Rejuvenating Downtown Libraries

The future of libraries is an interesting topic – while some proclaim they are bound for extinction, others are suggesting that the civic monuments of yesteryear can and should be adapted into digitally connected, urban hangouts.

Slate Magazine has put together an interesting little slideshow outlining the history of public libraries in America and how cities across the country are modernizing them in an attempt to rejuvenate their downtowns.

This particular segment seemed to nicely sum things up:

Like the other new downtown libraries, the Denver Public Library sends another message: We Are Still Here. The library building boom of the last two decades is closely tied to efforts to rejuvenate downtowns. Cities can’t re-create the department stores, movie palaces, and manufacturing lofts that once made downtowns the vital centers of American metropolitan life, so they build convention centers, ballparks, museums, and concert halls instead. Retro ballparks have enjoyed success with the public, but I’m not sure that trying to re-create the library-as-monument has an equal appeal.

…Ross Dawson, a business consultant who tracks different customs, devices, and institutions on what he calls an Extinction Timeline, predicts that libraries will disappear in 2019. He’s probably right as far as the function of the library as a civic monument, or as a public repository for books, is concerned. On the other hand, in its mutating role as urban hangout, meeting place, and arbiter of information, the public library seems far from spent. This has less to do with the digital world—or the digital word—than with the age-old need for human contact.

Slate: Borrowed Time, How do you build a public library in the age of Google?

[via Good]