In Brooklyn, Modernizing a Library for Downloads and Robots

NEW YORK — Major R. Owens once dreamed that an alien spaceship had landed and that the creature that clambered out told the first person it encountered, “Take me to your librarian.”

Owens, who retired from Congress in 2006 and died in 2013 at age 77, is not to be forgotten at a library that is not quite that big, but still huge: the Brooklyn Public Library. He worked for it in the 1950s and 1960s, when he was in his 20s and early 30s.

By early 2020, the wave of people that surges into the building on Grand Army Plaza every day will be reminded of Owens and his first career, because the library is about to begin an ambitious renovation project. One of the first things people will see — after they pass through the monumental entrance with its sculptures of literary figures like Hiawatha and Tom Sawyer — will be the Major Owens Welcome Center.

It will serve as a gateway to the nation’s fifth-largest library system. And the library’s president and chief executive, Linda E. Johnson, has ideas for what will lie beyond.

“We are focused on broadening the definition of what it means to be literate,” Johnson said. “A hundred years ago, it was transactional: you borrowed a book, in English. You took it home. You brought it back.”

Now the library has holdings in more than 30 languages and offers digital downloads that go poof when the due date expires. It has Wi-Fi. Johnson said the central library and the 59 branch libraries are the largest source of free internet access in Brooklyn. In warm weather, people with laptops do not go far when the doors close at the central library. They take up positions on the steps outside and log back in.

Like other urban libraries, its mission now includes providing English classes; some are conversation groups led by volunteers. Johnson said a third of the households in Brooklyn speak a language other than English. The library even has a program for an associate degree from Bard College. The classes take place at the library, not at Bard’s campus 120 miles away in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

But buildings deteriorate if they are not maintained. Three years ago, when library officials took stock, they found $300 million worth of deferred maintenance work at the central library and all the branch libraries. On their list were aging boilers, iffy air conditioning systems and leaky roofs. The central library, which opened in 1941, has its own share of problems. During the snowstorm last week part of the ceiling in the Arts and Music section on the third floor began leaking. Tables and chairs below had to be cordoned off with yellow tape, almost like a crime scene.

That was bad enough — on busy days, the central library needs every seat it has, and then some. It would have been worse if the water had run in a different direction and dripped on books.

Johnson, who is passionate about architecture, talks about “figuring out how buildings can inspire people.” The central library was designed to do that when libraries were about books: from above, it actually looks like an open book. The Art Deco-ish front entrance recalls the spine, the two huge wings the front and back covers.

But now the central library has a computer room for patrons where every terminal is often filled and where bright meeting rooms line the perimeter. The space used to be a staff cafeteria, Johnson said.

That signals a fundamental change in the way libraries operate.

Originally, nearly two-thirds of the central building was intended for behind-the-scenes work — putting shiny covers on books, gluing in the pockets for checkout cards, typing up the cards, checking in books that had been returned and trundling them on carts for reshelving.

The reshelving is still necessary, of course, but most of the other tasks are now done at a processing center in Queens that the Brooklyn library system shares with the New York Public Library.

That leaves unused space that Johnson wants to repurpose. Among many other things, the plan for the central library calls for replacing two levels of old-fashioned “stacks” — shelves that were off-limits to the public and are no longer needed for day-in, day-out work. The plan envisions a new “experience space” where, among other things, children could learn about robotics or three-dimensional printing. Or maybe something else. “Who knows what, in two years, we’ll be talking about?” Johnson said the other day. “One of the problems is none of these libraries were built when anyone was thinking about technology. Being literate today means being digitally fluent.” For libraries and librarians, it also means adapting at an ever-accelerating pace.

But there is so much to do that the “experience center” will not be built until later on.

First will come a reorganization of what is where in the building. The “popular library,” a place for browsing what the librarians consider top titles, has been underused on the out-of-the-way mezzanine. It will get a new home just past the Major Owens Welcome Center.

Other changes will make the lobby more librarylike. An office where people can apply for the city’s municipal identification card program will move downstairs, as will a passport-application office. They will have their own entrance off Flatbush Avenue.

As for what makes the building work, there will be new heating and air conditioning systems and new elevators.

The library’s regulars worry about getting stuck between floors. Johnson was leading Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen on a tour recently when a woman ducked into the elevator and sighed, “Look how slowly the doors are closing — I really hope I don’t get caught in this elevator.” Johnson said the woman was not a plant, but when it comes to making the case for money from City Hall, she was the right person in the right place at the right moment.

The plan is to do the $135 million project at the central library in four stages. Some areas will be blocked off during construction, but the library itself will never close. The first phase is budgeted at $35 million, and the library has the money, with $10 million from the administration of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, $2 million from the Brooklyn borough president’s office and separate City Council appropriations and donations. That leaves $100 million to be raised for later stages.

Not everything that Johnson has in mind is going into the central library. A new, larger branch library is planned for Sunset Park. Part of the construction cost will come from the $40 million the library received from the controversial sale of a branch library building in Brooklyn Heights. A new library there will occupy part of an apartment tower that is now being built.

But libraries are not just about buildings. There are the ideas in the collections they contain.

“We are the most democratic institution in our society,” Johnson said. “All you need to come to the library is the inclination and imagination to walk through our front door.” She mentioned a study that identified libraries as one of the most trusted sources of information these days. “I don’t want to pat ourselves on the back,” she said, but she did just that. And she said the credit went to librarians in the branches. After President Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, branch librarians began posting signs that said “All are welcome here.”

“We’ve run with that,” Johnson said. In the lobby of the central library is a sign almost as tall as Johnson with “all are welcome here” in 12 languages.

After mentioning places in the refurbished central library that could host discussions about topics like immigration or the Constitution, Johnson talked about Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist who is considered a saint among librarians.

“I think he would be proud of the way libraries have risen to meet the needs of communities,” she said. “Allegedly the reason he gave the money” — underwriting more than 1,500 libraries, including 21 in Brooklyn — “was he grew up poor in Scotland and was denied entrance to the library.”