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Comment by tapland | Hacker News Reader

Locally (Stockholm, Sweden) the head of the city libraries has made a statement of battling the 'quietness norm' in libraries. Most of them now have playgrounds, one in Kista (where I happened to live at the time) won awards for best library in the world and in Sweden the same year.

It was completely unusable for what me and my fiance usually do at the library. The study rooms had the ventilation system for the building running through them with a loud dull noise making going back out to the playground-ridden small library with build int coffee-shop feel like putting on active noise supressing headphones. And the playground + café + it being placed in a mall (as opposed to across the street in the municipality building like it used to be) made reading or browsing a hard task.

My fiance who has ASD really has no public space available at all in this city anymore and we are moving to another city where we know of accessible quieter places, including parks and libraries without built-in noise generators.

./rant

Carpeting here is extremely rare. Scandinavian minimalism everywhere. The article helps me understand why the local chinese restaurang, with carpeting, tablecloth and padded chairs, is so nice to stay at.

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I don't think it's just Scandinavian minimalism. You want hard floors when you know there will be snow and rain for a large part of the year. It would be impossible to keep things clean otherwise. Just look to Svalbard where you take of your shoes even when going to a bar.

I'm a big fan of the making-libraries-loud (loud as in happy) movement, but I'm usually bringing my kids to browse the shelves and pick books to bring home, not to actually spend time there reading them. In my experience kids find quiet libraries intimidating. (Which is at odds with my own preferences, I should add, but I prioritize the kids.)

What the libraries need is a quiet reading room, rather like the trains have added quiet carriages.

I don't know which libraries you are meaning, but it sounds like their study rooms are broken, rather than the whole concept is broken.

So, lets fix the study rooms! :)

Libraries are not playgrounds.

This idea that the primary functional purpose of an important space should be some kind of afterthought is rather depressing, but I guess is follows from the entertainment-centric culture we live in. The purpose of a library is to read, not to entertain your kids.

Libraries are repositories of books for people to take away. The idea that they need to provide office space for people who could just as well read at home is stupid.

Good luck taking a Gutenberg bible or a Shakespeare first folio away to read quietly at home.

Comparing a city library with an extremely specialized institution which holds a Gutenberg bible or a Shakespeare first folio is ridiculous. These are separate institutions which only share the name library.

Yeah that's kind of the problem with this entire discussion. People are discussing entirely different sorts of libraries.

Well, no. People are trying to draw a functional distinction between two types of libraries that isn't really there.

First, old-fashioned academic libraries existed; later, public lending libraries existed, but only because various people noticed that the existence of academic libraries was a good thing thing that should be more widely accessible to people outside academia and/or religious institutions. At no point has the purpose of public lending libraries been to provide the community centre and entertainment resource that some people want them to be.

Except for now.

   At no point has the purpose of public lending libraries been to provide the community centre

I'm in my 40s and here in the United States, in my lifetime libraries have always doubled as community spaces: hosting events like readings, book clubs, art classes, and so on.

Of course, they have not traditionally been free-use community spaces in the sense of "hey, come to the library and drop your kids off so they can run around and play" or anything like that. But I don't think anybody's asking for that, either.

Judging by your spelling of "centre," perhaps you're not in the U.S. and therefore have a different experience and perspective.

Then take it to the quiet study rooms that my comment you are replying to suggests we fix! ;)

Not exactly popping over to leaf through those with my kids, tbh.

Sure because most community public libraries have those just laying around for any member of the public to read whenever they want.

This is such a straw man. Unless you have an actual academic need for an actual Shakespeare first folio, you can read that text without needing an original printing. If you have such a need, the Palo Alto Public Library isn’t likely to have a it there for the asking.

Academic libraries at universities have their purpose, but your local public library isn’t going to typically be used by Shakespeare scholars.

Reading restricted collection books is a pretty low percentage of why people visit libraries. Reading ultra rare, priceless books is almost non-existent as a percentage of library visits.

Libraries find their roots in academic institutions, a context in which they are absolutely intended to be a place of study, not just a repository of books.

