Faith in the Library's Future
With the Opening of a Flagship Building in Rockville, Montgomery Bets the Public Will Keep Coming Back

By Jennifer Lenhart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Librarians, those experts in answering people's questions, had a few vexing ones for themselves as they contemplated their relevance in the Internet age.

Mainly, they wanted to know whether people could be lured away from the comforts of home electronic centers to go to the public library. They wondered whether the public library could be hip enough, comfortable enough and relaxed enough to make people want to hang out there. They looked at the way bookstores have been retooled and asked: Why not try the same thing with libraries?

The $26.3 million Rockville regional library, opening at noon today, is the symbol of Montgomery County's optimistic answer to those questions. It is the answer, the building's architects and the county's elected officials say, to the question of whether libraries can still be players in the international information bazaar.

"People were predicting the demise of the book, how everything was going to be electronic and . . . digital and that libraries would shrink," said Melanie Hennigan, the lead architect. "It couldn't be further from the truth. . . . What's happened is the Internet has spawned a renaissance in libraries."

The District, too, is considering a new central library downtown, a project with an estimated cost of as much as $275 million, 10 times the cost of the Rockville facility. But a decision on replacing the present flagship, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at 901 G St. NW, has been postponed indefinitely.

Montgomery's new flagship library, in the heart of Rockville's revitalized town square, has more space, more computers with Internet access, more WiFi hookups and more materials to lend than the old Rockville library, which was smaller, darker and short on parking spaces.

The Rockville library has visual showstoppers. Along Maryland Avenue is a 200-foot-long wall of wavy glass, made to filter out 98 percent of damaging ultraviolet rays. Inside, lounging chairs have been placed along the wall to "open up the building to the outside," said Hennigan, an experienced library designer with Grimm & Parker Architects, based in Bethesda and McLean.

The main entrance, off the cobblestone plaza of the new town square, is set off by a glass canopy and has nine video screens airing local interest television programs.

Visitors step through that door and enter a pumpkin-colored corridor with a wavy wall, which Hennigan dubbed "the wonder wall." It has video display terminals with touch screens that can be used to access the library's electronic catalogue.

At the end of the wonder wall is the biggest "wow" feature. It's a soaring central rotunda, accented by a half-spiral staircase that rises 20 feet to the second floor. At ground level, directly below the ceiling, a terrazzo mosaic is illuminated by 250 tiny lights suspended from the rotunda.

Nearby is the main circulation desk, another wavy structure, this one birch covered in burnished copper. The wave motif, Hennigan said, is supposed to be a "super-subtle" nod to the mapping of the human genome, completed by government and private scientists in Montgomery six years ago.

The building is a showcase for the county's new approach to libraries, officials said. For the first time in Rockville, patrons will be allowed to bring coffee and snacks inside. A Starbucks is set to open this spring across the square. "This library wants to be what the Barnes & Noble is to Bethesda Row," said Hennigan, referring to another revitalized retail area of the county. "Just as cool. Just as fun."

An area of the library designed as a hangout for teenagers has beanbag chairs and cafe-style seating at a counter. On both levels of the public library, if there's a place to sit, there's a place to plug in. The 99,000-square-foot building has a third floor for county administrative offices and nonprofit groups.

"Inside, the library is no longer what is inside the walls," said B. Parker Hamilton, director of public libraries. "It's really what's inside the world. There are no frontiers."

The new library has provoked controversies. A spat over a plan to charge patrons for parking in the nearby public garage was settled in the spring when the County Council agreed to make parking free. A plan to name the building after outgoing County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) stalled this week.

Some critics fret that the library, in trying to offer something for everyone, will end up serving no one well.

Rockville residents Irwin Charles Cohen, who led the campaign against paid parking, and Jacques B. Gelin said they often criticize the county libraries because they're always noticing things that bug them. "The bricks-and-mortar stuff is going really well," Gelin said. "I'm really interested in what goes on inside."

In a county where about 135 languages are spoken by students enrolled in public schools, the library system's collections are a sore spot. The new library will have collections in Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish and Russian. The county also has a call-in language line and a subscription to a database called Rosetta Stone that provides instructional materials for learning languages.

Policies on language collections and on the library system's collections overall have not been revised in years, Hamilton said. But she said the policies will be reviewed next year. "The county is becoming more diverse, even compared to 10 years ago," Hamilton said, "and for including language collections, the question becomes: What is the criteria?"

Jung Moon, a mother of two from Clarksburg, regularly visits libraries across the county in search of Korean-language books and intends to visit the new library soon. She said that the county's selection is limited and that she often must get on a waiting list to borrow books.

"There are so many Koreans in this area," Moon said. "They need more space so they can have more books."