Library Transformations

You may have read that incoming ALA President Leslie Burger wants stories of Library Transformation to support her theme for the upcoming year. I thought it would be nice to provide an illustrated story of the recent transformation of the Annoyed Librarian Flea Libary. Now, as you may know, the ALFL is a "Library Five-O" library, which means it is constantly changing. You can't constantly change while remaining in one place, so the ALFL has gone mobile!

Here is a picture of what the ALFL used to look like:

You might think it looks pretty impressive, in a sturdy, traditional, neoclassical kind of way. You might think it looks as a library should. You would of course be wrong. You might notice, for example, that it has bricks and mortar and stuff like that, too. You know what the Annoyed Librarian says when she sees sturdy traditional bricks and mortar? Yuck!

Here's the old ALFL Reading Room:

Quaint, isn't it. You might also notice it has a lot of books, and if you have a lot of books to move around, you can't constantly change! That's one of the most important principles of "Library Five-O." When the Annoyed Librarian sees lots of books in a library taking the places where lots of computers could be, she says, "Yuck!"

So we did our best to get rid of all the bricks and mortar, which left the ALFL looking like this:

Not a book to be seen! And no bricks and mortar, either, baby! We're a slimmed down operation. The only problem came when it rained and the ALFL laptop got wet. Plus, we were still in the same place! That's no way to constantly change!

So we went mobile, baby! The laptop was too heavy, so we converted to the ALFL smartphone, so we could constantly be on the move. And check out the new ALFL Bookmobile:

Now we can constantly change our address as well as everything else. True, there's only two books in it, the Merriam-Webster's Second and Third Unabridged Dictionaries that we use for seats, but we like the name "bookmobile." We'll be changing this soon as well. By the time you get around to spotting this bookmobile, we will probably have exchanged it for a Yugo.