Well, apologies if I think kids being encouraged to go to libraries is more important than grown ups who can go _anywhere_ refusing to finding somewhere to read.

What kids should be encouraged to do is not merely attend a library as if simply being there is an end in itself, but to learn to appreciate and enjoy quiet, reflective learning.

I think the above comment gets to the heart of the problem with the "community libraries should be fun" argument.

I agree, children should be taught this. When I was a kid, the sanctity of quiet of the library was absolute. It was a special place. In a world where there's a screen literally everywhere you go, we should value the last quiet place rather than destroy it.

Upvoted.

This is precisely what I have been thinking while reading all these comments, but unable to express so succintly.

My 4 and 7 year olds do, my 10 month old doesn't, and I'd still like to be able to go to the library (and yay, I can, because we have nice libraries here that aren't full of aggressively shushy weirdos). Plus _I_ want to be able to talk in a library, about what books we want, about what words mean, about chess moves, whatever. It's just wrong to exclude people from a space because you want a free, quiet office, and I'm glad that more and more libraries agree.

you know what else is stupid? to assume everyone has a quiet home they can read in.

The idea that they need to provide space for activities other than quiet reading is even more odd.

Kids that grow up associating libraries with fun are much more likely to want to visit them after they learn to read. Libraries are closing down because they don't have any readers.

I don't go to libraries anymore because I can get any book I want for 3-4 Euros shipped to my door.

That's true, assuming you want a relatively small subset of all books. Once you want something recent, or obscure, or a current textbook, you usually can't find it for anywhere near that amount, if you can find it for sale at all.

I hope you can appreciate how fortunate you are.

Though 4 Euros ($4.50) is less than half what I pay for most books I want on Amazon.

It would be very expensive for me to feed my book-reading habit like that. I couldn't afford it without libraries.

It's nice that you can afford to spend money on books, but we need a solution for everyone else, especially if we agree that books are a good thing for society.

Recently there was that op-ed in Forbes that said we don't need libraries because we have Amazon: https://qz.com/1334123/forbes-deleted-an-op-ed-arguing-that-... -- Was such a disaster that Forbes limped away from it by deleting it.

Of course there are people who need libraries and I support funding them even if they're mostly empty. But I think a sizeable fraction of the people who used to go to libraries but don't do so anymore are like me and just buy the books they want to read used rather than go to the library.

is this a joke? the last thing most young adults like is to be surrounded by screaming children. The louder you make libraries the less people will ever want to go there.

I don't see where the comment above yours said anything about inviting screaming children into libraries. Screaming kids in most situations is frustrating and can be off-putting. Libraries should have similar social norms as anywhere else.

That's why you have a children's section.

I don't remember any of the kids running wild in the libraries visiting them as adults.

We who didn't have a problem being quiet and going there to either read quietly or to bring books home, going there for the books, seem to be much more likely to actually visit as adults. Is there any evidence to suggest people who use libraries as playgrounds are more likely to use them as adults? Because if there isn't we are removing one of extremely few quiet places for no gain. I remember going to the library or staying after school to be able to read my Asimov and Douglas Adams, which would have been hard at home. If people who have quiet homes came there to let their children off to play I would be less likely to go there, just like I'm less likely to go there now when that is happening.

Libraries are becoming irrelevant culturally. Turing libraries into playgrounds in an attempt to stay relevant just turns the library into something new. It's like trying to trick people into reading or something, I don't think it's going to work.

The new model may be valid, but maybe we should just close the libraries altogether and start calling them "Community Centers".

The purpose of libraries has been completely ousted by the internet. It is no longer a place that makes vast knowledge attainable to the average person, that's the internet now.

You can either have no libraries at all or libraries that cater to a different purpose, one that they can offer better then your phone.

Except sometimes you want or require a physical book... not all books on the internet are available freely, legally. Also, libraries offer free access to the internet, computers, printers, etc, which (believe it or not) not everyone can afford.

If it were true that the purpose of public libraries had been superseded by the internet then no one would be using public libraries, and they would all have closed by now due to lack of funding or public interest. That public libraries continue to exist, and that people continue to use them, suggests otherwise.

