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An inventory of libraries 2: brutalist fortresses that don't need your love · Feb 14, 06:06 PM
Chances are, if you’ve attended a university, college or entered a civic building built in the last 35 years, you’ve encounted brutalist architecture. The style is so common it’s practically invisible: on the outside, exposed concrete, obscured entrances and a bunker-like tendency; on the inside, exposed duct work, more concrete and a proletarian, no-nonsense air. It’s hard to see these buildings without their attendant cultural baggage—often shabby with age, then tend to reek of grey bureaucracies and failed 1970s social planning.
Despite its recent connotations, brutalism does have a noble history. After the Second World War the architect Le Corbusier became enamoured of the scuptural qualities of raw concrete—in French beton brut—and the British took to it as a way to rebuild quickly and cheaply. Visit the South Bank or Barbican centres in London and you’ll see brutalism at its most successful. Both are forthright, cantilevered spaces that are both stolid and daring. In Canada, a domesticated brutalism became the hallmark of the national post-Centennial building boom in the 1970s. With a few exceptions, such buildings tend to be uninspired. Canada has many brutalist libraries, and they are not easy to love.
In my adopted city, the main branch of the Ottawa Public Library opened in 1974 to replace the Carnegie-funded library on its site, and although at the time the new building was heralded as a landmark design, it has not aged well. With its few windows heavily recessed behind concrete buttresses, the structure hunkers down as though to reduce its exposure from a blast. In 30 years the building has grown dingy and cramped, without enough space for its expanding collection, and it has lost its interior focal point. (Its atrium entrance had to be rerouted because of too many wheelchair-unfriendly stairs.)
I’ve written before about the library as a secular, light-filled cathedral. There is also the library as an accumulator of the grunge of human use. This is the dark underbelly of the public library that no one wants to talk about: books smell of other people’s cigarettes; some chairs smell faintly of piss. In some circles, the main branch of OPL is considered unsalvagable, because its dowdy atmosphere is past redeeming. Current thinking proposes a new site, and a brand-new building, somewhat west of downtown. Evacuation would be a shame, though, both because it would separate the library from the densest part of the city and also send a message that discarding the past is okay.
It is not.
Winnipeg’s revitalized central library offers an encouraging alternative. Cast in a dour brutalist mould, the 1977 building received a major facelift by having its rear profile replaced with a wall of glass. A five-storey “reading terrace” creates an inviting gathering place to read in the sun. The new enhancements even reflect positively on the building’s concrete shell, making it look attractive and muscular—less Soviet than ever. Without the funds to build over again, WPL took the enlightened step of working with what they have. The result is an architectural success story, and a triumph of library values.
We’re reusers and recyclers, and we never retreat from our users, no matter who they are.
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Personae in the flesh · Nov 18, 07:15 PM
Somewhat busy, of late, steering a replacement for this thing. The good news is I am no longer a usability testing virgin. Predictably, the 14-year old could scan a page and flick his mouse faster than I can think. But there was also the 60-something woman with new contact lenses who couldn’t tell where the page ended and the browser console began. Just pixels to her.
Play with the site map and call yourself an information architect: on one hand it’s a thin, yet boasting kind of profession, yet there is a frightening myriad of ways to let a web site go bad. Nothing to do but to cling to the image of the real people on the other side of the screen. Bear with us, please.
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The infinite library · Sep 18, 07:08 PM
The following appears in the Autumn 2005 issue of University of Toronto Magazine:
If he traded his khakis and open-collared shirt for a monk’s robe, the bearded Rev. William Craig would not look out of place in a dank medieval library. But this is 2005, and the Anglican priest doesn’t need to roam the dark, mouldy corridors of a medieval library to do research.
In the cafeteria of Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, Craig, a doctoral student in theology, pulls out his wireless laptop computer, launches an Internet browser and calls up a digital book from the library’s electronic collection. The print version of the 221-volume Patrologia Latina, a massive 19th-century collection of a thousand years of church doctrine, would fill dozens of shelves. Yet Craig can scour the full text of every volume simply by entering a few words into the search box on the screen.
Academic research has changed remarkably since Craig began his student career in the 1970s. “When I was an undergrad, we didn’t have personal computers,” he says. Now he can find primary sources central to his thesis – on the 1604 Hampton Court Conference of King James I of England – with a few clicks of his mouse. Digital resources such as Early English Books Online, which contains nearly 100,000 page-by-page reproductions of books published between 1475 and 1700, have made research “infinitely” easier, says Craig.
