THE SAN JOSE MODEL

摘要

It took Six years to propose, plan, and execute what Jane Light, director of the San Jose Public Library (SJPL), calls "the marriage.'The idea came from brainstorming at a power breakfast of former mayor Susan Hammer and former San Jose State University (SJSU) president Robert Caret in 1997. They would collaborate to build what became the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library to serve as the main library for SJPL and the city and the university library for SJSU. The magnificent King Library opened in August 2003. The building, with its innovations in combined services for an active campus of 27,000 students and 1,153 faculty and a busy city of 924,950 people, might have been enough to earn LJ's highest award. What it triggered in cooperative planning between university and city, in risk-taking and vision by local politicians, city officials, university administrators, and library managers and staff was truly unique. It is that incredibly complex and difficult work that won the Gale/Library Journal 2004 Library of the Year Award. Much of the credit must go to the current directors of each library, Patricia Breivik at SJSU and Light, who, after inheriting the idea, have organized the marriage and continue to make it work so effectively. They have invented a new model for. academic/public library cooperation. In fact, we should probably call it "The Libraries of the Year Award" this year, because despite their inseparable collaboration, the two maintain unique and quite different identities.