Through the looking glass and beyond

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This was published 12 years ago

Through the looking glass and beyond

Technology and changing habits are transforming libraries the world over, writes Yuko Narushima.

Updated

In the library of the future, a robot will find the book you want, remove it from its shelf and deliver it to a service counter for your collection.

It will take minutes between ordering the book online and having the pages in your hands.

Welcoming ... light and and airy spaces draw a constant flow of patrons to Surry Hills library.

Welcoming ... light and and airy spaces draw a constant flow of patrons to Surry Hills library.

That library is being built at Macquarie University, which will become the first Australian university to install a robotic crane as part of an automated storage and retrieval system. By putting 80 per cent of its stack in a compressed space, the university can keep its collection on site.

That is a luxury other libraries are giving up. The University of NSW and the University of Sydney are cutting back on hard copies, either by discarding duplicates or moving titles into storage.

All over the world, libraries are coming to grips with the limits of shelf space and the changing demands of their members.

The University of Oxford faced opposition when it ran out of shelves at the centuries-old Bodleian Library and trucked books to what The Guardian called an ''unlovely but pragmatic'' industrial estate on the outskirts of Swindon, 45 kilometres away.

When the Ernest S. Bird Library, at Syracuse University in the US, tried to move books 400 kilometres away, staff and students ran a campaign to ''free Bird'' and keep the tomes close.

So the University of Sydney librarian, John Shipp, was prepared when protesters united on Facebook to fight the renovation planned at the Fisher Library. Students and staff borrowed 1100 books in a single hour to save them from storage. Of those 160 hadn't been borrowed since 1979.

''Touching an icon like Fisher Library has to engender some protest. You would expect it to,'' Shipp says. ''In universities where they care about scholarship, there's always protest.''

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Uncatalogued gems worth thousands have been unearthed at Fisher. Since the removal process began, librarians have discovered a first edition of Indian Currency and Finance by John Maynard Keynes and an 1892 copy of The Story of a Puppet or the Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, and moved them to the cherished rare book collection. Shipp expects to find 18,000 more.

The library manager for the City of Sydney, David Sharman, says public libraries are also changing. Their function has gone from a warehouse for books to a pleasant place in which people want to spend time. There, the focus on book preservation of 40 years ago is now balanced against the demands of visitors, who want more than to sit on a patch of carpet with a book on their lap.

''The belief at the time was that books and light don't mix because it makes the paper fade,'' he says. ''We've gone full circle because natural light and people do mix.''

Libraries are becoming airier. Rows of shelves are opening out to lounges and cafes. Desks come with powerpoints for students to plug in laptops and sunlight passes over squat shelves that no longer need a ladder for access.

Search engines have also changed the information people look for. Requests for low-level information - what Sharman calls ''Wikipedia-level references'' - have given way to increased interest in niche information. Search engines and websites such as Wikipedia satisfy the initial demand for information.

''[Wikipedia] may be right, it may be wrong, but it will give you an answer,'' Sharman says.

The digitisation of reference material, including encyclopedias and dictionaries, also delivers access to quality information at home. Library members can log on using their library card number and trawl through databases in their lounge rooms.

For fiction, demand in libraries for e-books has so far been small. Instead of shifting novels online, community libraries are tailoring hardcopy collections to match the interests of their members.

In Surry Hills, for example, the library carries extra titles on art and design. Expectant mothers read up on parenting and first home-owners peruse books on decorating.

In Waterloo, young families prefer a more traditional collection, with books for young readers. The Haymarket library has the city's Asian language collection. Across a number of libraries, graphic novels, or comic books, are pulling the traditionally hard-to-lure demographic aged between 20 and 30, Sharman says.

''There's some serious literature written in this form now. People immediately think of male teenagers but there's an entire literary world of graphic novels,'' he says. For the nine inner-city libraries he manages, 25 per cent of visitors are tertiary students, he says, many of whom live in share houses and are seeking a pleasant space to spend time. And librarians are less inclined to hush chatter, perhaps in the recognition that their buildings are becoming meeting places for people seeking free public space, indoors.

In the new Ryde Library, shelves are arranged in Y-shapes according to genre. Books on health are clustered. Home and garden titles sit together.

''Like a bookshop,'' the library services manager, Jill Webb, says. The furniture and bookshelves float on wheels to allow for easy reconfiguration.

Webb expects libraries to change further. It would be a brave librarian to predict what the library of 2030 would look like, she says.

''Where libraries are going is something of an unknown. The best thing that we can do is be very open-minded and be willing and able to change,'' she says.

While the automated system coming to Macquarie might work for a research library - where members know what they are looking for - community libraries cater for a different set of readers.

Public libraries are committed to an open stack that gives people direct access to the books, Sharman says. ''We have a lot of use from people browsing. They say, 'I'm after a design book. Even if they're after a particular one, once they get to the section there's usually two or three that will catch their eyes,'' he says.

''There's no doubt digital books and information are becoming increasingly important,'' says Sharman, ''but the paper book has still got a long way to go yet.''

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