How to Prepare Now for What's Next by Michael McQueen

Author:Michael McQueen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780730349853
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-02-05T14:00:00+00:00

A new-look library

When the Woollahra City Library in Sydney’s eastern suburbs embarked on a multimillion-dollar renovation a few years ago, it was clear that simply re-creating a more modern version of the old facility wasn’t going to cut it.

While library design has evolved very slowly in recent decades, since the early 2000s libraries worldwide have had to ask themselves some pretty difficult questions. In the digital age, what is the purpose of a library? Certainly being a solemn and silent storehouse for printed books is no longer viable — but what could they evolve to become?

The team at Woollahra set about entirely rethinking the role and purpose of a library and ended up creating a facility four times as large as the one it was replacing. This was undoubtedly a bold move when other libraries were struggling to justify their existence and the old facility had been suffering from declining visitor numbers for years.

The new Woollahra City Library is not only aesthetically impressive, with its bright, inviting and inspiring lobby replete with an enormous vertical garden, but the daily visitor count has soared to 2500 people — up from just 400 prior to the renovation. The facility itself is almost unrecognisable as a library. While there are certainly printed books on shelves, there are also video conferencing rooms, flexible co-working spaces for local freelance professionals, workshop and seminar facilities and a Microsoft Surface technology hub.

Speaking of Microsoft, the iconic software giant is in fact the perfect example of a business that got trapped in an old paradigm and paved the cattle track better than most — only to turn things around in recent years.

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