Tag: libraries

Categories
libraries news

The House that Kool Built

The Seattle Times has an interesting interview with Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect who designed the much-lauded Seattle Central Library. He mentions his thoughts on the “book spiral”, saying:

… one of the points of a library was that there are accidents and that you find yourself in areas where you didn’t expect to be and where you kind of look at books that are not necessarily the books that you’re aiming for. So it was to create a kind of almost arbitrariness — or to create a kind of walking experience, an almost kind of urban walk … a kind of Rotterdam, a very efficient, direct aiming for limited destinations.

Check it out.

Categories
libraries

“Public” vs “Library”: Which idea is more important?

Miss Conduct of the Boston Globe Magazine explores how libraries might be allowing the idea of what it means to be public to disrupt what their mission is as a library.

But I do think we have the right to pick up a new Alexander McCall Smith or study for an exam without feeling threatened–and a large, unwashed, clearly unstable man is threatening to a woman, or an elderly person, or a person with children who need protection. In their zeal to remain “public,” are libraries in fact driving away significant segments of the public they are meant to serve? Are they emphasizing “public” at the expense of “library”?

Surely there’s a middle ground, but where do we toe the line? Thoughts?

Categories
humor libraries

Wyoming Libraries: Advertising done right?

picture of the wyoming libraries mud flap girl

On one of my recent flights home I had the fortune to sit next to an interesting woman who happened to be in marketing. We got to talking about libraries a bit, and she sympathized that if people only knew the breadth and depth of the services their libraries offered, they would want to move in. Given her field, it’s no surprise that her advice was, “You guys need to get in touch with us.” It’s true. In my experience, libraries like to market themselves, and it probably works to some extent. Marketing is not our specialty, though, and our efforts at marketing are probably akin to the results we might get if we gave a marketing expert a book and asked them to catalog it (sure, it sounds easy until I ask you what the 245 MARC field is for, and then you’re baffled). Maybe it’s time libraries went to the experts for their marketing.

Wyoming Libraries are there already, and their campaign is awesome. It’s intelligent, sassy, and multi-modal. They have a library mud flap girl, a library Eiffel Tower billboard, and two radio spots. From the site:

Wyoming’s libraries are as expansive as the state, and as close as down the street.

Libraries offer more than many people realize, and we want to reach out beyond our regular users to let people know this. The new statewide marketing campaign is designed to increase understanding, use and support of Wyoming libraries.

I don’t know about you, but their campaign makes me want to move to Wyoming and use a library. I’d love to know how effective the campaign has been so far in bringing new users into the library, but that’s always a dodgey statistic at best, and I imagine it will take some time before any valid results can be analyzed.

In the meantime, I need to find myself some of those mud flaps …