Branching out

WHITECHAPEL ROAD is a typical main drag in London's East End, where on a springtime Saturday vendors beneath striped tents hawk $9 jeans, pirated DVDs, and slabs of fish laid out on melting ice and styrofoam. Amid Whitechapel's familiar sand-colored stretch of weathered Victorian-era architecture, however, there's an edifice so brightly incongruous it looks like a real-life Photoshop insert. It's a big, friendly box of a building, its translucent glass facade festooned with tinted panels in varying shades of blue and green-as if a giant prototype of a revamped Rubik's Cube had suddenly dropped from the sky.

This is the Whitechapel Idea Store, the flagship of a $44 million project initiated by the London borough of Tower Hamlets. The council aims to replace the area's century-old libraries-largely disused and falling into disrepair after decades of meager funding and neglect-with modernized venues. More than just rehabbing buildings, though, the mission of the Idea Stores is to rejuvenate, as well as rename, the very concept of the British public library, starting in one of London's toughest neighborhoods.

Whitechapel was Jack the Ripper's terrain, and Tower Hamlets is often described as the city's most deprived borough, as measured by a variety of factors including literacy, employment, health, crime, and housing standards. Nearly half of Tower Hamlets residents are black or ethnic minorities, some 50 languages are spoken in the borough, and poor literacy and math skills hinder perhaps one-quarter of the population. Yet by the readiest measures, the Tower Hamlets experiment is succeeding beyond all expectations. London's first Idea Store branch, which opened in May 2002 in Bow, tripled the attendance rates of the two libraries it replaced. The Whitechapel branch, which opened in September of last year, posted similar gains with some 56,000 visits in February, while book borrowing is up 34 percent.

The Idea Stores serve the functions of a traditional library, but they are also a means of community outreach-an objective inscribed in the inviting, colorful design by architect David Adjaye. The Idea Store is a drop-in center where you can learn English, acquire job-seeking skills, and get legal advice. Or you can take inexpensive classes in sign language, capoeira, or Pilates (course fees at Bow are the equivalent of $1.50 per hour). You can chat with your friends or yak on your cellphone-as one Whitechapel staffer put it, ''This is not a sanctuary where you go to get away from the world."

But if a library by any other name isn't a sanctuary, then what is it? And what lessons might it hold for American libraries, which like their British counterparts are struggling to keep their patrons-and their funding?

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The seeds of the Idea Stores were planted in 1998, when Tower Hamlets began a large-scale survey that found fewer than three in 10 residents used their local libraries, compared with more than half of Britons nationwide. ''It's called an Idea Store because we found in public consultation that libraries had a negative connotation as being fusty and old-fashioned," Idea Stores program director Heather Wills says. ''Thirty percent of our residents are Bengali and have no knowledge or understanding of the library brand."

This is a curious assertion, given that the Bengali region, like the US and Britain, has had public libraries since the mid-19th century, but the ''fusty" reputation of the Victorian-era libraries in East London is certainly accurate. The interior of the Whitechapel Library, now subsumed into the Whitechapel Art Gallery, looks like a derelict hospital and smells like a gym sock, its ceiling sloughing paint and plaster.

Broadly speaking, Idea Stores are not actually stores-that is to say, the books are still free, and so is the Internet access. But these 21st-century libraries do take a retail approach to aspects of design, promotion, and even financing. Patrons won't find librarians at an Idea Store, but rather ''idea supervisors," who wear uniforms of black polo shirts, as do their staff. The Idea Store logo uses a slender, squared-off lower-case font that might be dubbed Digital Chic, as if to signal the Idea Stores' technological savvy. The slick branding, not to mention the furniture (utility sofas, curving plywood shelves), suggest that Idea rhymes with Ikea in more ways than one.

And if the wide aisles, cheerful banners, and in-store cafes remind visitors of a British supermarket franchise, all the better, since all seven of the planned Idea Stores will be situated next to-or, in a couple of cases, inside-major shopping centers for the convenience of the busy patron. Wall-mounted flatscreens advertise aromatherapy workshops at the brand-new Idea Store in Canary Wharf, which is nestled in a massive mall complex. At Whitechapel, daydreaming patrons can gaze upon the majestic vistas of the Sainsbury's supermarket parking lot.

