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Build us a facility to be proud of

The Lawson McGhee Library on Church Avenue was a state-of-the-art institution when its bright, airy building opened in 1971. It was the pride of a city that took special pleasure in providing its residents with a modern, usable facility for books and periodicals. Its reference desk has always been an accommodating and reliable source of information on where and how to find what.

It has served its public well for more than 30 years, through the period when the city turned the library system over to Knox County. Its features have been as adaptable as they had to be in a changing world. Would that it were expandable and compatible with the kind of modification needed for it to be a model library of the 21st century.

It has become outmoded for reasons that are no real fault of its promoters and architects. It wasn’t designed to provide computer terminals for public use. It was built before videos, CDs and DVDs came into being. It’s a narrow-band facility in a broadband age. Parking seemingly wasn’t the vital consideration it has become.

So it’s especially gratifying to find Knox County on the brink of designing a new central library, where the technology and techniques prevalent in today’s library services can be offered to its users, including the area’s young people bent on learning all they can in an environment conducive to studying both the written and audio/visual record of mankind.

The $1 million in the county’s 2004-2005 budget, advocated by County Mayor Mike Ragsdale, and by all library personnel and most patrons, is there to get the design process started. Ragsdale has been clear that it is his intent to gain for the county a new central library that is as state-of-the-art and appealing as the Church Avenue library was when it was built more than three decades ago.

It appears that the site to be selected may again be on Church Avenue, a couple of blocks away, fronting on Gay Street in the block that formerly housed the News Sentinel. That location, which has a lot to commend it, may hinge on the county’s negotiation of a land swap between the city of Knoxville, which holds the old News Sentinel property, and the county’s large, clear tract down State Street to the north. Given the easy relationship between Ragsdale and the city’s mayor, Bill Haslam, such a trade could happen with minimum fuss.

The Nashville Public Library’s recently constructed downtown presence is thrown up as an example of how important a fine library can be to the health and vitality of a downtown, a whole city and its metro environs for miles around. It is a draw to downtown Nashville that has made that city more than pleased with its investment.

No estimate of the cost of a new library can be made now. But Ragsdale has said it might run to about $45 million, based on what he has learned of library costs in other cities. That would include a parking component that the present library sorely lacks.

If it is fully funded and built in the next few years, such a library would be a great new source of pride for Knoxville and Knox County.

The initial planning money was included in the budget that passed County Commission Monday. The budget vote was unanimous, although a tax increase in the form of a wheel tax hike was necessary to pay for it, and the wheel tax also passed handily on first reading.

For their willingness to look to the future on such issues, the commissioners are to be congratulated. And Mayor Ragsdale deserves to be singled out for his leadership in offering up such forward-thinking proposals as the new library represents.

One caveat we’d like to introduce is that the library should be not only the best we can afford at this time, but also expandable, with some thought given to modification that may be necessary as times and technologies change. We’re not expecting permanence, but we do wish for longevity on the order of the useful life of the present library.

It’s been a good one. Let’s build one that’s going to be at least that adaptable over time.

May 27, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 22 © 2004 Metro Pulse