"Ultimate Internet Cafe" Frischer

This article really confused me. The whole theater idea is not that new in itself, and I have seen a kind of learning theater at the Chinese pavilion at Disneyland. However, it was unclear to me what the exact thing would look like and what it could actually accomplish and the extent or flexibility of what that kind of facility can do. Is the author really encouraging spending so much money for a theater that could only show people in large screens surrounding them what a Roman villa would have been like? That sounds nice and the novelty of the idea certainly caught my attention. But at times when libraries are shutting down because their cities don’t want to sink any more money into the institutions it seems really frivolous to advocate this kind of construction. On the other hand, for larger libraries, this could be a real draw the same kind of which draws people to science museums and the like. So that kind of approach is not completely off base, just unrealistic. I was dumbfounded, however, that his “ideal” library was the very same one that in our first week we learned had been the reason for book dumping in San Francisco. Did this author just choose to ignore the reality that this library was one of the failures of architecture and the reason why so many people have been disillusioned by libraries? Their library doesn’t have space for books! If that is his ideal, I have less respect for his theater idea of a library. It is almost as if his vision does not include any vestiges of a traditional library, and while this kind of imagination is needed, he is proposing something that would be unrecognizable and probably not involve a lot of traditional librarians. If his vision is that of the future library, I am not going to be very happy working in that kind of environment. I love books! And I don’t want to have to keep defending that belief or read that, through omission, other librarians do not value books or the page as much as I. If a mega-style theater is the alternative, I don’t want anything to do with it.