Are books the wave of the future?

           

The City of San Diego opened it’s new, nine-story, $189 million dollar library last weekend. It took them over thirty years to bring the project into existence.  Some wags note, rather cynically, that San Diegans had more pressing priorities - like building a light-rail line and a downtown Baseball stadium.  Regardless of motivation, the magnificent structure, complete with a three-story atrium offering spectacular views of San Diego Bay, is open for business and, apparently, well worth the wait.

            In addition to state-of-the-art technology, San Diego’s new library will accommodate 1.2 million books. Wait a minute…haven’t we been barraged by the (mis)perception that books are a thing of the past in the 21^st Century?  In fact, are libraries even necessary? La Salle Librarian, Delia Swanner answers the latter question with a resounding yes! She quotes the American Association of School Librarians 2009 position statement: "Empowering Learners: Guidelines for School Library Programs":

1. Mission
The mission of the school library program is to ensure that students and staff are effective users of ideas and information; students are empowered to be critical thinkers, enthusiastic readers, skillful researchers, and ethical users of information.

2. Collaboration
The school library program promotes collaboration among members of the learning community, and encourages learners to be independent lifelong users and producers of ideas and information.

3. Reading
The school library program promotes reading as a foundational skill for learning, personal growth, and enjoyment.

4. Multiple Literacies
The school library program provides instruction that addresses multiple literacies, including information literacy, media literacy, visual literacy, and technology literacy.

One only has to walk through the Blakeslee Library at lunch (especially around Finals week) to encounter a room filled with students using the space for what it was intended: to study, to work on a project, to do research, to get a leg up on tomorrow’s assignments, and, most important of all - to ask for help.  But that’s not all.  While it should not be a surprise to learn that the student presence in the Blakeslee Library after school plummets (although never to zero), the monthly after-school Café Biblioteque (a “coffee house” featuring guest speakers/entertainers and/or original student work such as poetry) tends to draw better than three dozen students from every grade level. Interestingly enough, the single largest attendance at Café Biblioteque was last December when 70 students helped create Christmas greeting cards for teenagers who were spending the holidays in Juvenile Hall.

Even so, traditional uses of a library like La Salle’s continue to frustrate the predictions of 21^st Century prognosticators. The Blakeslee Library witnessed an annual door count of 18,420 (this is an increase of 23% over the prior year) and an average of 18 class visits per month. 728 books were checked out for research purposes.  This represents a 34% increase over the prior year.  In support of this, more proactive view of libraries, Luis Herrera, the City Librarian of San Francisco, offers a compelling argument for the continued need for libraries:

Libraries are more relevant than ever. They are a place for personal growth and reinvention, a place for help in navigating the information age, a gathering place for civic and cultural engagement and a trusted place for preserving culture.

So, while libraries will undoubtedly survive the “Age of Technology,” it is not at all clear that books in print will survive the duration of the 21^st Century. According to one study, however, less than 10% of the world’s books in print have been digitized, suggesting that they will be around for the duration of our lifetime and the lifetime of the so-called “Millennials.”  And, as the inevitable shift to electronic media drives current library users to a computer portal, books in print must be preserved, no longer because they are the primary source of research information, but because they represent an essential component of intellectual inquiry that won’t be electronically replaced anytime soon.

            Meanwhile, magnificent buildings like San Diego’s new Central Library, remind us of our aspirations to know more about our world and its story through the fundamental task of sitting quietly with a book in our hands.