Comment on Did it really used to be common for guys to go to a bar every night like in Cheers or The Simpsons?
mech@feddit.org 11 hours agoIn Northern Europe, that’s called a library.
The one in Helsinki has board games, media stations for watching films or listening to music, gaming consoles, PCs with design and CAD software, VR rooms, 3D printers and other fabrication machines, conference rooms, study rooms, workshops for fixing things, recording and photo studios, a shared kitchen, a cinema, a playground…
Oh, and books.
merc@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
Wow. My local library mostly has books. No board games. No media stations – there are some (old) computers you can use to browse the web, so I suppose you could watch media there, but it’s set up as a desk, not a couch or something. You can borrow some games, but not game consoles, and there’s definitely not a spot to play the games on-site. Definitely no VR rooms. There’s one branch of the library in the city that has 3d printers. One branch that has a “music editing station” with a music keyboard attached to a computer. One branch has a high quality, large format scanner for scanning historic docs. Definitely no kitchen or playground.
The idea still seems to be that libraries are supposed to be quiet places where you can read books or study. Any media is meant to be consumed with headphones on, so obviously no shared listening of any kind. They do loan music, video games and movies, but they’re meant to be brought home. You can borrow a lot of musical instruments, but again, there’s no place to play them on-site because the library is a quiet place for reading or studying.
I think it would take a major mental shift for people here to consider libraries as places where you might do something non-quiet, and/or non-serious. And something like cooking on-site would be seen as completely non-librarylike.
mech@feddit.org 2 hours ago
The one in Helsinki is separated into 3 floors, 1 of them is for quiet reading.