My Noisy Sister

I also suspect that kids come to libraries, both school and public, because libraries exert a powerful pull on their psyches. What other institution in our society manages to provide a public gathering place while simultaneously catering to the solitary, interior life: the imagination, the curiosity, the intellect. As humans, we constantly come together to celebrate our accomplishments and natural blessings: We build sports stadiums to admire physical prowess; we set aside park land to worship natural beauty; we construct museums to be transported to the past. In the same way, we create libraries so we can savor, together, what the world's great minds have conceived--and, lest we forget, that encompasses everything from the Ancient Greek dramatists to the giggle-inducing Captain Underpants.

This increases the likelihood that the sorts of activities that have long brought students to libraries--to find Pablo Picasso's middle name, to get a picture of the Nigerian flag, to research the internal combustion engine, even, perhaps, to get the latest book by Brian Jacques--will be carried out at home online, in the depths of the family room, surrounded by dirty socks and crumpled Chee-tos bags.

In an emergency--say, finishing a term paper the night before it's due--I can certainly support working under these conditions. But while working at home may be expedient, few family rooms were ever conceived as of shrines to human endeavor. The library as place, however, gives knowledge its proper due, by sheltering it, by caring for it, by venerating it. Nowhere does it say that because we digitize the human record that we have to eliminate the place that celebrates it.

Still, the trend is ominous. I can no longer say with confidence that all libraries will survive once the Internet is fully developed. The libraries that will falter and die will be those whose librarians fail to understand that they're no longer the only game in town. The ones that survive will understand that the library must offer everything that a Web-based research service provides--and then go further and create a vibrant place where young people want to be. Go to a Starbucks during the day and you'll see people working, hunched over laptops. They could work at home, but they prefer to be surrounded by others, even if the interaction is minor. I'd venture to say that kids feel the same way. There's an electricity, an energy that we feel when in the company of others. This is what we must cultivate in libraries--through lots and lots and lots of family programming, through attentive and friendly service, through appealing facilities--if we're going to lure kids from the sock-strewn family room.

I believe strongly that librarians who focus on the library as place will save it. Our society is still head over heels in love with libraries--witness the new $200-million version of antiquity's Great Library of Alexandria that will open in Egypt later this year. In the last decade, schools and public libraries have done extensive renovation and building projects--all at a time when the Internet has been omnipresent. There's no doubt in my mind that as spectacular as the Internet is in delivering written and visual information, it cannot begin to satisfy our need for a public space that honors the life of the mind.