Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Hornsey Library revamp
I was in Hornsey library this week and there are plans for a major refurbishment, which may involve closing the library for a period of time: here is what Haringey's website has to say about it . I'm not denying that the library looks quite tired and dated, but it's going to cost £1million and I do wonder where the money is coming from.
We are lucky to still have a fantastic library service in this borough, but year on year the book buying budget is shrinking (at a time when many more books are being published) and space to display them disappearing in favour of computer terminals etc. (There are still loads of books in boxes at Marcus Garvey as there is no longer enough shelf-space to display them in the new library.)
A great thing about our libraries is the range of experienced and knowledgeable staff - I'd hate to see them replaced with technology (which, in my experience) rarely works properly. On the other hand, it could all be a jolly good thing - what do people think?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Adrian Hackney on
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This is a disappointing set of plans. The display of what is proposed is poor and only available on paper, and only in this library apart from my disappointing photos. The display was originally offered as a consultation, with a comments book ( a book in a library, how quaint) but is now forinformation only with a secret ballot.
These works have been used as a political ploy in an attempt to make the Hornsey Town Hall development more palatable. The outgoing Crouch End councillors suggested that the businesses displaced from HTH could move to the library. This was not true.
The money was set aside in the budget of June 2016 as part of a wider libraries project (Refresh for all IT across 7 libraries, plus building improvement wo...).
I question whether we " have a fantastic library service in this borough" . We do still have library buildings that are open, despite attempts to change that, certainly at Muswell Hill and Highgate. As I understand we no longer have children's librarians. I have been told ""They've deleted the role of specialist Children's Librarian, so that Children's Librarians will now do other duties, including Customer Services and those Librarians who were not Children's Librarians, will now be expected to do that, whether or not they want to."
Maddy has linked to the LBH website. On reading this a friend of mine wrote "From the wording we may assume Haringey have learnt the lessons from the public consultations about other libraries, and have concluded not to bother in this case."
Claire Kober has been writing about libraries at least since 2011 when she said "But in the current economic climate, things can’t stay the way they are." and began pushing the idea of libraries as community hubs.
The phrase I picked up on in the text on display was "Future proof" which seems to mean bring up to date with what has happened in the last 10 years - Amazon's Kindle was launched in 2007.
The designs look a lot like McDonalds do now. This is not the future of interior design, it is at best the present.
Flood with wifi - whereas at present the wifi lies in small puddles?
Books - a concept (no, sorry, actual real things) first produced in quantity in the 15th Century. Since then we've had (inter alia) wind up gramophones ; vinyl; audio cassettes / walkman; Compact Discs; DVDs (come, and almost gone, since 1995 - I can't remember the last time I put a DVD in a drive). All are now largely defunct. This computer I am using does not have an optical disc drive, and it really does not matter.
This computer I'm using has an interface called 'Thunderbolt' which Dell describes as "Thunderbolt™ 3 multi-use port allows you to charge your laptop, connect to multiple devices (including support for up to two 4K displays) and enjoy data transfers up to 40Gbps, which is 8x faster than USB 3.0. Also includes two USB 3.0 ports." - so the USB mentioned in the library display is old hat, only just barely included by Dell to keep Gutenberg and Caxton and the future proofers at Hornsey library happy.
But all I can do is find fault. I am no more able to predict what will happen next than anyone else. So, they should cut the crap about future proofing and just go for 'making it quite nice as things are now and not too expensive to run / change when whatever happens next happens'
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Permalink Reply by Maddy on
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This is what I was afraid of - a bland cost-cutting refurbishment that destroys any heart the building still has.
What I really meant was that in the current climate it's fantastic that we still have a library service, with actual books,reasonably long opening hours and proper staff, compared to many places where the libraries either have closed,are run entirely by volunteers or you can only get books out by machine....
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