Tomorrow's library today

P olished terrazzo. Perforated stainless steel panels. Raised carpeted decking hiding miles of fiber-optic cable and serial jacks in every conceivable place— walls, floors, desktops. Rows of computer terminals with color monitors containing numerous Web sites left idling on Netscape’s software. This is what one experiences once inside New York’s $100 million, state-of -the-art Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL), the nation’s premier public information center catering to science and business researchers. But SIBL is more than a modern-day, interactive research institution giving unsurpassed access to information. It is a prototype for the library of the future, where hundreds of databases are at users’ fingertips and the public can troll the Internet for whatever information it needs, even the day’s headlines. As technology blazes a path to the new century, library and research institutions worldwide are in the process of rethinking their roles and functions. For example, San Francisco opened its new main public library (SFPL) at a cost of $140 million, touting 1,100 terminals and computers with Internet access for the Bay-area public. Great athenaeums in France, Britain, Germany, and Japan are being built or renovated to make room for mass increases in book stacks and to accommodate information technology. Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, sees the current level of investment in libraries as unparalleled since the time of Andrew Carnegie. Raising the money proved uncharacteristically easy despite a climate of dwindling government funds, federal and state office closings, and reduced library hours. In New York and San Francisco, the projects were made possible by commitments from both the public and private sectors. San Francisco voters overwhelmingly approved financing for the new library with 78% in favor; more recently voters approved a 60% increase in the library budget and guaranteed it remain at that level for the next 15 years. New York’s SIBL’s initial goal of $24.5 million in government funds was easily reached; the remainder came from private sources including corporate donations, foundations, and and endowments. The electronic kiosks throughout the library were developed and donated by IBM, as were most of the workstations and software. While SFPL boasts workstations with oversize visuals and voice-output devices to accommodate the visually and hearing impaired, workstations to help the staff scan and catalog multimedia productions, and a children’s Electronic Discovery Center containing a plethora of multimedia selections, SIBL differs slightly in the sense of a general-interest public library, instead catering to the business and science communities. Material from a noncirculating research collection of 1.2 million volumes—31 miles of shelving— housed on five floors of electronic shelving in closed stacks above the public floors, is retrieved via packets in pneumatic tubes sent to the appropriate stack and then delivered by special elevators just large enough to hold book carts. The time it takes an elevator to descend five floors to the delivery desk is 35 seconds. In SIBL’s Electronic Resource Center (ERC), 70 workstations offer access to more than 100 standalone CD-ROMoperated databases, networked files, online full-text journals,