C.R. library aims to serve many purposes

CEDAR RAPIDS - Imagine a library that's more Grand Central Station than a collection of tall, silent bookshelves. Gone are the intimidating reference desks, the stern librarians who demand quiet and the thousands of books no one reads.

Libraries across the country are carving out a role as buzzing community and technology centers where patrons can get Internet access, book a meeting room, take their children to story time and quickly check out materials on their own.

And that's why director Bob Pasicznyuk envisions a new Cedar Rapids library with fewer books, fewer staff, fewer service desks and fewer departments, but with a stronger wireless network, more computers, meeting rooms and automated check-in and checkout, as well as a staff that roves the floor helping patrons find what they need.

Embracing technology

Technology is swiftly transforming the way people read books, listen to music and watch movies. Many young people no longer buy CDs and DVDs, let alone check them out from the library. Apple iPads, Amazon Kindles and the Barnes & Noble Nook, devices for reading electronic books, have hit the market in the past three years.

Like many institutions, libraries are uncertain how to harness the changes.

“Libraries' futures are tied to technology. There's no two ways about it,” said Saul Amdursky, director of the Des Moines Public Library, which opened a downtown flagship branch in 2006. “Whether we know it or not, the public judges us by the quality of the technology we offer them.”

Free public access to the Internet is now a basic library service. Beyond that, what technologies should libraries use, and how?

Flexibility is important, Amdursky said. For instance, the central library in Des Moines has raised floors, which make it simple to run wires underneath to set up computers anywhere in the building.

“Today, what is the teen area can tomorrow be a computer center,” Amdursky said.

If Pasicznyuk, the Cedar Rapids library director, has his way, the new library will incorporate some of the innovations used by the Darien (Conn.) Library in a community 45 minutes outside of Manhattan.

The 54,000-square-foot library opened a year ago. Its staff of 29 doesn't sit at desks but does carry mini-laptops and cordless desk phones from customer to customer.

The library runs traditional programs like teen writing contests and workshops for aspiring playwrights, but patrons also can borrow a global positioning device for a car, get help preparing a resume, work on computers equipped with expensive publishing and editing software, or log onto a Bloomberg financial terminal. In the library's technology center, classes include Photo-Sharing on the Web, Craigslist for Beginners, Your Pod or Mine? (An Introduction to Podcasting) and BlackBerry Boot Camp.

Children can use software on a $14,000 tabletop computer that works like a giant iPhone. They can pull up mapping applications to zoom in on West Africa or edit video by dragging their hands across the surface.

“We allow kids to come in here and do gaming. That's not necessarily a library function, but it's, in our view, the function of an organization that's at the center of the community,” said Alan Gray, assistant director of the Darien Library. “More and more and more, libraries are looking to play that role in their community.”

Electronic books

Libraries don't expect to lend many CDs and DVDs in another 10 years, but the transition from physical to electronic books will be more complicated. Copyright law is restrictive, and neither electronic books nor the devices designed to read them are cheap. (A Kindle and the Nook cost $259 each. The iPad starts at $499.)

The cost of e-books has spiked with the recent release of the iPad. A deal between book publishers and Amazon to sell electronic books for $9.99 collapsed when Apple released its latest product.

Copyright law requires e-books to be loaned one at a time. Two patrons cannot simultaneously read an electronic book, unless the law changes, Amdursky said. So if a library thinks it needs, say, 20 hardcover copies of a best-seller to meet patron demand, it would need 20 copies of the e-book to fill the same gap.

The Iowa City Public Library has a collection of 270 e-books. About 40 percent of them are checked out on any given day. The service has been narrowly popular, said Susan Craig, the library's director, but e-books won't take over for physical books anytime soon.

The titles the library can buy are limited by publishers and vendors. How e-books can be used is still being sorted out.

“It's different from the music industry,” Craig said. “It's very complicated and totally in flux.”

Libraries already try hard to limit costs while increasing circulation. One way, Pasicznyuk said, is to lease popular books from publishers for a period of time and then phase them out. The publishers sell the used books on the Internet, and the library can make sure it has enough copies of a popular new title when demand is high. This can't be done with e-books yet, Craig said.

The new library in Cedar Rapids will likely be smaller than the 105,000 square feet that has been planned, Pasicznyuk said, and will have a smaller collection than before. Storing books takes space and costs money, he said, and books that aren't checked out should be removed. Often, he said, a smaller, more nimble collection makes it easier for patrons to find what they want and increases circulation.

“People have trouble finding what they need if the shelf is too packed, if there're 7-foot shelves instead of 5-foot shelves,” he said.

The smaller library will have a smaller staff. The equivalent of 44 full-time employees work at the library, 24 fewer than in 2001, and Pasicznyuk said the number won't increase when the new library is complete. He hopes check-in and checkout will be almost entirely automated, and he doesn't want to have an old-fashioned circulation desk.

A gathering place

Many librarians increasingly see their institutions not so much as book repositories, but as community centers. Each community must make its own decisions about what it wants, said Camila Alire, president of the American Library Association, but many towns and cities are moving toward a library that serves as a place to meet.

“Just because technology is a major factor, it doesn't mean that the people in the community still don't want the library to be designed well for them to come in and use it,” Alire said. “They're designing it not only for the emerging technologies, but also library as space, meaning that it's attractive, it brings children in, it brings adults in, it brings teenagers in.”

The new Cedar Rapids library will focus on meeting rooms, Pasicznyuk said, and return with vigor to its bread and butter: children's materials and programs, which take up plenty of physical space.

Before the flood, the Cedar Rapids library had 40 public access computers. The goal for the new library is to have 100.

Finding a way to meaningfully connect to patrons through social media is the next challenge for libraries, Amdursky said. Not in the near future, but eventually, public access computers will become obsolete for most residents, and audiobooks, music, DVDs and many books will no longer be on the shelves.

“What we need to figure out - and this is going to be really interesting - is how we can use your tax dollars to purchase those products, to make them accessible to you,” Amdursky said. “Your BlackBerry, or whatever its successor is, is going to be the one critical tool that we're going to have to figure out how to reach you through.”