[LINK] "If libraries can't make it here in New York, can they make it anywhere?"

[rfmcdonald]

Matthew Mateusz Zadrozny has an opinion piece at The Guardian regarding the New York Public Library's controversial planned revamp. (As it turns out, I noted it here in 2012.) Zadrozny, as I noted here, gained fame via a photograph of him eating his chicken lunch on the steps of the beautiful Bryant Park branch.

The Central Library Plan, now misleadingly rebranded as a “renovation”, would sell off the Mid-Manhattan Library (the busiest lending library in the country and the place where President Obama got his start) and the Science, Industry and Business Library branches; squeeze users into a space that is a fraction the size; and divert $150m in taxpayer money from 87 resource-starved community libraries. The 42nd Street Library, the most democratic of the world’s great research libraries, would see its seven floors of historic books stacks gutted to make way for an airy and hard-to-access atrium, in a shortsighted worship of the digital.

I say “shortsighted” as someone who has experimented, clear-eyed, with all the forms of digital reading – laptop, phone, tablet, e-reader – before concluding that reading on paper is, in general, better. Sure, digital text is necessary for computational linguistics and preferable for referencing, but paper is easier on the eyes, impedes distractions, prevents snooping, obstructs censorship and does justice to paragraphs and pictures in all their shapes and sizes. I have discovered, too, that digital devices bias reading toward the immediate and ephemeral, and printed information, being slower and more expensive, tends to be of higher quality.

The virtual destruction of the New York Public Library rests on faulty premises. In a world of cheap personal computers, ubiquitous internet access and vanished book stores, libraries will always be special. For in addition to preserving manuscripts that may never be digitized, providing services to communities, and lending e-books to remote users, library collections entice citizens to meet in public spaces – and not just for the experience of reading on paper. Readers come for the ageless experience of browsing the shelves and commenting on one another’s dust jackets. Should the plan here in New York go through, the 42nd Street Library may soon find that its terminals are as empty as the ethernet ports carved into the tables of the Main Reading Room.

Amazingly, this desecration and downsizing is taking place amidst an upsurge of usage across libraries in the City and broad support for libraries across the country. According to an in-depth report released last week by Pew Research’s Internet Project, all Americans – including technophiles – love their libraries to this day.