The idea behind libraries is that a minimum of knowledge should be accessible to everyone.

For what it's worth, there's still a lot of information you can acquire legally and for free from a library that you can't get both legally and for free from the internet.

Unless of course you're looking for information on some niche thing that nobody was talking much about after ~2000 or so.

Quality and depth of information in a good library, at least for many subjects, is much greater than what you'll find for free on the internet.

If children grow up associating libraries with a place that is not fun, support for libraries will die after that generation.

The Berlin city libraries absolutely have spaces for children to play (loudly) and also make point of events with readings for children, and so on. A generation will grow up associating libraries as part of their life.

Libraries aren't supposed to be "fun".

I feel like this is a very negative way to view the situation. Libraries should totally be "fun". It should be "fun" to go and find a book that you enjoy or just spend time reading in an area dedicated to the love of books. It shouldn't be a place to just drop the kids off and leave, but it should be a place kids want to go. Reading can be fun and I almost feel like it is a "trendy thing" of my generation (Millennial) to hate it.

Where have you seen the reading hate trend?

Go around and ask any people, younger people the better, what the last three books they've read are.

Watch them struggle.

Not reading is one thing, hating books to be trendy is another.

The most popular selection on FB in the West for favorite books literally seems to be "I don't read lol".

I should have made it more clear that it was in my own personal experience. Many of the kids from my highschool or even as late as the people I am still in contact with from college. Many are astonished I own a bookshelf full of books and actually read from it. I am pretty sure there is no real relation here, but I would like to compare it to how the same set of people feel about math. They have an assumption that it is boring and not fun so they actively avoid it.

God that's awful. Where are you from?

I don't know if it's necessarily "hate" per-se, but go read one or more forums on something like Reddit.

Depending on the forum, and the size of the comments, you'll sometimes see something like:

TL;DR

"too long; didn't read"

In some cases, you'll see a post where there will be a "TL;DR" section summarizing the "long form" version just below it.

The funny thing is, the "long form" might only be a paragraph or two, but apparently for a certain segment of the population who read forums, even that much information is "TL;DR" worthy.

These people don't want to read anything that won't fit inside a tweet. I'd dare say that for some, even 280 characters is just too much text to digest.

It leaves no room for thoughtful discourse. It leaves no room for intelligent debate and conversation.

I see such brush-offs of conversation online, and couple it with what I have heard of some people who eschew being alone; who need noise (particularly people around them talking with each other) so that they don't have to listen to their own thoughts - and it makes me shudder to think to what end our society will arrive at.

In a way, we are already witnessing its decline.

You can blame how reading is taught in schools.

There is nothing that will suck the enjoyment out of a story faster than a high-school curriculum.

Libraries are supposed to be whatever the fuck we want them to be.

> Libraries are supposed to be whatever the fuck we want them to be.

No, libraries serve a specific purpose. You can want them to be banks, or restaurants, or laundromats or whatever, but that doesn't make them anything but libraries. And besides, everyone else wants libraries to be libraries, so you've been outvoted in that regard.

I don’t know about everone. The Carnegie Library here in DC is now an Apple store. Our local library is turning more into a community center, while many others are a place for the homeless to hang out.

And that is why libraries are closing.

I grew up thinking libraries were not fun. I am an adult. I support them.

I grew up thinking they were a place for thoughtful reading and writing, scholarship.

And that when a society devalues scholarship, it's on its way to the condition of, say, Venezuela.

Well gee, libraries weren't "fun" when I was a kid, and they were my favorite place to go because I learned the value of reading at an early age. It seems like we ought to be selling children on reading, not on fun. Doing fun activities at what used to be a library is not going to magically make children interested in reading and acquiring knowledge.

I believe the trend of changing libraries from ‘places to read’ to ‘mutli-purpose community hubs’ is a great one. I’m not sure, but I believe its happening all over Scandinavia.. and for what it’s worth I hope its also going to start happen in The Netherlands.

