R. D. Lankes has an international reputation for new thinking around thepurpose and design of libraries for the 21st century. While this particularcomment is deliberately a pithy sound bite designed to show how librarieshave moved on, from a purely curatorial function, to be places that existfor their community, it encapsulates the premise that design of the buildingfor a community is key, enabling library places and spaces to exist forpurposes required by the community and not for high-flown notions –by civic authorities or parent institutions – of patronage(‘giving’ with inevitable strings attached), or designingwithout proper engagement with the wishes of that community.

Lankes writes of the different eras of library building, describing as the‘Book Palace’ all libraries which existed more or lessunchanged from earliest times to the beginnings of the 20th century. Hedescribes the US term ‘patrons’ – implying librarianshad a monopoly of collections, that these users needed library staff, butthat there was no other real public stakeholder in the library offer– and says that this morphed into the term ‘users’.

He goes on to say that the library public then often became‘members’, especially in academic institutions, but also, ofcourse, in every library where borrowing is possible. Latterly librariansnow have to compete with other providers, notably with providers ofelectronic or digital resources. So Lankes says that librarians now have noobvious term for their users/members, because what has now happened is thata library is a movement for local people and everything nowoffered through library places is very locally based.