Old vs. New or Classy vs. Functional

This image is an example of the architecture of the New York Public Library when it opened in May, 1911. At that time it was the largest marble building in the United States and had over one million books on the shelves. The Library Director, Dr. John Shaw Billings, designed a huge reading area on the top floor with seven stories of book stacks and a system in place designed to get the book to the library patron as fast as possible. The very first patron waited six minutes for his book. The building, once the whole library, is now known as the Humanities and Social Sciences Library.

I'm fairly certain the West Melbourne Library does not contain any marble. Nor will it, now or in the future, hold more than 1,000,000 items. WMPL opened 87 years after NYPL with only one floor and a nine-seat reading area. It is a comfortable, friendly place that gets the book in hand in under a minute. (If we own it. And if it's not checked. And if it's shelved correctly. But we won't go into all that.) This very functual building was built in the middle of a cow pasture and suffered bulls in the employee parking lot the first year. Ah, the good ol' days.

At the turn of the century (the last century,) high society in New York, the movers and shakers that raised and donated money to build the library, would not have been impressed by a small, block building with a teal-colored metal roof. Citizens of West Melbourne in 1911, our own movers and shakers, were too busying keeping the mosquitos from carrying their kids away to even consider a library.

The point is...uh, what was my point? Oh. Yeah.

But it's our library. It belongs in this community, serving this population, and getting books into the hands of its patrons. Same as the NYPL which is serving its own population and still moving books off the shelves after 87 years.

Let's hope the same will be true of the West Melbourne Public Library.