To many observers, perhaps most, these contrasting aesthetics embody radically different visions of what a library is and does. These newer libraries are cast in a radically different formal language, one that speaks not of books, but of information: pellets of useable data, as smooth, precise, and indistinguishable as the computer screens themselves. The lofty atria are redolent not with the noble rot of ancient leather and buckram, but with the coffee and fresh baked goods on offer in their cafés, whose glitz has supplanted the seedy glamour of old-fashioned reading rooms. Gleaming banks of computers seem to be everywhere: books, not so much. In Seattle and Salt Lake City, glass curtain walls surround vast open spaces. Newer libraries, by contrast, scream their modernity. So, even more, do their contents: the endless rows of books, their spines appealingly faded but still colorful, which march down the equally endless Borgesian labyrinths of their stacks. Columns, pilasters, Gothic curlicues, and Roman triumphal arches reinforce the sense of solidity, history, allegiance to an older world. The names of dead white male authors, incised in stone, parade across their facades. Older libraries – the New York and Boston Public Libraries, Beinecke at Yale, Butler at Columbia, Widener at Harvard – and newer ones in the traditional style, like the Chicago Public Library and the new library of Rhodes College in Memphis, proclaim their allegiance to ancient cultural traditions. Behind the glorious facades, a strange kind of war is being waged: a war between styles of repository, reading, and research. Yet the styles of our great libraries vary radically, and meaningfully, and even the quickest look at the contrast reveals that they are more labile institutions than they seem.

The American model–easy to enter and simple to use, powered by vast resources and vaster ambitions – has played a major role in the current dominance around the world of English - language scholarship. Anyone who has done research in the greatest European libraries – libraries whose collections of manuscripts and rare books dwarf American ones – knows that not one of them offers an open-stack collection of books and periodicals from the last two centuries to rival the top ten or twelve university libraries in North America. General collections are in some ways even more amazing. The manuscripts of James Joyce? Shuffle off to Buffalo. Care for Tibetan religion? Your best bet is Bloomington, Indiana. Do you want to pore over incunabula? You can find thousands of them in the Northeast at Harvard’s multiple libraries in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress in the Southwest at the Huntington Library and dozens of points between. And the story told by the buildings is confirmed and enriched by their collections.Īmerican research libraries are the envy of the world: for complex historical reasons, our monoglot and often xenophobic society has created some of the biggest and most cosmopolitan collections of texts of every kind the world has ever known.

Every external clue suggests that they matter deeply, both to individuals and to institutions with deep pockets. They mount costly, splendid exhibitions of everything from ancient manuscripts to 1960s comic books. They inhabit spectacular buildings, old and new, which occupy prime real estate in cities and on campuses. Research libraries take up a vast amount of physical and psychic space.

Google stacks