Our new public library

Unfortunately, it's also surrounded by Woburn.

It has the faceless landscape you often find in poor or industrial areas. Is that the problem with Woburn ? My knowledge of MA is limited to places like Boston and a few of the more charming suburbs.

It is not one of the wealthier burbs, but it's not what I would call poor, either.
I guess you'd call it "working class". Not that I should be casting aspersions.
Stoneham could use a bit more charm itself.

a beautiful addition to a great old building

My little town is planning a new library addition. Im on the board and Im more fired up about the layouts and accouts for the computers and the overall connectivity. Were not anywhere near the look of your old and new wings. Ours is a modest country town library which has grown by use. (The second worse problem). Weve gone for the LEEDS cert and are using geothermal heat and trombe walls like yours, ours will be a "barn like" addtition with windows opoening where a Pa barn would have "Tobacco drying slats". I love looking at how others have done their growth connections, and Im saddened at how many towns and cities have just trashed their opld libraries and built just brand new buildings.

Even the U of Delaware, (a well endowed small University) had, taken its old library and built a new modern addition BUT, they constructed the major part of its expansion in an underground building of 4 floors , so that the new wing didnt overpower the old wing. I think U Del had such a great idae but all it took was millions of Dupont Dollars.

It's odd how the books are not being mentioned. I bet I could name a long list of world famous books that won't be in any of these libraries.

Spendi, betcha'd be wrong. Particularly with interlibrary networks, that Cambridge and probably Farmerman belong to. I can gdet damned near anything that's been published in the last two hundred years within about two days, if they don't have it on hand, which they usually do. Thru the Camb. library, I once got a fifty-year-old book on Australian bush poetry published only in Australia, from the library of the Australian Embassy in DC, likely the only copy in the States.bet you'd have a hard time getting it as quickly, if at all, wherever it is you are, spendi.

It took me six months getting The Romantic Agony out of my library.

But I was talking about the books in those splendid libraries rather than those in the wider system. The ones the committees think of as morally uplifting.

Really I was just trying to shift the focus from the planners to the authors. The most magnificent temples dedicated to the worship of the egos and planted around with the cutest trees might well be the worst library in Christendom. A library is exclusively about what's on the shelves.

Architecture. This is an architecture/design thread.

Perhaps you'd like to start a thread about your favourite library.

Say...I'll drink to that.

Uh, no, Spendius,, it's not. A library is about the knowledge you have access to.

Of course the books are the most important in a library. The more welcoming a library is the greater is the chance that people like to go there. A place to sit and enjoy your books, a beautiful view, the books placed so you want to read them.
I know one library I really never liked to go to. Unwelcoming architecture, used to be a smelly entrance as it was shared with the entrance to "social benefits" for homeless and alcoholics. The rows for the books so narrow that two people could hardly stand there together. OK this was not in Sweden.

The library which I showed pictures of have books in 25 languages for both adults and children. There are books in large print and books in simple Swedish for people who are not so good in Swedish.

I've been to that library before. In fact, I got a $5 parking ticket (if memory serves me correctly while parked out front of the library) when I dropped by to the library to save some time in picking up a book instead of waiting for an interlibrary loan. Good times! Good times!

saab makes a very good point. A good library tries to serve the needs of everybody. Spendius's Schopenhauer is very little use when your toilet is stopped up and you need a book on plumbing repair quick.

true if you're looking at the world through a monocle

It should have been $50 tsarina. You do know why there are parking restrictions don't you? It is to make things easier for all of us busy motorists who are always in a rush and a tizzy. Or the best they can do anyway and they are the ones who say what goes and we elected the gluttons for punishment to act on our behalf anyway. So you have been deemed legally to be a person who gets in our way to save yourself a precious few moments for the other important things in your life. That is actually gross and deliberate disobedience.

Make that $100.

re tsarstepan and spendius:
Knowledge does not come cheaply.

Parenthetically, stepan must gotten the ticket a LONG time ago, I don't know any city in the Boston area where you can get a parking fine of less than $25 now (admittedly I haven't tried doing research by amassing parking tickets), and I think Boston is inching toward $100 in some cases.

I have never had a stopped up toilet. And a good pal of mine is an ace plumber. In fact it was me who got him into the plumbing game. In a roundabout fashion that only a complete idiot would find interesting to hear tell of. The sort of thing you get in some books of the type everybody says is gibberish. Where they write the story backwards and then number the pages in reverse. The authentic stuff. It had actually happened. With a degree of poetic licence. To cover over or skip round those crucial episodes which show the hero in the sort of light he would rather not be shown in in the author's opinion.

Mr Joyce did not shirk the going to the toilet episode, and it is crucial, and having done so set about handling it as tastefully as he thought fit in view of the temper of the times. And wouldn't it be wonderful if he taken on a crucial unblocking of the toilet episode.

But for Mr Joyce Jack might never have dared to pluck his little jest from his memory bank bearing in mind all the other possibilities from which he had to choose where Schopenhauer would be of little use. Mostly of no use.

He blazed the trail. Got wanking a hearing too. All your crapola and dipshit and bullshit and arse wipe and wanker and the whole gamut of it in daily use is down to four-eyed Jimmy.

Of course Schopenhauer is of significatant use in a number of other situations. Often dangerous ones. He helps a young man to orient himself less hypnotised when confronted by the opposite sex. Not entirely but who can expect that. More pragmatically should we say.

So with the committee being of a faintly feminist tincture Schopenhauer is hardly likely to be on the shelves whether the toilet is blocked or not. And nor is JJ. And the scientists say that the sperm count is reducing. Bit by bit.

I dont think that spendi is of this age. The business of libraries isnt BOOKS its all about information and entertainment.
However we achieve these goals is what a library should be about.
Ours offers courses , sponsors trips, connects with any library on the planet, can get copies of facsimilies of all of Ben Franklins newspaper articles (the Dogood letters) etc.

To stop at books as the only coneyance is to spend too much time thinking about how to improve conestoga wagons.

It seems that many libraries that Ive been checking out in New England, Maritimes, and the mid Atlantic are into energy conservation and optimizing storage spaces. I recall when, as a kid, I first vsitednthe Princeton library at the U and was amazed at how tall the ceilings were. The new ones dont spend as much on maximizing the "cubic foot" space while increasing the square footage. Ive seen that most of these have optimized their ceilings at about 10 feet, due to energy conservation. Is the new Boston one a high or low ceiling space lilk?

LEEDS certification is something that architects are scrambling to be on the train with.

HOW does one pass from the old section to the new? is it just a hall or is it something more?