Dear Students and Friends of VISA,
I love libraries. A Saturday trip to the public library was part of my childhood routine. I grew up in an industrial town near Montreal (Ville LaSalle) and the library was in a strip mall on top of a bowling alley. Once inside the library, thoughts of the nearby Seagrams and General Foods factories, trees with blackened trunks and strip malls disappeared. My mother had a passion for books and reading and to supplement our library-on-top-of-bowling-alley experience, she would buy an annual 'out-of-town' family membership to Westmount Library (Westmount is an affluent city adjacent to downtown Montreal). Westmount Library is in a beautiful historic building in a picturesque urban park with ponds and waterfalls. This was a far cry from the Ville LaSalle library! Trips to Westmount Library would be simliar to a pilgramage to a far away land. We would pack a lunch and take the bus for a day-long adventure. After choosing our books, we would linger in the park for hours reading our nearly acquired library books. We felt incredibly rich.
I think libraries should be the most prominent building in a city. They are wonderful places to daydream, to be solitary, and to be part of a like-minded group of people who like to read. My favourite thing to do in a library is to shelf browse and see what titles might pop out at me. I think I have come to appreciate this experience even more now with the truly infinite resources available to us at any hour of the day or night via our computers. I like the finiteness of a libraries' collection. My latest UVic library shelf browse finds include: Where the Heart Beats (a new biography of John Cage), Inside the Studio: Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York and Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times. Not sure how I would have discovered these books in any other way than random shelf browsing. (So great to have unlimited access to the UVic Library for a one-time only $15 alumni fee!).
I enjoyed reading Michael Kimmelman's extensive article in the New York Times about the upcoming renovations to New York Public Library. I so much appreciate that New Yorkers feel so strongly about their public library (you can get this from the article and all the follow-up comments). I wish the planning for the Victoria Public Library had the same level of input at the design stage; I will never understand why the main public library in Victoria was designed to be hidden from public view and from access to natural light.
Here is an interesting website called Library as Incubator Project that focuses on the idea of libraries being a creative hub for visual art and performing arts. My favourite libraries are the Vancouver Public Library because of its monumental entranceway and the Seattle Public LIbrary (see below) because it is so interesting to walk around inside (the floors incline to correspond with the incline in dewy decimal numbers. Both these libraries excel as beautiful visual designs and as monumental structures in the city landscape.
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