Good Lookin’ Libraries – a Key to Survival?

If you get the chance to look at the Lucas Foundation’s publication Edutopia for October, 2005, be sure to read “Way Beyond Fuddy-Duddy.” The short, picture-laded article showcases the remodeling efforts of some elementary library media centers in New York City, funded by the Robin Hood foundation.

It’s interesting to look at libraries through the eyes of architects – especially ones who seemed to have been frightened by a librarian as children. The subtext of the article is not terribly “sub” in the passage below:

Such design elements exemplify how the Robin Hood Library Initiative defines the school library’s role in the twenty-first century: a place for collaboration, performance, creativity, interactivity, and exploration, both online and offline. It’s a hub, not an add-on luxury.

“There’s nothing forbidden about these libraries,” says Robin Hood’s Saltzman. “There’s nothing scary. There’s no schoolmarm with her hair in a tight bun, punishing you for talking above a whisper. At times, these libraries are raucous.”

The signature exclamation points also encourage a liberation from a stereotype. “An upside-down i represents the turning on its head of all those negative notions of what a library was. That exclamation point is what it’s all about — the emphatic invitation to learning.”

The article suggests a few strategies we must use if we are to avoid the Flat World Library Corporation option I wrote about a few days ago. If we are to continue as a bricks and mortar operation

• We’d better have damn inviting physical facilities.
• We’d better not be the stereotypical “old school marm.”
• We must be a place for “collaboration, performance, creativity, interactivity, and exploration, both online and offline.”
• And at times, we’d better allow the place to get “raucous.”

A second article in this issue of Edutopia, “No More Books,” describes the much bally-hooed effort to create a textbook-free high school near Tucson through a one-to-one student to computer initiative.

“Scan the classrooms, labs, and libraries of Empire High School and you’ll find laptop computers, digital projectors, and wireless connections, but nowhere in the specially designed facility just outside Tucson, Arizona, will you find a textbook.”

While the quote above indicates there are “libraries” at Empire, the school’s “under construction” website shows no links to even a single library. I hope Empire HS has a library and librarian. I want to know what role they play in this bell-weather school.

Should every library stop buying new books for 5 years and spend the money upgrading the furniture and painting the walls?

How do libraries roles change in a text-book free school?