Please Call Me a Luddite: Why I Still Can’t Love the CLP

For me a trip to the Main Brach of the New York Public Library begins with a frantic search through my backpack for blank white and yellow call slips.  As the six train rattles south I lean up against the doors and quickly recopy the author, title, year and call number from one used call slip to a new one.  As the doors open I quickly walk out onto 42nd street.  I weave through tourists before bounding up the worn marble steps between the two marvelous lions that mark this building as one of importance.  Still clutching my call slips I run up two sets of stairs to the Rose Main Reading Room where I file my call slips.  The attendant rips off the top white page—it is scanned and sent to an attendant who will pick out my book from the seven stories of books before me—and hands me back my yellow slip with a number written that will appear on a screen when my volume is ready for pick up.
	At this point I can finally slow down and catch my breath.  The mad dash to file my slip as quickly as possible has ended and I can admire my surroundings.  It is far from the first time I’ve been to the library, but its majesty—50 foot ceilings and a 300 foot long hall—never cease to amaze me.  I walk quietly past scores of hard working people until I find a suitable place at a table to sit down and work.
	To me the building stands as a symbol of higher learning and is perfect in every way.  In contrast to the Mid-Manhattan circulating branch that lies across the street it is clean, quiet, and studious.  In 2008 after 97 years of grime building up and graying the marble the NYPL embarked on a hundred million dollar renovation funded by Stephen A. Schwartzman, who the building is now named after.  With the money the NYPL cleaned the façade and expanded the stacks (the area where books are stored) underneath Bryant Park, greatly increasing the capacity of the library.
Yet just 3 years later the NYPL once again hopes to renovate the Schwartzman Branch.  In a heavily secreted plan known simply as the “Central Library Plan” (CLP) the NYPL hopes to spend 250-350 million dollars updating the recently redone branch.  By selling the also recently redone Science Industry and Business Library (SIBL) as well as the Mid-Manhattan branch the NYPL will raise enough money (along with private philanthropy) to remove millions of books from the Schwartzman branch and place a circulating branch inside the Schwartzman Building.  The books will be moved to New Jersey [ a.) eww b.) 3 million books have already been brought there] and the tumultuous chaos of a circulating branch will be brought inside.
And my dad thinks that it’s a brilliant idea.  And though I know he’s right I can’t agree.  In my dad’s opinion the renovation of the library is a democratization of a building that is used only by elites (like myself) who would like to keep it that way.  “Not everyone has the ability to go to the library,” my dad says, “when the Library has already embarked on a digitization process it seems silly to focus on the antiquated system of real world books.”  To my point that a tangible book is quite different from using an ebook my father responds: “Years after the book was invented people still taught ‘Scroll Reading’ in schools.”
At present just over 30% of the Schwartzman building is open to the public.  The CLP will increase the public space twofold to over 420,000 square feet.  Carl Pforzheimer III, a trustee of the NYPL, explains that while: “The stacks are important to have…it’s more important to use the space properly for the future.”  The circulating branch inside the Schwartzman Building would be state of the art with the newest digital technologies. Additionally a high-ranking NYPL official explained that the CLP is also a cost-cutting measure: “We need to get more efficient.”
Perhaps the best argument against the CLP is that such an extraordinary sum of money would be better spent on updating branch libraries.  However my father explains that “updating  the branch libraries in the short term before we know exactly what a library needs to be in the 21st century is shortsighted.”  As to why it’s the Schwartzman Branch specifically that deserves updating: “For almost a hundred years the Main Branch of the NYPL, flanked by those two lions ‘Patience’ and ‘Fortitude,’ has been a leader in research.  And you recognized that every time you come home with your glowing accounts of your trip to the library.  But in the past ten years the library hasn’t kept pace with technological innovation and for it to survive in this century it is going to have to change.  Some library somewhere is going to lead the way into the digital frontier, why shouldn’t it be us?”
“Remember the Luddites” he said, speaking of the 19th century movement against the Industrial Revolution who often smashed mechanized looms.  “You don’t want to be remembered as them.”
In such an emotionally charged debate perhaps the only way to win is to get emotional.  So call me a luddite, maybe it’ll help me change my mind.