Comment by enra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by enra | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Finn but been living in SF for the last few years. Went to Oodi couple of weeks ago was impressed by the facilities and the building. In addition to books, there were workstations, 3D printers, large format printers, sewing machines, video games, board games, kids play area, restaurant, and a cafe. Our startup also worked there for one day. There is free Wifi, a lot of chairs and places to sit and even meeting rooms you can book. Noise levels are also quite low that you can read or work, much better than in a regular cafe even in the large open spaces. They have seemed to have worked a lot on the acoustics.

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...

> In addition to books, there were workstations, 3D printers, large format printers, sewing machines, video games, board games, kids play area, restaurant, and a cafe.

...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

The Omni in Oakland has all of this and more but is entirely owned and run by the member community:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zccga90hcY

Shame that government in the US does not invest in such resources for the community.

What if we gave the community of upstarts and creatives that run the Omni the same $100m budget of the Oodi library?

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.

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