Scott Sherman (3)Recensioni

First rate: a lively, stylish and thorough conspectus of the events that almost turned the beloved New York Public Library on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, one of the world's great research libraries, into an internet cafe. Highly recommended.

A fast moving book. I wish there had been more about what was happening to the staff of NYPL, and a bit less about the battle over architecture. As a librarian, I want to sympathize completely with the author, but the realities are that print books in libraries just aren't seeing the use they used to get. I don't feel the author addressed that adequately.½

how some rich dudes tried to ruin The Library, and how members of the public said oh hell no. Well-researched and a reasonable suggestion of how to approach the can of worms that is digital information. I seem to have missed most of the drama coverage of the threatened NYPL remodel but I felt like Sherman covered the timeline very well. If you too had library blinders on from 2013-15, this book's for you! Not a totally balanced look at the situation, and left me curious about what really was going on behind the trustees and investors closed doors. But if you're going to attempt a radical stripping of a *public* library with no public hearings, well, can you expect to have fair and unbiased coverage of the events??

The conclusions drawn by the author and the groups supporting the NYPL imply that we should wait and see what happens with ebooks and digital rights before sending entire historic research collections to NEW JERSEY and maybe losing half of them in the process. Sherman and NYPL supporters also concur that libraries and other cultural institutions "shouldn't aspire to be bleeding edge," and success of such institutions can't be based on metrics. Rather, success for libraries is intangible and hard to quantify and revolves mostly around quality of collections and levels of public trust.

There are ways to use new media tools, maintain existing collections, and still build fantastic digital collections while enabling totally free access to information to any citizen. That's what libraries exist for. Not to race Google to the end of the internet.

Interesting inside look at the fight over the future of the New York Public Library and it's future. Interesting to see how things panned out and how an idea that was well thought out at the time could fall victim to interests and changing concepts of the trust. Much of it resonated with some of the debates going on where I work too.

Much of this was progress for progress' sake rather than actual upgrading a system to make it good. There was also a lot of neglect over time that lead to the need for some drastic renovations and sales of some sites to help pay for them. A situation where an essentially private company runs a public service and the public have little say when it's being changed. A warning for privitasation of libraries and other public services!

An important account of a critical moment in the history of one of our nation's most significant libraries. While all sides acted for the best of motives, the difference of opinions concerning the future of libraries created an unsustainable tension. The directors envisioned "a library that was, to a considerable extent, discarding its research function and transforming itself into a quasi-populist institution propelled by metrics and overseen by ill-defined, highly paid 'strategists'," wishing to be "hip" in an age "when many public libraries have prioritized spaces for community engagement and coffee shops over books and bookshelves." Their efforts to make the NYPL more "popular" would in fact make it less meaningful in the lives of its patrons: "The renovation is elitism garbed in populist rhetoric.... Leave the heavy lifting to the folks at Harvard and McKinsey (and the quants in our commodities division), the financiers are saying; the rest of you, there will be lovely sun-filled spots to check your email."

Although the full plan was blocked, over three million books were removed from the central stacks to distant off-site shelving. The research function was permanently crippled, and the stage remains set for a resumption of the plan at a future moment. The broad lesson is that libraries should not be entrusted to business experts, no matter how well intentioned, but to librarians. They make mistakes, but one can hope they better understand that libraries are not measured by commercial metrics and popular fads.