Once a place of dusty shelves, stern "Shhhhs" and whispered conversations, the Wollongong library is bright, loud and thriving. KATE McILWAIN looks at the reinvention of the modern library.
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Wollongong’s bookstores have dwindled, the last few city video stores have downsized or closed and internet cafes have faded into non-existence.
But – against all odds – in the city’s libraries, visitor numbers and loans are growing.
More than one million people visited the library in the last financial year, borrowing nearly 50,000 items more than the year before.
In a world where their encyclopaedic reference sections have been made redundant by Google, and where kids hanker after iPads and smart phones instead of old-fashioned books, Wollongong’s libraries are not just surviving, but thriving.
The shift of attitude and focus that’s helped this happen is especially evident on Tuesday mornings at Wollongong Central Library.
Dozens of children – sometimes dressed in animal costumes – run and leap around, chasing lurid green and orange flashing lights across the floor in the kids’ reading section.
Taking part in one of the library’s new weekly interactive play sessions, kids stomp and make noise and no one bats an eye – a clear sign that the days of stern, shushing librarians and “Quiet please” signs are gone.
Elsewhere, on any given day, there might be a group of older men reading newspapers and playing giant chess in the sunny front corner of the library, or a noisy group of teenagers from various refugee backgrounds helping each other with their homework.
Some weekday afternoons, kids aged between five and seven become “steampunks” – hurling paper planes across the library to study aerodynamics or programming robots to walk through mazes they’ve built during the library’s after-school sessions.
On Friday nights, tweens and teens come in to watch movies or talk about their favourite apps and online games, and – from time to time – hoards of children dressed as Harry Potter characters or superheroes take part in dress-up days and trivia nights.
Wollongong City Council’s library and community services manager Jenny Thompson said all these programs had been part of a deliberate effort to change the way the library works in recent years.
“There was a realisation, probably at the point where online, eBooks and all of that was happening, where people were talking about how books would be gone, libraries would be gone,” she said.
“I think that was always a bit exaggerated, and time has demonstrated that people still love a physical book.
“But about five or six years ago we really diversified our programs to try and provide activities that would be of interest to people who weren’t coming here.”
Ms Thompson said council data showed the strategy was paying off.
“The numbers of people through the door are increasing and also our website visits are increasing,” she said.
“The website visits are increasing a little bit faster, but overall there are more than a million people visiting our libraries.
‘’That’s about four or five visits for every resident each year.”
Perhaps the most successful library activity in recent times is Comic Gong, which was thought up by Corrimal librarians to encourage more kids to read about four years ago.
The first event clearly hit a nerve, attracting more than 1000 comic fans, and the annual event has now turned into a city-wide festival that attracts thousands of locals and out-of-towners.
“We saw an opportunity to show just how different libraries were, and to reach out to parts of the community that we didn’t get to regularly and stage an event that engaged not just our local community,” Ms Thompson said.
“We’ve just seen it grow dramatically over the past few years, and it’s become something really important – a flagship event not just for the library but for the city.”
Despite this shift to activities, technology and events, books are still the libraries’ core business.
According to the council’s latest figures, Wollongong borrowers checked out nearly 50,000 more books in the financial year just gone than they did before.
Although, tellingly, this growth came entirely from eBook loans. Physical book loans dropped by 9300 from 2014/15 to 2015/16, while e-items increased by a massive 60 per cent in the same year.
Despite the continuing changes and the rapid influx of technology into the library’s operations, the free and socially inclusive nature of the library remains a source of pride for its staff.
“Libraries have always been a place where people could access free information of whatever kind, and free resources,” Ms Thompson said.
“We’ve broadened that out now to recognise that there’s less and less freely available public recreation activities, educational opportunities.”
Librarian Laura Gomes is responsible for developing kids and youth literacy programs and says she has seen the library make a difference in many young people’s lives.
“Not everyone plays a team sport or can afford music lessons or tutoring,” she said.
“So this allows kids to come together and talk about things they’re interested in, and there’s a real focus on social inclusion.
“I’ve had kids that have come that have been so nervous the first time, but now they’ve made friends and they hang out.”
Likewise, acting central library manager Tanya Leonardi sees the modern library almost as a community centre which gives society’s misfits a place to go in an age of technological isolation.
“We offer a place for people who are socially isolated,” she said.
“They’re digitally connected, but very isolated socially. So they can come here and talk to other people.
“Quite often, libraries are the place that people who don’t talk to anyone else can come.”
“We’ve got customers who are here every day, they’re here when we open and some of them go home when we go home at the end of the day.”
Details of library activities and sessions: www.wollongong.nsw.gov.au/library