Helsinki Central Library chosen as the best new public library
oodihelsinki.fi
oodihelsinki.fi
There are also books you can read, borrow and return. The book selection seemed more recent/popular, not a lot of old books (still it has 100k books). To those that comment on the how little books there are: There are several other libraries in Helsinki that house old and vast amounts of books. Helsinki has nearly 40 public libraries and numerous scholarly libraries: https://www.myhelsinki.fi/en/see-and-do/sights/helsinki%E2%8...
Overall it feels like a great place for people to go outside of their home or office to read, meet with people, take their kids to, and for free.
I uploaded a few mobile photos and videos if anyone is interested: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/z7ez8rhisktpaac/AAD7xd6xsCESP6LhJ...
...these things are tremendous sunk costs that will need to be constantly paid for if they are to be useful.
You need to train staff how to use, service, and do light maintenance on the 3-D printers. You need to dedicate staff to supervise people using them and answer questions, as well as ensure patrons aren't using them incorrectly or monopolizing them. You need to have service contracts to maintain them periodically, and given constant or standard innovation, you may have to replace them every ten years or less entirely.
If you pick poorly, you may not be able to use them effectively at all.
These things are not sustainable long term. You're going to end up slowly paring all of the fancy tech related stuff as it breaks down and becomes obsolete, because budgets simply can't afford them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zccga90hcY
Shame that government in the US does not invest in such resources for the community.
I've been to the Omni space where Counter Culture Labs is - and while it's cool that it is completely organic and has a great supportive and local feel, it also really feels cobbled together and limited.
At least with lots of tool libraries popping up around the US, there's volunteers who just hang out and get involved with projects that people bring in.
Imagine if that was the new kind of 'librarian' job - coder, fabricator, artist, designer, community oral historian, and archivist.
$100 million is an extremely good deal for what they got, and they say that includes the equipment? I don’t quite believe they built it for that little.
My town (population ~15,000) wanted to build a new library last year — it was voted down as unnecessary — at a cost of almost ~$30 million for a two story 30,000 sq. ft building.
Oodi’s 185,000 square feet is an exquisite leisure center, and with up to 20,000 visitors a day sounds like a fantastic investment for Helsinki.
My town (~10'000) has a library, 3 schools, a big outdoor public swimming pool that can be used as well during wintertimes (gets covered by a roof) + another small swimming pool in one of the schools, a modern art museum, an ice rink, an athletics & football stadium, 3 indoor gyms (a big public one for national competitions + 2 small ones usually used by the schools), a parkour track in the woods, a theatre, a cinema, (maybe I've forgotten something) => it was absolutely no problem building them, but the $ needed for the maintenance&depreciation of the structures and the salaries of the employees was underestimated => now that the town is not anymore in the "big boom"-phase we have a huge budget problem (I'd like to get rid first of the modern art museum but apparently the opposition is very strong and well-connected).
But it was considerably more than $100 million (I think around $125), so kudos to the Finns for such a great job.
Oodi is more of a living meeting place for people where you can play board games, video games, make art, 3D prints, music and such. It might be dubbed as a library to ensure that its visitors have a vague understanding of the place i.e. it's free to use all the services and open to anyone.
[1] "A library is a curated collection of sources of information and similar resources.." as per Wikipedea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library
Ask any librarian today and they'll say that's what a library is now. Or at least that's probably what they want their library to be now. This probably only goes for public librarians.
But the law that governs public libraries actually gives libraries quite wide mission.
Quick automatic translation from the finnish version. Not perfect, but you get the point.
”The purpose of this Act is to promote:
1) equal opportunities for education and culture for the population;
2) access to and use of information;
3) reading culture and diverse literacy;
4) opportunities for lifelong learning and skills development;
5) active citizenship, democracy and freedom of expression.”
Regular libraries with more books in general tend to have a similar "hit rate" for me. If you are in Helsinki and want to visit a nice more classical library, Kallion kirjasto and Töölön kirjasto are easily accessible by tram or electric scooter. Kallio is old and nice and Töölö is by Alvar Aalto.
I mean, it’s an interesting building, and a nice place for a cup of coffee, but it’s absolutely useless if you want to go and browse some shelves and borrow some books; it’s like it’s been actively designed to make that hard to do.
I’ve visited Oodi a lot more than traditional libraries as I already have the need for books satiated with Kindle and such.
It's important to not let our personal nostalgia for the past hold back the next generation from getting the resources they need from local government.
This is clearly a well-thought evolution of what a library of the future should be.
I don't do a lot of research (that a library is useful for) these days and what there is is mostly in journals and the like. But, in general, I find that with electronic searches of library catalogs it's probably less important to discover things accidentally by physical proximity. (And a lot of big libraries aren't/weren't open stacks anyway.)
Maybe that changes in the future, which just means that the world has changed. Institutions need to adapt to the needs of each generation.
Luckily Finnish public libraries have relatively good sites for reserving books online — maybe I should get into the habit of using the online reservations.
One of ours locally has a tool library and 3D printing, which I think is awesome. Performance spaces for poetry, music, etc.
On the surface it fits the bill for all the modern awards it’s bound to get and it fits the narrative that libraries are for public space rather than renting books, but spend some time there. It’s not practical to get books from as there are hardly any books, it’s not practical to study as there is only one tiny reading room.
I urge anyone reading this article to spend more than 15m wandering around in there.
But I've been 2-3 times and I never found a book. It's like the books are all deliberately hidden, it's infuriating.
The Mid-Manhattan branch is a HUGE circulation library. It's across the street from the main library but confusingly enough - it's in the middle of being renovated so, for now, its colocated in the basement of the main library and a subset of its collection is available. It is _very_ browsable.
Libraries cannot survive by catering to a smaller and smaller subset of people who are habituated to using a mostly obsolete technology. On a cost-per-loan basis, most libraries would save money by closing their doors forever and simply buying books from Amazon whenever someone asks for one. Local governments look at the lending data and quite rightly wonder whether the money could be better spent on a thousand other things.
To secure their future, libraries are becoming a sort of egalitarian third space. They provide internet access for people who don't have it and training for people who have been left behind by technology. They provide a place to relax and socialise for people who can't afford a $4 coffee. They provide a venue for community events. They provide young people with opportunities to engage in the kind of self-guided learning that actually matters today.
Turns out I wasn't the only one thinking this: https://www.seattlepi.com/ae/article/On-Architecture-How-the...
What’s with the recent trend of libraries and coffee shops that look like modern art museums (cold, bright, lack of wood, metal, sharp acoustics..)? I can’t be the only one who notices this.