San
Diego's Downtown Library Must Be an Electronic Warehouse.
John M. Eger, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Opinion,
December 21, 1994
Almost as prolonged as the debate over whether to have a new airport and where it should be is the argument over a downtown library. A resolution of both issues is important to San Diego's future. Like the airport debate, the library question deserves to be elevated to the top of the list of a dozen nagging issues facing San Diego.
And resolution shouldn't take 30 years. We can ill afford the indecision and indigestion these kinds of protracted debates incur.
Fortunately, the library decision should be relatively easy. Mayor Susan Golding's City of the Future Advisory Committee report, released in April, made two relevant observations:
San Diego is already beginning to nurture a vision of itself and develop concrete plans to fulfill that vision as an international information region with a robust communications infrastructure supporting health care, business, education, the arts and government itself.
And, in this new future, libraries will continue to be important institutions as well as central to the evolution of an information economy.
However, future libraries will be electronic warehouses interconnected with high-capacity data networks permitting effective and efficient sharing of resources from one library to another, from one source to literally thousands of databases and repositories of information across the globe. Importantly, these databases will be both public and private, consisting of text and data and pictures and full motion video.
The buzz word, of course, is "multimedia," a relatively old term that seems inadequate to define a very new future in which all forms of media and communication will be integrated and available to the citizenry at large.
The essence of this new vision, however, argues persuasively that if there is to be a library, it must be more than bricks and mortar and stacks of books. Rather, it must fit the times and be a truly electronic library servicing the broad and emerging needs of a very different populace and a very different workplace.
The committee recognized this and thus recommended that the downtown or "central library" in fact be the link between branches -- a system of some 80 public library branches in the county. What's more, it recommended that it be a hub or server, as it is called, for perhaps all the other databases, private and public, that increasingly are being made available worldwide to satisfy the needs of the emerging global information economy and society being ushered in by the convergence of technology and economics.
Importantly, the committee did not take a position on where the library should be located, nor what it would look like.
Indeed, to serve the linking function, one could argue that the central library need not be a traditional library at all, but rather be housed in any one of the government buildings or even on an existing university campus that happens to have the space, interest and inclination to provide such a central hub.
This ignores the need, however, for some facility, preferably downtown, to serve the traditional needs of a traditional library. It also ignores the potential to create an important landmark for San Diego, as a "City of the Future."
Richard Weinstein, former dean of the UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Planning, has argued persuasively for the "established connection between culture and commerce in the life of all great cities." Weinstein in a recent article asked us to think about Sydney, Australia, and the image that comes to mind. It is, of course, "the opera house unfurling its nautical forms at the tip of the peninsula in the bay. For the traveler as well as the citizens of Sydney, the building has become inseparable from the affirmative spirit of the place and its people."
What could be more demonstrable for San Diego as a truly international information region than for the library to be in a highly visible place, perhaps with teleports or earth stations mounted on its roof, and a gleaming glass facade that welcomes entry, to visitors and citizens alike, for a visual and literary tour of the world.
This could be a place with multimedia, high visualization kiosks and computer terminals -- indeed even virtual reality systems -- permitting access to the great databases of the world. Whether it be a tour of the Museum of Broadcasting, or the Louvre, or the Library of Congress, or the health care libraries being built by the Mayo Clinic and other institutions, it would dramatically underscore San Diego's commitment to universal access to information -- to intellectual capital -- a fundamental ingredient in a robust information society. It also could be a showcase for the high tech, biotech and software genius of the growing number of software development firms, high-tech manufacturers and innovators in our region.
In a very real sense, "cities of the future" will be built along information highways, not waterways or railroads as in the past. The process of developing a virtual broad-band, communitywide information highway is well under way. But to insure that there is actually a "there there," not just a highway with no beginning, middle or end, we need to have a virtual fountain of information activity -- information production, transfer, storage and use; and facilities supporting those activities -- in our region.
Nothing could be more important to that effort than an electronic library of the future, and nothing could demonstrate our commitment to that more than a new building like the opera house in Sydney, which becomes a symbol for who we are, and can be, and will be if we have the will.