And it even has books

MINNEAPOLIS - It was biting cold in Minneapolis on Feb. 17, the day the city's public library IT staff moved their gear from a temporary site to the new, high-tech library downtown.

"The day started out at minus 15 at my house and the wind chill was about minus 35," recalls Sharon Kinsmith, manager of systems and telecommunications for the Minneapolis Public Library. "We had to put everything in a very bouncy truck and move it to the new building in that temperature."

The only casualty was a small server that ran the library's touch-tone renewal system, which lets patrons renew books over the phone. When Kinsmith extracted the phone board from the dead server, she found it wasn't compatible with any of the library's newer equipment. So her team got industrious. "One of my staff had an old computer sitting in his garage. He brought it in and got the board to work on it."

Fortunately no other impromptu repairs were required. The rest of the gear survived the move to the new library, which is set to open on May 20. The 353,000-square-foot building is the flagship of the city's 15-site public library system. Designed by architect Cesar Pelli, it has a five-story glass atrium topped by a prominent wing-like extension that juts out beyond the roofline and over two city streets.

Inside, the $125 million library is laced with technologies to make the city's physical and digital assets accessible to patrons. There are 300 desktops and 16 laptops for public use, and wireless Internet access is available throughout the building. Electronic signage and maps are linked to the library's digital catalog to show the locations of items.

Eight self-checkout units let patrons check out books on their own. There's also a book-sorting system from FKI Logistex that does a lot of the heavy lifting for library staff - a group made smaller in recent years because of budget constraints. Akin to sorting systems used in retail distribution centers, the bookhandler reads bar codes and routes books along conveyor belts to the proper bin or pushcart, depending on whether a book is destined for in-house shelving or shipment to one of the other city libraries.

"The sorting system is able to sort 6,000 items in an hour. I just say that number and think, yippee!" says Betsy Williams, director of collection and technical services.

New building, new network

Getting into the new facility required the library's IT staff to move their data center twice - first to a temporary site in 2002, then into the new building. But the effort was worth it: Construction of the new building provided an opportunity to upgrade the telecom infrastructure that serves the city's entire public library system. There's a new network, along with a new IP phone system.

"When you open a new building like this, there's a lot of anticipation. People haven't had access to a good chunk of the collection for more than three years, and expectations are high. We realized if we're going to have a state-of-the-art building, we need to have state-of-the-art infrastructure," Williams says.