Right now libraries are dying. In my city, 80% of public library use is high school kids or university kids (overflow from the busy university library) studying there during peak exam times, outside of that its extremely underutilised. And for my hometown its even worse, even 15 years ago there would maybe be a handful of people there at a time, in a building that could easily fit 30-50 people.

Turning those libraries not only into a book repository but also as a place to drop your kid to play with other kids while you read, to study (think study rooms with outlets for laptops), to grab a coffee, attend a reading, etc. to me is an amazing initiative.

And there is synergy as well: you can go grab a coffee with your friend whilst your kids play, maybe browse for a new sci-fi book - and hey there is a reading which you can attend whilst your kid is preoccupied and the reading doesn’t feel dead because some other visitors and students are also attending and even if you get thirsty you can grab a tea :)

This whole wall of text might seem a little rantlike but I truly do love libraries (my mom used to take me) and seeing them reinvigorated like that is very cool.

My mom is a children's librarian and in my experience the point of a library is to help kids and to get them to like reading, neither of which is silent. Reading to kids, teaching them, and helping them pick books are all primary parts of a library and none of them are silent. You can have specific sections set aside to be quiet as libraries should adapt to the communities they serve but saying that the purpose of a library is to read is taking an incredibly narrow view of libraries.

Libraries of the old world are a dying thing. People simply don't want to go there anymore.

Transforming libraries to something children associate with fun, where young people can study together in groups and where culture events happen - is what should be done. Make libraries a bastion of culture and community. And that is not incompatible with a place where you can sit in peace, it's just not everywhere.

Actually the primary purpose of a library is to be a repository of books, not a reading room. Just like the primary purpose of a bookstore is to sell books, a library is a place to check out books.

Besides libraries should change! Who the heck goes to a library to look at encyclopedias to write papers anymore? If you are doing academic research, go to an academic library — a place where you’ll find few kids. But a community library? That should be a place where everyone is welcome and excited about books, not a coworking space for old curmudgeons. If you want a perfectly silent reading environment — go to your home.

> That should be a place where everyone is welcome and excited about books...

But to get excited about a book you have to be immersed in it, and that requires reading it and really focusing on the subject matter.

If people are talking all the time, they're not reading books, and others aren't able to enjoy their books.

> ... not a coworking space for old curmudgeons.

Old curmudgeons aren't part of "everyone"?

Is the set of people who can only enjoy, or even read, books in silence pretty large? There is certainly a threshold of noise where I lose reading comprehension, but it's quite loud.

Do other people need silence, like absolute silence, to read?

Before I worked for myself, I never worked in any office that remotely came near to silence. Most were roughly the equivalent of moderately loud cafes, at least.

>The purpose of a library is to read, not to entertain your kids.

Libraries are just repositories for literary or artistic works. They have a secondary function of acting as a "third space" or community center. Being able to find places to read is part of that, but there is no reason you should expect them to be tranquil zen gardens at all times. Most people should be able to tune out the general background noise of kids playing or whatever. It's really just loud conversations that cause problems.

Hell, most public libraries in my town are basically just de facto homeless shelters.

The purpose of a public library (at least in the US) is to provide services to the public. A large part of the public, especially who aren't otherwise occupied during the day, are young children.

Most libraries I've been to have a large section dedicated to kids books and activities, often with stuff animals, blocks, etc that kids can use for creative play.

There are usually also rooms that you can reserve for work or study, and tables out in the open that people can sit at to read or work.

Kids are loud and energetic. Usually older people enjoy the vitality they bring to a space. The main age group bothered by them are 20 and 30 somethings who don't have kids and aren't used to being around them.

When I was young what I liked about libraries was that they where quiet places. It's a terrible idea to make libraries loud.

Or, let's create some kind of public space that is not an isolated study room so that people can leave their homes but still enjoy a calm and quiet place?

But then your kids won't want to go there in the future, because all kids grow up to become adults who want loud places for their kids to grow up to visit loud places...

The main problem we experience is a complete lack of quiet places, and since you don't want any, and that seems to be a majority opinion, we won't have any.

