“Express” Libraries Bad Idea

Sometimes change is just bad for everyone.  I oppose anything that adds to the dumbing-down of the nation.  This is one of those ideas.

I am mighty proud that Madison, Wisconsin is moving in the opposite direction and preparing to construct a new central library.  At a time when other nations are gaining speed on America with brainpower and ideas is really not the time to short-cut our libraries!

In this suburb of St. Paul, the new library branch has no librarians, no card catalog and no comfortable chairs in which to curl up and read.

Instead, the Library Express is a stack of metal lockers outside city hall. When patrons want a book or DVD, they order it online and pick it up from a digitally locked, glove-compartment- sized cubby a few days later. It’s a library as conceived by the Amazon.com generation.

Faced with layoffs and budget cuts, or simply looking for ways to expand their reach, libraries around the country are replacing traditional, full-service institutions with devices and approaches that may be redefining what it means to have a library.

Some library directors worry that such machines are the first step toward a future in which the physical library—along with its reference staffs and children’s programs—fades from existence. James Lund, director of the Red Wing Public Library in Red Wing, Minn., recently wrote skeptically about the “vending library” in Library Journal, a trade publication.

“The basis of the vending machine is to reduce the library to a public-book locker,” Mr. Lund said in an interview. “Our real mission is public education and public education can’t be done from a vending machine. It takes educators, it takes people, it takes interaction.”