Wired on Friday/Danny O'Brien: You would think that libraries would be the first victims of Silicon Valley's technophilia. A dusty old repository for old media? Why bother supporting this government-funded dinosaur when we can spend the money handing laptops to our children, and browse for e-books on the internet?
But here in the Valley, the public library system and the information technology boom have been going hand-in-hand for some time. And if the renaissance happening here in the technology capital of the US is anything to go by, that partnership will prosper for some time.
Despite the riches of its surrounding valley, San Jose is not always the most smoothly-functioning of cities. Its tax income is shackled to the thrashing up-down cycles of the tech industry. Public funding is tricky to get, and harder to maintain.
The region's dizzying house-prices, and the natural tendency for any Californian city to sprawl as far as gas prices and its suburbs permit, mean that much of its working citizenry commutes from over 30 miles away. That has left its centre underfunded and empty of life outside business hours.In times of recession, even those business hours are quiet.
But, filling the newest building in the San Jose skyline, San Jose's library thrives - both with funding, and with a constituency for its services.
It's a testament to how public libraries can survive and prosper when public funding is under pressure - and to how much respect the geeks that built the dotcom boom have for these providers of universal knowledge.
The Martin Luther King Jr Library's new building, which cost $177.5 million, is the largest and costliest civic development in the city to date. The large injection of cash came from the library's unique double function.
The new library was a shared venture between the university and the city. Both organisations pooled their book repositories, funding, and real estate together to provide for the new complex. The regions' technologists also contributed over $10 million in individual donations.
The top three floors house the private San Jose State University's collection; the rest the public library reserve. Both university students and townspeople have access to both collections
The library system's greatest competitors in the US are the bookstore chains Barnes & Noble and Borders. To better compete with them, the library has a coffee shop and book store under the same roof. But the greatest differences with the libraries of old are technological.
Dragging cocooned net users in San Jose out of their houses is hard - so the library has made it a little easier to dig out books from home. You can search and order books and DVDs from the catalogue online so they'll be ready when you arrive. If you can't find the volume you're after there, you can search a computerised database of California and Nevada libraries, and have it delivered to the library for pick-up.
Renewing and checking out fines is also possible via the web. You can also drop off books at a roadside check-in bin.
There are internet connection ports everywhere (over 400 of them, including at least one embedded in a large supporting column on the outside of the building). Some 290 PCs are available for browsers. San Jose students can hire out laptops for use in the library.
Even in areas which are not so geek-heavy, libraries which have chosen to walk arm-in-arm with new technology appear to be doing well. While the British charity Libri last month published a report, written by ex-md of Waterstones Tim Coates, warning there may be "no libraries in 10 to 15 years", funding for library construction in the US has grown 15 per cent on a decade ago.
A recent study by the University of Washington showed that a year after computers are placed in libraries that don't have them, attendance rises 30 per cent. And visits to US libraries have increased 17 per cent in the last six years. While some of that jump is down to the recession - libraries are a refuge for job-hunters in downswings - much is due to the attraction of public access internet.
Not every city allocates this much funding to its library system. But then, geeks here have a particular regard for the library as an institution.There's a mutual respect for shared expertise. In the beginning of the web, one of the few groups to recognise its potential were librarians and other "information brokers", who were accustomed to navigating the heavy thickets of data in commercial databases. And as techies struggled to design systems that would manage the flood of information on the net, it was the experts in library science to which they would eventually turn for advice.
The older and newer traditions have often sniped at each other's prejudices, but they know they share the same goal: disseminating knowledge to as wide a group as possible.
When I worked at a well-known newspaper in the early 1990s, the only people who truly understood how the net would change how the paper operated were the geeks working on their technology section and the librarians running the clippings library. "Who wants to read yesterday's news" was the attitude of almost everybody else.
Librarians know exactly how many people want to read yesterday's news. The interest generated by search engines like Google, whose power comes from mining these archives of "old news", came as no surprise to these old hands.
Now "information scientists" are the most sought-after experts on the net. And for those who have stayed behind in the underpaid world of libraries, the two roles - librarian and technologist - have merged.
"The Shifted Librarian" is a popular website amongst geeks, who enjoy the snapshots of life on the other side of the recent acquisitions desk. The Library Journal, the trade magazine for American librarians, has also documented what it describes as a new subculture amongst the librarian community: "hacker librarians", who do more than just suggest a book title or two - they write and maintain software to solve their clients' problems.
The distance between the stereotype of the prim-faced, fussy librarian and the Journal's description of this group, working in t-shirts and jeans all night at an all-day librarian "hackfest" to improvise solutions to common librarian issues - one devised a reference binder replacement out of a Poop Scoop - seems vast.
But the hop from it to the working practices of the Silicon Valley geeks here is very short indeed. As close as a trip to the local library.
