electronic services. But according to librarians everywhere, traditional print collections are far from obsolete. ““With Internet access, the use of print materials has gone way up,’’ says Toni Carbo, executive director of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. ““They are complementary technologies.’’ At the Cleveland library, circulation has jumped by an estimated 15 percent since the catalog went online. People dial in from home, locate a book and arrange to pick it up at their local branch. Early next year the main library will expand into a new, second building. A new addition is also under construction at the main library in Sarasota, Fla., where 70 computer terminals will be hooked up to the Internet. Cincinnati is completing a library building that will house a children’s learning center, computer areas, expanded collections and a saltwater aquarium. Chicago’s library is planning fiber-optic hookups with all 81 branches, and San Diego will unveil a new library in the year 2000. Research is underway on precisely how to wire the building. ““No one knows what’s going to be the new system in the future,’’ admits city librarian William Sannwald. ““I have a friend who keeps his ‘67 Pontiac Bonneville just to listen to his eight-track tapes.’'
But few cities have changed libraries as dramatically as San Francisco has, with a furious battle over whether to retain the old card catalog (it’s staying) and self-styled ““guerrilla librarians’’ hiding books to keep them from destruction. The city’s old library, a dilapidated building made treacherous by the 1989 earthquake, was considered one of the worst in the country. The new library, designed by James Freed of Pei Cobb Freed and backed by a city budget commitment to ongoing financial support, inhabits a different universe. The $134 million, seven-story building is flooded with natural light; 300 computer terminals are available with access to catalogs, databases and the Internet; a huge children’s area has its own array of computers on child-size tables, and the spaces everywhere are airy and open. But there’s something wrong here. Is this a library or a really well-wired airport? As one user wrote in response to a survey conducted after the first month, ““Great library! Where are the books?''
That’s exactly what the angriest critics are asking. There are lots of open stacks for browsing, but behind the scenes books are piled everywhere waiting to be reshelved –a process that can take up to eight weeks, owing to crowds of new borrowers and a shortage of staff. But lots of books are simply gone. Baker, who was forced to sue the library to obtain a computer file listing discarded books, charges that some 200,000 were hauled off for destruction or giveaway before the move to the New Main, as the building is known. ““Some in the administration call those books trash, but they weren’t,’’ says a librarian. ““We were told to weed liberally, by the linear foot. It was done for space.’’ Space is so tight at the New Main that, according to one librarian’s estimate, up to a third of the circulating collection may be in storage. A memo dated Oct. 2 demanded still more weeding of ““older books.. . that we don’t think are used too often.''
Dowlin admits the New Main has less stack space than he had wanted, but he denies that the discarding has been indiscriminate. ““We have periodicals that go back a hundred years,’’ he says. ““We’re not sure anybody will ever want to use them. Wouldn’t it be nice to find a research library that wants to be a home for them?’’ Baker, who has urged the library to retain books for which there are no duplicates, calls Dowlin’s collection policy ““use it or lose it.’’ In fact, the old library housed a fine research collection, says Berkeley historian Gray Brechin, who used it often. ““Dowlin is turning it into a big, mainstream browsing library.''
But even library skeptics have been impressed by the unprecedented scope of the fund raising for the New Main. ““People gave who had never been involved in projects like this before,’’ says Baker. The campaign, which has become a model for civic projects in other cities, went beyond the usual philanthropists to target local populations, dubbed ““affinity groups,’’ including blacks, gays, environmentalists and others. ““It was the most diverse and neighborhood-wide campaign ever done here,’’ says Sherry Thomas, executive director of the Library Foundation of San Francisco, which led the effort. The affinity groups raised funds for the library in general, and also for special rooms or other spaces to honor their constituencies. It’s all laudable, and yet. .. The gay-and-lesbian community, which raised $3 million, is honored by a handsome reading room with easy chairs and a supply of reference materials. The Chinese-American community, which raised $1.2 million, also has a comfortable room, with a couple of computers. And the Filipino-American community, which started late and raised only $250,000, got a table in an alcove with a smattering of books. ““We never intended the rooms to be more than symbolic,’’ says Thomas. ““Each one is a showcase, not a collection.’’ But the message is peculiarly non-San Francisco: with diversity comes inequality.
That elusive sense of community, of the library as a place for what one librarian calls ““the fellowship of readers,’’ is just what critics don’t sense in the New Main. Dowlin’s view of the library as ““the mall of the mind’’ is more apt, conjuring his sense of library users as online information shoppers. ““I’m not sure what the balance should be between print and technology, but there has to be a public discussion of the real costs, and what we’re willing to give up,’’ says Brechin. It’s true: great libraries have always looked to both the future and the past. The public’s job is to let them.
The new libraries rising all across North America are anything but fusty. They’re electronic theme parks–for readers.
Denver: This $72 million light-filled complex by Michael Graves has a six-story atrium topped by a one-acre reading room.
New York: The high-tech public research center for science, business and industry, designed by Gwathmey Siegel, was carved out of the old B. Altman department store.
Phoenix: Library users can look through windows in the interior walls of this William Bruder building and see its mechanical systems and fiber-optic wiring.
San Antonio: Circulation is up by 47 percent since Richard Legoretta’s bright-red, $38 million building opened last year.
Vancouver, B.C.: There’s retail space, day care, promenades, galleries–plus 300 terminals and a million books–in Moshe Safdie’s $74 million library complex.
