In the past ten years we have been moving away from the concept of a library being a place where books are collected and held for the benefit of a particular community, to the idea of library as place and library as community technology center.

San Francisco's public library went through a controversial transition when it moved from its old location to its new building in 1996. Thousands of books were tossed out, and the old card catalog was dismantled and transformed into art which now decorates a few of the walls of the new library.

When you consider the number of patrons, the new concept of a library wins out: libraries have become much more popular and the number of users has grown.

I keep thinking about Arthur, a world war II fighter pilot, retired philosophy professor and writer, who told me his books had been thrown out of the SF Public library during this transition. It was clearly very painful for him to have the library in his own city essentially say that his ideas and work were no longer important...

Libraries started tossing out books before major digitalization programs were under way--I think about all the books that could be potentially caught in this gap--and lost.

An aquaintance told me today that when she wants the experience of a library, she visits the Mechanic's Library (a private library located in downtown San Francisco where the book still reigns) but she uses the public library for her research (mostly logging into their online databases using her library card number). 

We tend to assume that the more popular something is, the more of a success it is. Is this true?

Is a library a success because it attracts more users, or is a library a success because it holds the information and history which is important to a particular place and makes it available to users?