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

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

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