> and that seems to be a majority opinion, we won't have any.

Is the majority really in favor of being loud? I personally believe that it is in fact a minority - just a loud minority. People who enjoy silence are also usually less vocal about their interests - sadly. Because from a public health perspective it's the loud people who can learn something from those enjoying silence.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of spaces that feature both "noisy" public spaces as well as quieter private spaces. I worked at an offie with such an arrangement and it was quite nice.

There's really no reason why there can't be both, especially a library.

In fact a lot of libraries do exactly this, don't they?

Typical library arrangement, at least here in America:

- Center of library has long tables with multiple seats; can be used for group interaction - Sides of library have all the bookshelves - Between the bookshelves and the outer wall there are more private desks. It's naturally quite quiet here because even if the central "public" area is noisy, you have all the bookshelves between you and the central area

In camabridge ma the newish library (less than 10 years old) has a designated “quiet” study room. I haven’t been inside but I’m assuming it’s like the quiet train cars, where loud talking is frowned upon.

I know growing up the one library had a perfect arrangement the first floor was children's and looser in sound rules allowing for stuff like reading out loud and talking while the second up were serious quiet normed areas with a broader selection. Owing to the construction it was silent except for footsteps in the stairwells when the doors were closed.

>I'm a big fan of the making-libraries-loud (loud as in happy) movement, but I'm usually bringing my kids

This is so different to me, it's ridiculous. Loud is not happy. Loud is not sad. Loud is just loud. I'm not going to a loud library. If your kids can't be quiet, then keep them out please.

Probably there should be libraries for children that are louder, but that's a different conversation.

When I go on bushwalks there are teenagers with their damned bluetooth speakers. Every business blares their horrible music at you to get you out of there faster. Workplaces want insanely distracting open-plan offices.

Can we not have one quiet place?

I'm totally with you here. I sometimes feel like living in a tyranny of the squallers. In a room with 100 people it takes 100 people to create silence and just one to destroy that. It's so sad.

>tyranny of the squallers. In a room with 100 people it takes 100 people to create silence and just one to destroy that.

I've never thought about it like that but it's so true. Loudest one wins every time.

Also I just learned a new word, "squaller".

Pro tip (for people in London at least): Senate House library in London rents out private Study Carrels to its members. These are located in the reading rooms (which are usually very quiet) and have their own walls and a door you can close. I loved them and did some fantastic focused work there (although others found them claustrophobic...)

https://www.senatehouselibrary.ac.uk/using-the-library/inter...

There is a very simple solution to this problem. Build more libraries or bigger libraries.

A terrific example is the Jefferson Library in lower Manhattan. It is technically a children's library to the point where it's nearly impossible to find bathrooms that are adult accessible without children.

It is also possibly the best quiet library in the city because the upper levels of the space are adult only and nearly pin drop silent. You can absolutely have both.

Oh. If there is one thing we are not lacking it's libraries.

Actively fighting to make them all louder is what's causing it here, not a lack of libraries.

The architectural style and decorations are part of the problem as the article says. An equally big one though is, as you say, the apparent need to have blaring music, TVs, etc. just about every place.

I was just at an event a month or so ago that had a DJ in the exhibit hall blasting music at a volume that was actively preventing people from having easy conversations. Which is sort of the purpose of being there. Not listening to some DJ who apparently has to work corporate events to pay the rent but nonetheless thinks people are there to listen to him.

After complaining to the organizers, they turned things down a bit but this is a pervasive problem. Even when I'm eating by myself, I still find the music in some restaurants both annoyingly loud and not what I would consider pleasant background music for a meal.

>Even when I'm eating by myself, I still find the music in some restaurants both annoyingly loud and not what I would consider pleasant background music for a meal.

This is by design to get you out of there quickly to free a spot for another paying customer.

I vote with my wallet and suggest you do too.

If a restaurant has music I don't like, which seems to be a trend nowadays, I get the message that they don't want me to be there and leave immediately.

This is blowing my mind. Why would you want to change the "quietness norm" at libraries??

No local university building with some public access or similar?

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