Library 2.0, circa 1998: Ironwood Branch

Rick Anderson's essay got me to thinking about one of the first times I encountered a radical shift in the way libraries did business. It was an SPL training day in 1998, and one of the workshops was presented by one of the heads of the Richmond PL, in suburban Vancouver, BC, regarding their brand-new Ironwood Branch, which had become internationally famous overnight as a model of the "library of the future." The 12,000 square foot branch occupied an upper story in a neighborhood shopping center and had been designed to bring the library's collection to the patrons. Materials were displayed face out for immediate visibility, there was an entire room devoted to public-access computers (a novel concept in the late 1990's), and self-check machines handled over 90% of the astonishing 750,000 annual circulation. At the time, SPL's busiest branch circulated 1/2 of that.

A year or so later, I attended similar workshop at the 2000 PLA conference in Charlotte, NC. And I walked away from it, asking myself, "Why can't we do that??"

By this time I was enrolled in library school at San Jose State, and in my studies I encountered such radical thinkers as Charlie Robinson and Jean-Berry Molz of Baltimore County PL, whose "Show 'em what you've got" theory of library management was a revolutionary concept in its day, widely criticized yet successfully adapted by Brooklyn PL in the 1980's. I also picked up the book Why We Buy, by Paco Underhill, whose studies of customer behavior in retail environments really got me thinking about how to market the library's collection. No longer was it sufficient for patrons to come to the library and shuffle down endless rows of 84-inch shelving, past thousands of books placed spine out so that they all blurred together in a mind-numbing haze. We had to change. We had to bring the collection to the customer.

Now we're taking the library's resources into realms that Robinson & Molz probably never dreamed of: Library Facebook and MySpace pages, RSS feeds, lists of hot titles e-mailed to patrons, downloadable audio and video, place-it-yourself holds, and so on. For me, though, Library 2.0 started on that training day in October, 1998, and the "library of the future."