Thirty years ago, card catalogues and printed periodical indexes ruled the library system. Then the digital revolution arrived. Computers replaced card catalogues and microfiche in the mid-1980s. Encyclopedias that appeared on CD-ROMs in the early 1990s gave way to easy-to-search electronic indexes and other reference databases on the World Wide Web.
But those early milestones were only a prelude. Thanks to the development of more powerful computers and larger databases, the number of library resources available in digital form is expanding rapidly. U of T’s electronic collection now includes almost 40,000 journals, more than 50,000 e-books and 1,000 indexes and other online reference tools. However, U of T’s e-collection is still dwarfed by the 15 million books and periodicals held by the university’s 32 libraries.
Peter Clinton, the director of information technology services for U of T Libraries (UTL), says the last few years have seen a quantum leap in the availability of full-text electronic materials – whole articles and books rather than just brief citations or abstracts. As a result, students and faculty can do an increasing amount of research from their computer desktops. Not surprisingly, they check out materials from the library less often. Over the past decade, the circulation of print items at UTL has dropped 20 per cent, due mostly to falling demand for print journals. In the field of physics, the latest research is published only in electronic form. When it comes to searching for library resources, students “want it now, they want it fast and they want it to work like Google,” says Clinton.
Visit UTL’s Web site and you’ll discover just how influential the popular Internet search engine has become. Front and centre on the home page is Google’s colourful logo. Click the link and you land on a page with the message, “There are limits to searching Google Scholar and you may find better quality information through the University of Toronto Libraries’ databases.” The wording is mild, but it’s evidence of the growing competition between academic libraries and major technology companies, such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon.
Google Scholar, a service started late last year that’s still in its testing phase, is the company’s first foray into academic research. It allows users to search collections of proprietary electronic journals and a variety of online repositories of scholarly papers. A Google Scholar search on “exosolar planets,” for example, returns 54 academic essays on the subject, ranked roughly in order of the number of times they’ve been cited. Within just a few months, Google Scholar has established itself as a rival to powerful multinational companies such as Thomson and Elsevier that offer huge (and, for libraries, hugely expensive) databases of scholarly material. Some librarians say that Google underperforms its rivals in the currency and quantity of its search results, while others declare that its simplicity is a huge advantage. “Google Scholar works. And it works in a way that presents very few of the hoops that we make students jump through to use our library databases,” writes T.J. Sondermann, an academic librarian and prominent blogger on library issues in the U.S.
UTL is not so conciliatory. The library is attempting to teach researchers that its resources are more specialized, in-depth and targeted to particular fields. Carole Moore, UTL’s chief librarian, says the problem is not that students use Google’s main search engine but that they use it primarily because they are unaware of alternatives. “Many students have a limited idea of how to search and of what they’re finding,” she says. UTL is conducting seminars on the use of library materials and Moore notes that once researchers are aware of what the library has to offer, they tend to lose their dependency on the search engine. “If researchers know how to use the databases, then that actually does bring them in for materials because it’s not all online,” she says.
However, Google isn’t standing idly by. The company is developing another service called Google Print that may encroach even more on the traditional turf of libraries. Last December, it announced a partnership with the New York Public Library and four major university libraries – Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Michigan – to digitize millions of their books. Publishers are expressing concerns about copyright protection, but even if Google limits itself to works in the public domain, the implications for academic libraries are profound. A Google search of the text of millions of instantly available digital books would be a more compelling first choice than even the largest library catalogue of physical volumes.
As Google expands into the academic realm, some argue that libraries should simply bow to its strengths. John Wilkin, a librarian at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, believes that the company’s dominance in online searching is inevitable. He says that libraries should “cede the generalist role to Google” and allow it to become a universal search engine for library materials. “We all love Google for its quick and dirty approach,” says Patricia Bellamy, a reference librarian at the Robarts Library. But Moore doesn’t share Wilkin’s view that libraries should relinquish their core business to Google. “I really don’t think we would want a world that was totally controlled by one search engine,” she says, noting that Google’s for-profit status puts it in a compromised position as an academic research tool compared to the non-profit neutrality of UTL. She adds that Google’s mandate is not to support academic research but to make a profit. If a service such as Google Scholar became unprofitable, the company might decide to stop supporting it.
