"Places of Quiet Collaboration"

(note: I edited this, adding the asterisked paragraph, after a good night's sleep)

I try not to post the same articles here and at LISNews, but I posted this commentary from the Christian Science Monitor  both places because I thought it was such a wonderful piece and wanted to make sure it was read widely.  Alex Wright echoes what I've tried to say about how libraries are about building and sustaining community and communities, as much as they are about collecting recorded knowledge. I think it's a great companion piece to last week's Losing Mr. Taylor. (Wright is also a heck of a writer.)

But the real Alexandria was much more than a giant papyrus warehouse; it was more like a Greco-Roman think tank, built with great colonnades and wide open spaces designed to draw scholars together, giving them a place to work together, engage in dialogue and debate, and practice Aristotle's famous peripatetic method: meaning literally, to walk around.

*You know, this is what Library 2.0 is all about. While I wholeheartedly agree with Wright about the necessity of libraries as physical space, as places for quiet collaboration, I think he misses a key point, or perhaps he side-steps it to make his very important point. The point he has set aside is that digital libraries can facilitate community-building. Blogs, OPAL programs, and digital interfaces such as OSoft's ThoutReader that allow readers to discuss and annotate and share are all about communing, about collaboration, albeit without literal perambulation. I don't think one necessarily needs to move one's legs in order to keep the ideas flowing.   

The article footer says that Wright,  a former Harvard librarian, is working on a book about the history of the information age. I'm looking forward to it!  And, least you think Mr. Wright is a stodgy old, paper-loving fart, he's got his own blog.