58/100: Adapt or Die?
This vignette is one in a series of 100 on the libraries of New York City
So I didn’t go back to the stacks as I’d planned to. I have all week, and anyway I’m on library-time, which is to say a sense of time where time isn’t really a concern. Today I stuck with the work-my-way-down plan and started on the sixth floor. The legend map downstairs describes it as the Pasculano Learning Center; listed beside it are career services, ESL classes, and media/technology training. I take the elevator again. Several people ride it with me, mostly to the terrace.
The Learning Center is a large, open-concept room with a long table running down the middle, and several smaller classrooms, here called program rooms, off to the sides. It’s very midtown in the sense of being corporate and glitzy. It’s so midtown, in fact, that it has its own, very professionally produced live-action video, which I recommend watching here (it’s about a minute of visuals):
Amazing what 200 million dollars can do, am I right?
At present, two of the program rooms are in session, one for Intermediate ESL students, the other a prep class for the US citizenship test. I see on the schedule there’s also a Media Lab and Spanish Conversation Hour later on today.
I’m once again struck by just how much the library offers to its communities. Of course, this is an extreme example: the NYPL president called it “the most important civic infrastructure project in New York in recent memory.” There was definitely a lot of extra cash to play with, hence the impressive surplus of services.. This isn’t always the case — in fact NYC libraries are currently facing almost $60 million in upcoming budget cuts — but billionaire grants or not, the grace with which these organizations serve their people is remarkable.
Something I’ve been grappling with since I started writing this series has been the dilemma of how much one should accept change versus fight it, and I’ve done a lot of oscillating on my answer. It started with the question of quiet: I was scandalized at the lack of what I regarded as proper etiquette. But I caught myself sounding like Grandpa Simpson, complaining about the wretched young people (or maybe just people) who didn’t know how to behave in public these days. I didn’t want to be Grandpa Simpson, so I got myself a pair of noise cancelling headphones and tried to embrace the “democratic” aspect of the chaos. For writing purposes, I started to hope for erratic behaviour; this is the best anecdotal material.
It was only after spending significant time in these spaces that I started to understand that libraries are fundamentally about people, and people, as a whole, have changed. Society has changed, and libraries have adapted alongside it. In the age of information overload, the library’s job is no longer to disseminate information, but instead to regulate it. In fact it might even be to protect us from digital inundation, by providing one of the few environments where tech is secondary, or at least can be if we so wish.
That said, it’s stricter here than at any of the other libraries I’ve visited. There are no food or drink signs everywhere, and the rule is enforced (again, I wonder how much this is a question of resources versus easing up on societal conventions). One guy took his shoes off under the table — they were dress shoes that didn’t look comfortable — and was promptly told to put them back on. No one talks here — not on the phone, not to eachother, and if a library worker answers someone’s question, it’s in hushed tones.
I don’t think there’s a singular answer to this query of how one should run an institution like this one — or the broader beat-em-vs-join-em conundrum. Some of the changes that have come our way have been positive, others not so much. One of the better ones has been that there’s just more choice (though this too sometimes gets overwhelming, I’m looking at you, streaming services) so that, where libraries — that is, places to think — are concerned, there really is something for everyone.
Thanks for reading!