The Perfect Little Library

A Guest Post by Norman D. Stevens

One of Gina’s blogs, The Pleasures of a Disorganized Library, evoked memories of my first days working in libraries some 60 years ago. At that time, the conventional wisdom was that small libraries were vastly superior to large libraries. While some iconoclasts, like my mentor Ralph Shaw, were fond of pointing out, for example, that in a small library a catalog was not essential as a good librarian would have memorized her — there were few male librarians in small libraries — collection.

But small libraries could not begin to meet all of the needs of their patrons and offered inadequate salaries and working conditions. As a result, capable and ambitious librarians were forced to work in larger libraries. But secretly many of us dreamt of working in a small library. In my case it was the Harrisville (N.H.) Public Library that is located in a small brick building that juts out into Harrisville Pond. The HPL now holds under 5,000 volumes, circulates fewer than 4,000 items a year, and is open about 30 hours a week. Its beautiful views, small collection, low level of use, and limited schedule couldn’t be better.

Times have changed.

Even small libraries, like HPL, and individual’s have access to the same enormous quantities of books and information as the world’s largest libraries thanks to tools such as WorldCat, Google Books, and other devices. Unfortunately, librarians working in small libraries still cannot necessarily earn a living wage and the loss of the dream of fewer demands has vanished even in places like the HPL.

A few years ago I recognized that technology might have altered that dream, but options for small libraries are now limited only by our imagination.

Some of those options, like the Telephone Booth Library in Westbury-sub-Mendip, England (http://www.theworld.org/2009/12/01/phone-booth-library/) had become a reality and there is even a small library in, of all places, Norman, Arkansas (http://www.normanarkansas.com/history/smallest_library_in_usa_2.html) that lays claim to being the smallest library in the United States.

Various friends have suggested their notions of what kind of small library might be created. Those include: The Beach Cabana Library; The Golf Umbrella Library; The Local Convenience Library; The ZDM Library; Inflatable Books; and the ELP Project. Each has its own appeal.

Now I am appealing to readers to comment on this blog by offering their vision of one that might be incorporated into an on-demand publication Norman’s Little Libraries that I’m contemplating.

An idea of what we are looking for is such a library that might be known as “The Chameleon Library.” Imagine a small space, which need not even be in a fixed location, somewhere wherever the library user might be. Through a new technology created by the staff of The Molesworth Institute, which involves only the insertion of a microchip in each user’s brain, we can, first of all, interpret the user’s latent vision of what kind of small “library” space he or she would find most desirable at that time and convey that image to her or his brain. In the same fashion, we can either allow the user to input a request for a “book” or determine what “book” it is that the person truly wants to read.

Please keep in mind that we are asking you to create little libraries. So keep your words concise and few. Thank you.