Posts I have this thing I say when people get worried about opening up our sites to our users to help create content:
If your library is like mine, you allow bottled water the building. There is nothing to stop users from deliberately upending the whole bottle all over a PC and destroying it. But they don’t.”
I wonder about the “nothing to stop them” bit. Maybe the best security is other users of the facility – engaged and passionate users – who would quickly tackle the delinquent water pourer. There is a lot of literature around new ways that rail stations are being protected - create a beautiful art space where people come to do other things and take pride in the place created. In these cases security becomes self-regulated. This is what seems to be happening at the State Library of Queensland.
Walking past the cafe on the ground floor, I noticed that the chairs seemed too big to drag through the door at night. I asked a staff member and she said that they leave them out after the cafe closes. There are always people around 24/7 using the free wireless. In fact, the backpackers’ tourist buses make stops here so passengers can get off to contact home. There is no evidence of graffiti either - although the concrete walls, which remind me of what you might see in an isolated abandoned factory, seem to be screaming for user based tagging of a different kind.
We’ve reverted to a water only policy recently, purely because of the number of Coke and coffee stains that have appeared since we relaxed the rules. If you accidentally spill water on the carpet, it’s no problem at all, but you can’t say the same for Ribenna or Vimto!
By the way — our library is rapidly becoming a “library without walls”. When I got into work yesterday, the entire entrance facade to the library (including two pairs of sliding doors) had been ripped out as part of the ongoing refurbishment. I’ll try and remember to take my camera to work tomorrow to prove it!
Hey Dave. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. Here’s a link to what our library looked like before, during and after our Learning Common was built.