To compete with Google, UTL, like other academic libraries across Canada, is facing short- and long-term challenges. In the short term, UTL must match Google’s ease of use. This means replicating the company’s one-stop search box. For libraries plagued with many different ways of gaining access to their diverse collections, as UTL is, creating a single search box to retrieve a broad range of materials is an obvious step toward making research more convenient for students. Currently, researchers must deal with separate entry points for the print catalogue, electronic index and abstract databases, e-books and e-journals, and UTL’s own scanned digital collections. Since 2002, however, UTL has been working with the libraries at all of Ontario’s universities to create the Ontario Scholars Portal, a single-box search engine that covers 7,300 electronic journals and 65 electronic indexes. Clinton says that the library is about six months away from its ultimate goal of tying its print catalogue, databases and catalogued Web resources to a single search. He admits that Google is innovating quickly, but says that libraries – and the electronic database vendors whose products they buy – are beginning to catch up. “Google, and in particular Google Scholar, has been a wake-up call for many of the information vendors,” he says.
Over the long term, the library is thinking about new ways that digital materials can be stored, packaged and delivered, says Moore. Like Google, UTL is digitizing books, but its focus is on its unique collections used by the U of T community and other Canadian researchers. So far, UTL has scanned thousands of rare illustrations of human anatomy, explorers’ documents and early Canadiana from the university’s rare-book collection. Progress has been slow, but last September UTL began a pilot project with a non-profit organization called Internet Archive to digitize books using a robotic scanning machine provided by the archive. Under the arrangement, U of T pays Internet Archive 10 cents US for every page scanned. Internet Archive, which is based in San Francisco, keeps one copy to add to its digital collection and U of T keeps one copy.
One year into the project, UTL has paid for about 2,000 scanned titles, ranging from a copy of a 1475 edition of St. Augustine’s City of God to war memoirs and literary texts. Over the next two years, the project will digitize all of the known editions of books and print material – about three million pages in total – by John Henry Cardinal Newman, a 19th century Christian theologian. The effort, a joint project of three American partners and St. Michael’s College at U of T, should enable researchers to detect subtle changes in Newman’s language that would otherwise take years to discover, says Jonathan Bengtson, the chief librarian of John M. Kelly Library at St. Mike’s. “Such analyses will lead to a deeper understanding of the development of Newman’s thought,” he says.
Google’s somewhat grandiose mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” With a market valuation in July of more than $80 billion US and quarterly earnings of $343 million US, the company is in a far better financial position than UTL. The library system is stretching its resources to the limit to compete with the ease and scope of Google as well as preserve its traditional collections and services. Unlike Google, which publicly announced that it plans to spend up to 30 per cent of its earnings on new product development, UTL has no capital for innovative projects. While UTL has managed to maintain its acquisition spending in real terms, it has had to contend with university-wide funding cuts that in the past decade have led to a 30 per cent reduction in library staff.
In the 2003-04 academic year, UTL’s total acquisition budget was $25 million, of which about half was spent on scholarly journals. Because some members of the university community prefer the print format, while others request electronic, UTL often acquires both – frequently at a higher cost, and with the associated headache of storing all those volumes. The university recently spent $6 million on an off-site, climate-controlled preservation space, to keep two million books. “I spent 10 years seeking this facility, because we’re out of space,” says Moore. Located near U of T’s aerospace building in Downsview, the warehouse is expected to be enlarged to hold five million volumes by 2020.
As UTL attempts to secure a role for itself in the Google Age, it’s reconsidering its traditional reliance on publishers and vendors and beginning to act a little like a publisher itself. Last year, for example, the library developed T-Space, a university-wide digital repository that holds thousands of documents, including course mate-rials and unpublished scholarship that would previously have fallen outside the library’s mandate to collect. Modelled on a similar repository developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, T-Space lets students download specialized course materials and allows faculty to post papers and research findings in a public venue without first having to find a publisher.
As UTL boosts its technological capabilities, Moore likens the direction that the library is heading to a much earlier forebear – a medieval library. These institutions of the Middle Ages were not only book storehouses but places where manuscripts were rewritten and information was combined and republished in new ways, she says.
As for Rev. Craig, who has watched the world of print expand into the broader possibilities of digital texts, the library has become an even more stimulating place to be. Writing a dissertation is still not easy, but he says that research “is a lot more fun” when the wealth of the world’s knowledge is at your fingertips.