The juxtaposition is apt, because in terms of funding, the Idea Stores aren't quite as public as the libraries they're replacing. The money comes from a combination of local council funds, national lottery money, charitable donations, proceeds from the sale of former library buildings, and corporate partners such as Sainsbury's and Lloyds of London. According to Wills, ''Government funding will not become a thing of the past, but we are confident that we can increase the proportion of funding from nongovernment sources."

Wills calls the Idea Stores ''a department store model, a shopping strategy that everyone can relate to." This blending of learning and commerce, of the public and private interests, may trouble many library enthusiasts-a free lending library that takes its cues from a for-profit paradigm may seem a contradiction in terms. It's certainly not what Benjamin Franklin had in mind when, in 1731, he opened his own idea store in Philadelphia: a lending library whose members pooled their resources to purchase books. The radical notion of free borrowing privileges for one and all would have to wait until the mid-19th century, when Boston and other municipalities unveiled the first publicly supported free libraries in the nation. By the 1920s, American culture had fully absorbed the principle of a tax-supported free lending library.

In their own way, though, many American libraries today are adapting the ''shopping strategy." Since 1990, Massachusetts has built or renovated over 200 libraries, often adding or redesigning space to accommodate cafes and community gathering space, according to David Gray, director of communications at the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners. ''You increasingly hear about the library as a 'commons,' more like a community center, and the library as 'experience,"' says Gray. He cites the Experience Library in Cerritos, Calif., an affluent planned suburb of Los Angeles, as the flashiest example of the new-breed library: It boasts a 15,000-gallon aquarium, a life-size Tyrannosaurus Rex model, and a suite of Epcot-style ''themed spaces."

Of course, most towns and cities don't have $40 million handy to launch their own bibliophilic Disneyland. In recent years, economic downturn and low caps on property taxes have slugged public libraries particularly hard. Libraries across the nation have reduced hours and staff, eliminated their bookmobiles and Sunday hours, and downsized to smaller quarters. In 2003, Pennsylvania slashed in half its annual contribution to the library system named for Andrew Carnegie, one of the English-speaking world's greatest champions of the public-library concept. Salinas, Calif., gained much unwelcome attention in 2005 when it nearly eliminated its public library system altogether; currently its main branch, the John Steinbeck Library, named for the town's most famous son, is open just 13 hours a week.

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The Idea Stores' hybrid funding model, and its embrace of corporate-style presentation, may pose a solution for cash-strapped municipalities. Yet such a proposition is anathema to a sampling of American library experts. Corporate involvement in public libraries ''is a really bad idea," says Francine Fialkoff, editor of Library Journal. ''Libraries are a foundation of democracy, the people's university. That's under threat as soon as you start involving corporations."

''A public library is a necessity for a civilized community and should be paid for out of taxes," says Michael Gorman, the British-born university librarian at California State University in Fresno and president of the American Library Association. ''There is a huge difference in the culture and ethic of public service and the private sector, and no amount of rebranding and reengineering can get over that. The private model is fatal to public services."

Even as American librarians resist private funding, they agree that libraries can be an economic boon to depressed areas, and not just a feather in the cap of a wealthy city. Fialkoff cites the Bronx Library Center, which opened in a low-income, largely Hispanic and African-American neighborhood in January. The library's ''themed spaces" are organized by age group. (The Teen Center on the first floor has a prime location near the DVDs and young-adult paperbacks.) The wide range of adult-education courses (including English literacy and career counseling) and arts events evokes the Idea Stores model, and so does Richard Dattner's transparent, glass-fronted design. Instead of a gleaming supermarket, however, patrons on the entrance side of the building have a view of Tuff City Tattoos and Taqueria Mister Taco.

Gorman points out that underfunding libraries is especially shortsighted given their potential as economic adrenaline shots. ''The ironic thing in America is that the libraries most under threat are in the communities that need them the most," Gorman says. ''Every dollar you raise for the library brings in five or six, because the library can bring in other businesses, raise property values, and revive the neighborhood."

Perhaps this is where public-service idealism and East London's third-way pragmatism dovetail. Whether it's a corporate-boosted Idea Store or a red-brick relic, the public library can no longer imagine itself as a sanctuary from the demands of the marketplace.

Jessica Winter is a freelance journalist in New York. She writes for The Village Voice, the Guardian (U.K.), Time Out London, and other publications.