Stacking the odds for treasure-trove down in the depths

Louise LaHatte looks through records that may, like thousands of books, be consigned to the basement. Picture / Greg Bowker

Look to the left of Auckland City Library's remodelled ground floor, where once were orderly rows of fiction and biography, and you'll see the new cafe, abuzz with loud music, a hissing coffee machine and chatting customers.

Through an open entrance two large plasma screens dominate the corner, one showing New Zealand rock music clips, the other BBC World in what is now called the News Zone.

Visitors lounge on armchairs, flicking through magazines.

Towards the rear left of the ground floor you'll find the new teen and children's areas, fringed by rows of videos, DVDs and "world language" books.

To the right, where areas of non-fiction like travel and history used to live, is the fiction section, perhaps the most emblematic example of the library's changing direction. Instead of the traditional long parallel blocks of metal bookcases, the shelves weave between genres like crime, fantasy and sci-fi, romance, large-format and graphic novels.

But it's a shock to see the limited amount of space given to general literature, compared with pre-revamp days. Many shelves are less than half full and there is no chance of browsing through prolific authors' back catalogues.

They are not on the open shelves but most likely to be found in the building's two-level basement - the stacks - where 36,500 fiction and 166,000 non-fiction items are stored.

There is no sign on any of the library's three public-use floors that books and materials from the stack are available to the public on request.

Since the library's $2.6 million makeover there have been grumbles about the revamp, with claims that books are disappearing, "shuffled off to the stacks ... [hindering] browsing, one of the basics of research. Auckland Central Library proudly puts CDs, love comics and DVDs on its ground floor in the somewhat forlorn hope that the illiterate will be seduced indoors," writer Peter Wells complained in the Weekend Herald's canvas magazine.

Not so, says central library manager Felicity McGuinness and her colleague, collections manager Louise LaHatte. The problem is twofold - having to accommodate a wider range of media, and space.

With an annual overall budget of $3,439,919 for the whole Auckland library network, the library acquires 100,000 new items a year. The collection expands, the physical space does not.

The library also "refloats". If a book is borrowed from central, but returned at a branch, it stays there until it is eventually returned, by a another borrower, to central.

The gripe that there's too much space, not enough books, is about perception, McGuinness says. "We have now created more interesting shapes with our shelves which looks more open ... and we have made a few alterations to try to make the pathway a little more logical."

As for browsing, McGuinness feels readers are well-served by the non-fiction section on the first floor, where there is a good range of material.

"Plus you've got the ability, once you've had a browse through what's on the open floor, to connect with a librarian and get a sense of what's in the basement."

For a booklover, the fiction stack is a shadowy form of heaven where a solitary librarian actions requests from above, zooming up the books in a telelift. But the contrast between what's on the shelves and what's in the stacks is stark. On the ground floor, there is a single book on the B shelves, by Booker Prize winner John Banville. In the stacks there is an armful. That pattern is representative of the entire fiction collection.

Perhaps McGuinness is being a little sunny when she observes: "If things are working well, hopefully a lot of what's in the collections are in people's homes, not on the shelves." It's true that borrowing has increased since the revamp, but it is hard not to wish that more of the fiction back-catalogues were available, and that customers were actively alerted to the basement treasure-troves.

LaHatte says the library will consider ways of promoting the basement collections.