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Report from the labyrinth · Jan 31, 03:38 PM
In Library: An Unquiet History Matthew Battles writes many beautiful sentences about the poetry and pathos of libraries, which are both echo chambers of society and too-frequent targets for eradication. As a cultural historian Battles proceeds boldly, and the book is a fine introduction to the major epochs of library and bibliographic development. From the book burnings of despots to the textual reverence of Judaism and Islam, Battles argues convincingly that how a society treats texts provides a clear window on how it tolerates ideas.
I fault his editor, though, for keeping the book short and sweet; it covers too much ground too quickly, yet also suffers from a meandering tendency—a charming characteristic of many bibliophiles, but dangerous in a short work (214 pages) in which pacing is key. (In recounting the intellectual wars of 18th Century England, for example, Battles’ overly long description of Jonathan Swift’s 1704 short story, “Battle of the Books,” throws the narrative off balance and tips it toward a cabinet of curiosities rather than an eclectic, but measured, history. I imagine the distended passage resulted from Battles’ editor saying that the book needed more action halfway through—as though purchasers of a history of libraries might need a jolt of excitement to keep reading to the end!) To his credit, Battles, a rare-books librarian at Harvard, recognizes the fallibility of tackling a history of a place that embodies all ideas. To undertake a history of the library as a cultural idea is to try to map a labyrinth:
From age to age, libraries grow and change, flourish and disappear, blossom and contract—and yet through them all we’re chasing after Alexandria, seeking a respite on Parnassus, haunted by the myths of knowledge and of wholeness that books spawn when massed in their millions. The divine irony that Borges discovered while groping his way through the stacks strikes the sighted librarian just as powerfully: preserving themselves, the books elude us. And yet it’s this that inspires more books, goading us to finish them, to complete the set, to add another book to the collection.
Matthew Battles. Library: An Unquiet History. New York: WW Norton, 2003.
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An inventory of libraries 1 · Dec 22, 10:28 PM
My friend Madhava sends me this weekend op-ed from The Times by Ben Macintyre, who waxes with some eloquence on the enduring place of libraries. He rightly points to the durability of libraries as “citadels of memory,” and he also mentions the uncanny static electricity their dusty surroundings tend to exert:
Libraries are not places of dry scholarship but living sensuality. In Love Story Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal get together with the library as backdrop; in Dr Zhivago, Uri and Lara find one another in a library. I have a friend, now a well-known journalist, who became overcome by lust in the British Library and was discovered by a librarian making love behind the stacks in the empty quarter of Humanities with a woman he had met in the tearoom. The librarian was apparently most understanding, and said it happened quite a lot.
I have no library encounters to compete with that, but it does seem timely to reexamine the role of libraries as physical buildings where people gather and do things. This is especially true, as Macintyre notes, in light of Google’s announcement last week to render some of the world’s great library books into just another search result. To me, the enduring value of libraries is not just that they are repositories for things to read—or places to hook up—but that they are places outside of churches or temples where individuals literally and formally encounter light. I think of libraries as secular temples whose god is merely, and entirely, light itself. Readers, and by turns libraries, cannot exist without light, and to me the mark of a library’s greatness is its architect’s recognition of that essential dance. Libraries exist in a delicate relationship with daylight; they may invite it wholeheartedly with skylights, coax it reservedly with the mediating influences of dark woods, or introduce it conditionally through the intercessions of archways and colonnades. Libraries work with light and turn it to civic, secular purposes. The enlightenment follows from that. And the role of libraries as clean, well-lighted spaces its also their greatest, and increasingly most profound, service to society.
And thus, in no particular order, I shall gradually accumulate an inventory of exceptional libraries I have seen, and the light I have witnessed there.
A few years ago I spent a day and a half in Florence, which followed most of a week spent in Bologna, hammered by jetlag, talking to children’s book publishers here, and nervously representing my employer. Florence, by then, was an exotic retreat from marketing tip sheets and cover art, although just as overstimulating in its press of bodies and constant, impinging shards of history. I wandered like an idiot. And, completely by accident, I discovered two of the city’s most famous libraries.
1. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, San Lorenzo
Giulio de’ Medici, Pope Clement VII, commissioned Michelangelo to design a library to house the Medicis’ manuscript collection in 1524, although it wasn’t opened until 1571—more than three decades after Michelangelo had left Florence for Rome—and remained unfinished even then. Michelangelo’s plan called for a multi-storey vestibule with a grand stairway leading to an long, narrow reading room flanked by windows on both sides. Entering the library, one is very much aware that the two spaces work in concert, and are intended to produce an epiphany.
If it’s a bright day—and in Tuscany the odds of that are good—one enters the dimly lit vestibule in sudden darkness, disoriented until the eyes adjust. And once you can see, the chamber itself is disrupting. The room is all classical severity—rectangular niches, columns and square angles—except for the central of three parallel flights of stairs. Those stairs seem to spill from the room above like successive waves, divided into three groups, each with a different geometrical curve. The effect is startling and, in its way, more than a little sexy. The room wants you to lose your bearings. It says: climb these stairs and you will float away from everything you know.
And what you enter is a box of light. At the time I couldn’t help thinking how much the library resembles a brightly lit schoolbus. On either side of the aisle are rows of benches and lecturns, where everybody in the room faces the same direction, travelling together. I couldn’t help thinking, too, how that room must have held, like a schoolbus, an immensely raucous energy in all that silent reading. All those frontiers being breached and travelled through….
The original plan for the library apparently called for a single row of desks in the middle of the room, flanked by intricate geometrical patterns on the floor. Floor panels that had been hidded by the desks were discovered in 1774, and their precise geometry has prompted an extended analysis by a British architect and a mathematical exploration by two British academics. The latter paper is amusing and worth a look. Michelangelo seems to have created an extended play on the notion of creating a form, then filling it almost to bursting with complementary and opposing forms, in the way that the library itself fills with light that pours down the slippery stairs into the vestibule below.
A Dominican monastery from its construction in 1436, the Convent of San Marco is best known as the place where Fra Angelico painted frescos in the cells of his fellow monks. Thus, if you were in the right line of work, you might have woken to the Matins bell and a crepuscular vision of this or this.
It is thought that Fra Angelico got his start as an illuminator of missals and manuscripts, and wandering the hallway among the 20 cells on the convent’s upper floor, it was clear to me that each monk would have slept and prayed in a particularly intimate relationship with one illustration. This was a way of living inside a book that never closed, whose single image grew to fill one’s entire life. I’ve read elsewhere1 about speculations that the visual intensity of illuminated books promoted great skill at interpreting visual metaphors and unpacking the significance of iconography. It would make sense, especially if you’ve read The Name of the Rose, that the friars would have been intimately attached to books and the parade of imagery therein—books were not only the source of their faith, but contained the virtual reality of their time. In their cells at San Marco, the monks would have been connected to the life of books even when apart from them, each sleeping and praying next to an outsized gateway into the life of images and text. That portal filled the wall opposite the material doorway, which led merely into the hall.
And the visual and imaginative density of the convent is what makes the library—and the spare grace of its light—so profound. The architect Michelozzo designed it to be 180 metres long and 36 wide, with three parallel aisles; as one enters the eye is drawn down two rows of columns flanking the central aisle, then upward to the vaulted ceiling. Emerging from the cramped cells2, one’s sense, first of all, is of immense space—a place that frees the mind. Thinking of it now, it occurs to me that the library’s side aisles seem constructed to resemble the convent’s cloister. If that’s the case, Michelozzo created an ingenious metaphor. The fresco in each cell encourages travel into interior worlds—one steps through the picture on the wall and into the imagination. Entering the library, though, one walks symbolically outside into the real world—filled with the weight and freight of ideas.
To me, though, the most moving aspect of the library is the weightless quality of its light. I walked from cell to cell dizzied by images, but when I entered the library the images lost their saturated brightness and dissolved. In a convent of such dense imaginings, the library’s walls are white plaster, and the library’s light—entering at eye level from the windows along each wall—is the light of blank parchment. Here was a place meant to embody the infinite potential of the unwritten page. This library says: all the pictures and words in the world only tell part of the story. I think of this library also as a place where the friars could create their own momentary frescoes on the walls, simply by looking up from the books they were studying to let the images sink in.
1Michael Camille. Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England. London: Reakton Books, 1998.
2All but one is about two and a half metres square; the exception is the double-sized quarters reserved for visits of the convent’s patron, Cosimo de’ Medici.
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