EX LIBRIS: why books and libraries matter
BY Andrew Woodhouse
Book is not just a four-letter word. Books do matter. When the City of Sydney Council’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, opened the new multi-million dollar library in the heritage-listed former Woolworth’s building in Kings Cross in 2004 hopes were raised.
After all, our previous library with its leafy, rainforest outlook in Fitzroy Gardens had been bulldozed by the former council for new developers’ apartments. It then shifted into a former tattoo shop, squinched between the Risqué Boutique and the Adult bookshop, hardly a literati line-up. The new 2004 library promised twenty-first century facilities. It didn’t deliver. Top shelves are too high to reach, none have Dewey reference numbers: readers struggle to find books. The Local History collection only provides half a desk to study a book.
Meanwhile, level 2 has inadequate surveillance, backpackers and vagrants snore and snooze away the daylight hours with their grubby boots and lunch scraps left on lounges as drug deals are organised behind shifting opaque curtains. Computers are unreliable. Complaints are fed into council’s black hole of concerns while over-promised upgrades have not materialised, after 12 long years. The security system is so flawed it does not alarm all books: the real level of thefts is unknown.
Our library is dysfunctional.
Unlike the gloriously-well-planned, glossy, glassy new Woollahra Council library where staff patrol with iPads to actively assist customers find books: no more waiting at the front desk.
“The Woollahra example is better than any five-star luxury hotel for service,” says one local, who has managed such premises.
Now, borrowing books at KX will be self-service if Clover Moore has her way, using the supermarket-style unsupervised swipe-and-go system. Staff become redundant and costs cut; collateral damage. Supermarkets, however, report increased thefts as people take home items unswiped.
And now Clover Moore wants eBooks , a book you borrow when you don’t borrow a book. You receive it in tiny print on your computer instead, or you can buy a Prime-X P870DM2-G Intel i7 67000 Quad Core laptop for $3,999-00 instead. Excludes battery and softwear.
Currently, booktopia.com.au has five million eBooks for $6-95. But consulting Dr Johnson’s magisterial 1755 English Dictionary, embraced by its beautiful, burgundy, tooled Moroccan leather and gold binding or Loudon’s classic on landscape design won’t happen.
What we are being handed down is not a library but empty shelves and cost-cutting e-choices. The joy of holding a book is snatched from our palms.
But are libraries really useful in the digital age of the internet? Yes, and the sheer tactile joy of a good book is back in fashion. Physical book sales have risen in the UK for the first time in four years.
It’s true, Google ™ can bring you back 100,000 answers. But a Librarian can bring you back the right one demonstrating professional skills at work.
As Thomas Carlyle said: “In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.” Let’s keep the dream alive.
Now, an aggrieved group of local pub and clubs owners thinks the state government owes them payback since life-saving lockout laws have reduced their nefarious businesses. It wants all height, design excellence, heritage and floor space ration (FSR) planning laws scrapped – just for them, of course.
They forget that the two, ‘mile-high’ towers proposed will mean demolition of half of Kings Cross, the Injecting Centre and council’s own heritage Art Déco Library.
Our library is under threat from developers again.
However, neither the state government nor council has offered their support. All this speculation and hallucination does not enjoy a groundswell of community support. It is a totally tendentious and selfish form of business welfare.
And perhaps it won’t happen if the NSW Land and Environment Court has a say. This week it slam-dunked a DA for the aptly-named Mad Monkey backpackers’ hostel. They proposed the hostel’s unauthorised use of its top floor, zoned as a boarding house, be legitimised. Their ”amended” DA was found not to be substantially the same as the original 1998 DA, now 18 years old! Council’s archive files had mould growing on them. The court rejected the appeal to increase capacity from 56 to 82 beds. It wasn’t substantially the same as the original, a crucial legal point. And it agreed with locals. Our heritage group lodged evidence in court of drug-taking and noisy street parties. Council objected to Building Code of Australia and fire regulation breaches for this potential death trap. “Appeal dismissed” rang out around the area like a full peal of bells announcing a Royal Birth. Justice at work.
Andrew Woodhouse is President, Potts Point & Kings Cross Heritage & Residents’ Society
