From the outside, the new library appears to be a glass dome sitting on the ground. Inside this dome, visitors will find no book shelves and no stacks. Only reading tables in a reading room. It is what is beneath this room that makes the library interesting. Below this reading room is a vault where the books are bar-coded and stored in bins. Because the items are not meant to be browsed, they are not sorted by subject. They are sorted by size in order to maximize the efficient use of each bin. The volumes are searched for online and retrieved by cranes, then delivered to the researcher...More details at Big Think.
14 May 2011
Rethinking library design
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This is terrible! When I go to look for a book on the shelf about 80% of the time I end up looking at the books around it and walk away with one of those. I've lamented the same thing about online-journals. I can't count how many times I've found the header of a much more interesting research article xeroxed onto the the tail of the one I just photo copied. Many of my research grants were a result of this serendipitous connection of the thing I thought I knew to the the thing I did not know before.
ReplyDeleteWhat a fantastically bad idea for a library. Browsing IS the point of a library not just getting what you came for.
I actually work In that vey new library and, quite frankly, it's terrible, primarily because of that fancy dome. As a result of the dome, it's insanely bright inside, even during overcast days, which makes using a computer very difficult and very hard on the eyes. even just reading texts, I find myself constantly squinting, which gives me a headache after less than an hour there. It's also very stuffy, the temperature, if the AC is off, is at least ten degrees higher than the library as a whole. This may be fixed as construction completes, but when the AC is on they actually have the opposite problem, it's freezing. Also, because it's so open, sound carries very easily (although, obviously construction noises are louder than study noises, so that also maychange). Honestly, it seems like the university was much more interested in constructing something that looked really cool, and had lots of fancy gadgets which impress alumni donors, than a building that actually facilitates study, which is a real shame given the amount of money spent on the project and the funding problems that plague many of the academic departments on campus.
ReplyDeleteI agree with charlie and empathize with TheWedge. This seems to be a great way to get people to stop reading. I'm having a terrifying visual of the future where reading for pleasure is not only unheard of but unthought of.
ReplyDeleteThis seems to go along with the trend of ebooks and Kindle type readers. They have their place and, in the case of readers, can certainly store a great deal of printed material (in addition to being alot of fun) however sometimes you just want to hold a book in your hand as part of the whole reading experience.
I agree with charlie. I love to browse, and have found some great new (to me) authors that way. I love books, and a library with novisible, touchable books is not a library to me.
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