Finland marches forward with libraries of the future
HELSINKI: What do you give the world’s most literate country for its 100th birthday? For Finland’s politicians and public, the answer was simple: a vast, state-of-theart library, a new “living room for the nation”.
You’d be amazed by the presence of robotic librarians.
Twenty years in the planning, Helsinki’s central library officially opens on December 5 at the end of a year of festivities marking the centenary of Finland’s independence after breaking with Russia in 1917 following six centuries under Swedish rule.
It is a huge, flowing structure of wood and glass sitting on a prime spot in the city centre, directly opposite the Finnish parliament.
But whereas the parliament building is an austere and imposing hunk of granite, the new library was designed by Finnish firm ALA Architects as a welcoming, undulating structure, clad in 160 kilometres’ worth of Finnish spruce, drawing people inside with a “warm hug”.
Named Oodi — “ode” in Finnish — it is intended as a paean to knowledge, learning and equality in what was ranked the world’s most literate country by a 2016 report based on official statistics.
While books will feature heavily — 100,000 of them — the cutting-edge facility also boasts studios for music and video production, a cinema, and workshops containing 3D printers and laser cutters, all free of charge for the public. It will also house an EU-funded visitor centre, offering information on the 28-member bloc’s work and its impact on people’s daily lives.
“Oodi gives a new modern idea of what it means to be a library,” Tommi Laitio, Helsinki’s executive director of culture and leisure, told AFP.
“It is a house of literature but it’s also a house of technology, it’s a house of music, it’s a house of cinema, it’s a house of the European Union.
“And I think all of these come together to this idea of hope and progress,” Laitio said.
One sign of such progress is the building’s fleet of book-carrying robots — small grey wagons which navigate themselves in and out of lifts, avoiding people and furniture, in order to bring returned books up from the basement and drop them off at the correct bookcase.
There, a human member of staff will place the books on the shelf. Oodi’s planners believe the robot librarians are the first instance in the world of selfdriving technology being used in this way inside a public library.
The robots will become a familiar sight to the library’s expected 10,000 visitors a day.
Oodi will have areas walled off for quiet studying, but for everywhere else, there will not be a “silence” rule in force, as is common in libraries.
In fact, making a mess and noise are positively encouraged inside the “nerd loft” — a place to inspire people of all ages to come together and create.
Users can build things in workshops equipped with cuttingedge tools, borrow musical instruments or play games consoles.
“We are prepared to constantly have discussions with the users and the staff about what behaviour is welcome in the library, but it’s definitely a place of noise and all sorts of improvised activities,” Helsinki’s head of library services, Katri Vanttinen, said.