Yes,but there is another side to the story: as a kid 60 years ago I useta spend a fair bit of time in the Mitchell Library and believe me it was a pretty intimidating place then. There surely is a "middle way". But, to agree with you, the thing I miss is the gradual disappearance of books on accessible shelves so that, when looking for a certain book by a certain author, your attention is caught by an adjacent book which looks (and sometimes is) absolutely fascinating.Even more so is this the situation with bound journals...I have wasted hours absorbed by the 1932 volume of some journal when I actually went to read something published 5 years ago!

I don't think Rudd can take the blame for revising the idea of the library. When I went to high school in the 1990s, our school had no library - it had a resource centre. While I mourn the gradual loss of books, I am excited by the new ways in which information is being conveyed. If libraries are places of learning and connecting with the greater world, then making those institutions more accessible and user-friendly must be a good thing.

I have loved libraries for 40 years and I love the way they are evolving. I am not sure the author is seeing the wood for the trees.
What exactly is a library? I dont hold with your description of a library. It is not just books and silence. It is knowledge and learning and it is available to anyone.

The new technologies developed in the last few decades are like libraries in themselves. Its not called IT (information technology) for nothing. The internet is just one colossal library. The knowledge possessed by everyday people and the knowledge available to them if they want it is unprecedented in history.

We are living in and surrounded by one giant library and whether it has paper books or screens or is silent or not I love it and would never want to go back to the tedious searching of shelves and thumbing through books in a dead and sterile atmosphere that the author seems to pine for.

Long live information and knowledge and fight forever to make it free and available to all.

I have always loved libraries too.
I have enjoyed how libraries have changed with the times over the years, and yet still remain free for everyone to use.

One thing I hope that doesn't change though is the availability of real books to borrow. The price of new books is too steep for many people.

I just can't imagine laying in bed quietly trying to read books on my lap-top computer. The click noises would be bound to annoy my husband!

Great article Helen.
Re school libraries. I know that some students find great difficulty concentrating amidst noise and I know that some students find reading from a computer screen tedious.
All learning styles need to be accommodated.
The world of technology is exciting and wonderful but there must be a balance.

Mikk & Suzeonline

Me too.

During the bushfires earlier this year, I lost my landline for 2 weeks. If not for the local library, I would not have had a link to the outside world.

Libraries will evolve with new technology - as they must. However, I do believe there will always be a place for the printed page - especially in bed.

I must confess I am not a big library user anymore. I do love libraries and likewise, the opportunity to find a surprise package hidden in the shelves. When my kids were younger we would all toddle off to the library each week. The kids loved browsing through the shelves. There was also every Thursday storytelling time in the Children's Section.

Quiet spaces are important but there is no reason why a modern library or resource centre could not incorporate a quite area as well as more interactive 'spaces' that all contribute to learning.

("Spaces" - ugghh!)

I liked this article because it raised the issue for me of what exactly a library is. When we first looked for supporters for On Line Opinion some of our stops were some of the major libraries. We reasoned that while the publishing, retailing and archiving functions were separate in hard copy publishing there was no reason for this to be the case.

One way of conceptualising On Line Opinion is definitely as a library. There are many types of library, one of which is the sort of library Helen is talking about. But even before libraries became "resource centres" plenty of people, businesses and organisations had "libraries" that were more than book repositories and places to read books. I think Agatha Christie scripted a few denouements in the libraries of grand houses.

When Google has indexed every book and put it on the web we will have a modern Library of Alexandria (or perhap Timbuktu of which I had never heard before this article) that can never be burnt down by crazed misguided mobs, or at least one would think so.

Is a library a physical space, or the organisation that runs it. And with limited resources, where should they put their effort? Into bricks and mortar which Helen might find soothing, but which I suspect is intimidating to people who aren't well-educated, culturally European and well-off? Or into something else?

Why don't we take this opportunity to reconceptualise the idea of "library" and what it is supposed to achieve? Is there one type of library, or many libraries?

I hope libraries never ,ever become social centres unless a special place is set aside for such activities. Imagine trying to read books in a coffee house. What I would wish for in libraries is a different place for classics. I am rereading a lot of the old books, Dumas, Haggard, ect and I find them hard to locate.

It's been about 15 years since I have been able to study in a suburban library. Childrens' play days, mums' coffee afternoons , mobile phone users, book sales, and so on.Call them what you like, your local book repository is not a place for those who find quietness a prerequisite for serious work. And the number of books is dwindling....Try finding any of the Greek classics at your local or Shakeswho? Plenty of dvds of television series from a couple of years ago and a cafe with specials on banana cake this week only.And in case you missed Britney's latest.....I don't want to hear, I don't want to talk or eat or drink. Forget browsing.It's over. Know what you want, get it and go or stay and suffer the banalities of the essential social interaction of talking about yourself to others busy talking about themselves.

Our local library in Maroubra was once a great place to research material and information for all community members in a quite environment.
Now the place has been turned into a quasi child minding centre used by inconsiderate parents who let their children disrupt the majority of the library users.

Ha! OCM has hit the nail right on the head. There are 3 types of library users IMHO and two of them are perfectly adequately serviced by the modern library as sort of centre of varying "socialness". Serious academic research in 1970 was carried out deep in the recesses of a "library" where quiet reigned; in 2000 this function is largely carried out at home using photocopies and inter–library loans through, in my case, a very efficient and helpful library staff. Now that I am a gentleman of leisure I order books (contemporary fiction) from the local library online and find it a pleasant place to visit and to be. Now we come to OCM's problem. The serious "amateur" student has no access to the University library for materials and support and the local library is, as you say, no place for serious work on books which are not available anyway. I think that this no man's land that the serious amateur finds themselves in is a problem that does not seem to be recognised by anyone.