In praise of good libraries
---------------------------
Fellow Circumlunar colony admin slugmax recently wrote a nice post[1]
about his nostalgic recollections of the small-town library of his
childhood. I grew up in a town too small to even have its own
library, but even if I hadn't I'm too young to have had to use a card
catalogue. I *do* remember the transition from loans via stamps in
the card in the back of the book to elecronic loans, but, as strange
as it seems, I think the libraries I dealt with move to electronic
indexing before they made that leap. I could be misremembering.
Anyway, this post is in praise of good libraries, but more
specifically it's in praise of one *very* good library - Helsinki
Central Library Oodi. "Oodi" is a Finnishisation of "ode". Oodi
opened at the end of last year, and as the simple fact that it *has* a
name beyond "Helsinki Central Library" might suggest, it's not your
run of the mill library. I can't honestly believe I'm about to write
this, because it sounds like weapons-grade marketing gibberish, but
Oodi honestly challenged my understanding of what it means to *be* a
library.
It has books, of course. Lots of them, in a wonderful variety of
languages. But at the end of the day, only one third of the space in
the building (and it's an impressive building, with umistakably Nordic
design sensibilities) is actually dedicated to books. The other two
thirds, in the words of the library's Wikipedia article[2] (that's
right, it has a name *and* a Wikipedia article) are dedicated to
"meeting and doing".
And, you know, the "meeting" part is cool. There's more than one cafe
in there, and also a huge space where people can just sit and hangout,
where eating and drinking are allowed and there are copious power
outlets and USB charging points for free use. But it's the "doing"
that really excites me. At least a third of Oodi is a giant, really
great hackerspace, and/or makerspace, or whatever you want to call
it. The facilities available to use there are incredible. There's
electronics tinkering stuff you can use; soldering irons and even
oscilloscopes. There's sewing machines you can use, including
fancy-as-hell electronic embroidery machines. Jewellery making stuff.
Proper soundproof music recording rooms. Huge poster printing
machines. 3D printers. An incredible range of stuff to promote
creativity and *production* rather than consumption. All provided to
the public for free. It's just amazing. It's so great that when
friends and family visit us here, we either take them to Oodi or tell
them to go and check it out. It's a genuine tourist attraction. If
I lived in Helsinki, I'd be in there all the damn time.
As physical, dead tree books slowly but surely (and very sadly, at
least for some) become less and less commonly used, it seems
inevitable that the public library is going to need to reinvent itself
to some extent, and I think the "library as makerspace" model is a
brilliant idea. Obviously it's *not* a cheap undertaking for cities,
and I don't think that somewhere like Oodi can ever really be anything
other than a rarety. But I still think it's a wonderful example of
the idea of libraries not as "a place full of books" but as "a place
full of free resources for the public to lead richer lives", which
*is* an idea that, I would hope, can be made to work at different
scales and budgets.
Does anybody else in Gopherspace have really cool libraries near them?
[1]
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~slugmax/phlog/2019-08-17-library-nostalgia
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Oodi
