Ear­lier this month I had the incred­i­ble good for­tune to visit DOK in Delft, Hol­land. Nor­mally I would call it the Delft Pub­lic Library, but it just goes by the name “DOK” and the sign on the door says it’s a “library con­cept cen­ter.” The staff did this on pur­pose to get away from the tra­di­tional stereo­types of the pub­lic library, because the insti­tu­tion they’ve cre­ated is about as far away as you can get from the con­no­ta­tion of a 1950s build­ing, filled with quiet peo­ple, all of them sit­ting alone, in a rel­a­tively dreary build­ing, being shushed by an old lady with a bun.

Instead, it is eas­ily the most col­or­ful and aesthetically-pleasing library I have ever seen. Granted, I’ve seen a very small per­cent­age of the world’s libraries, but the use of a diverse palette of bright and unusual col­ors was a very stark con­trast to every other library I have seen in per­son or in pictures.

Even more impres­sive (and truly strik­ing) is the amount of rad­i­cal trust the staff has placed in its patrons. Some of the stark con­trast with Amer­i­can libraries is due in part to the liti­gious nature of our soci­ety. Every­where I went in Delft and in DOK, I found exam­ples of things we could never do in the U.S. out of fear of being sued out of exis­tence. In some cases, it’s as sim­ple as hav­ing some of the shelves for chil­drens books and dis­play cases on wheels so that they can be moved around as needed to cre­ate pro­gram or play space. The kids can even stand on the book­shelves (as can adults). There’s a room that’s tucked away on the side that truly is built for chil­dren, with low benches for sit­ting and light­ing under­neath them for lit­tle ones who want to read or play on the floor. In another case, it’s the open lis­ten­ing sta­tion pods. When I was there, I could hear music drift­ing through the build­ing from one of them. Some kids would put on an album and let it run while they were else­where on the floor talk­ing or play­ing videogames. It wasn’t over­whelm­ing, though, and there were other places where I couldn’t hear it at all and could sit in silence if I wanted to.

The small design touches every­where are stun­ning, but that’s not sur­pris­ing giv­ing the Dutch aes­thetic. DOK eas­ily has the coolest, most com­fort­able chairs of any library. As I walked around, I kept sit­ting in them just because I could and wanted to. Some of them are even prac­ti­cal. Recently, I was in a pub­lic library in the U.S. where I had trou­ble find­ing a com­fort­able place to sit. My only choice as an adult was the stan­dard box cush­ion chair with wood arms. Com­pared to DOK, fur­ni­ture used in Amer­i­can libraries is at best cor­po­rate and at worst unwel­com­ing. They also use nat­ural lan­guage names for sec­tions of the col­lec­tion (psy­chol­ogy, com­put­ers and inter­net, etc.), not Dewey num­bers, and the graph­ics for the ban­ners are col­or­ful and eye-catching. They are clearly done by a pro­fes­sional, and they don’t all look the same. Also note the lack of steel shelves that make the library look like a ware­house. Instead, they used flex­i­ble shelv­ing made from recy­clable mate­ri­als (also done for some gor­geous tables and desks).

You walk into DOK and you imme­di­ately feel wel­come into a place you know you can spend hours at if you want to. DOK is what I’ve always wanted libraries to be in terms of the “expe­ri­ence” that hap­pens around books, infor­ma­tion, con­tent, media, and peo­ple. You can’t help but smile when you’re inside, and you just feel hap­pier in gen­eral. A cou­ple of years ago, I heard a speaker at a Min­nesota Library Asso­ci­a­tion con­fer­ence say that the clas­sic mis­take libraries make is that we focus too much on how we want peo­ple to feel about the library when they walk in. His the­ory was that we need to focus on how peo­ple feel about them­selves when they walk in, and DOK illus­trates that the­ory in prac­tice. Each time I entered the build­ing, the bright, nat­ural light from the glass ceil­ing had an effect on me. If I feel bet­ter about myself there, I will feel bet­ter about the library and enjoy my expe­ri­ence more.

DOK’s Direc­tor, Eppo, told us that “libraries are (for the most part) all about not hav­ing fun.” At DOK, they delib­er­ately turned this stereo­type on its head. Instead, their the­ory is that “life is all about hav­ing more fun than you can think of, and it starts at the library.” So they have videogames, lis­ten­ing sta­tions, com­fort­able chairs, a café, a cir­cu­lat­ing art col­lec­tion, pro­grams through­out the build­ing (not just hid­den away in a room in the base­ment), a piano, toys for kids to play with, a brightly-lit room devoted to graphic nov­els, an entire room (done in red) devoted to romance nov­els, and more.

When you walk in the build­ing for the first time, if your cell­phone is dis­cov­er­able via blue­tooth, you’ll receive a text mes­sage from DOK that says, “Wel­come to the most mod­ern library in the world,” a claim well-lived up to. There’s an RFID sys­tem for both library cards and books (with no pri­vacy prob­lems to date). There’s a sys­tem of LCD screens mounted around the build­ing for nav­i­ga­tion and infor­ma­tion which runs off Nin­tendo Wiis. The dis­play is a Flash appli­ca­tion of a Wii chan­nel and the top bar’s infor­ma­tion and color changes based on your loca­tion in the library. Staff can log in to a web­site to change what shows on the dis­play in order to update mes­sages for the pub­lic (about pro­grams, clos­ings, etc.). The afore-mentioned lis­ten­ing sta­tion pods are truly amaz­ing, and I now have to find a way to fund one for my home. Plans for later this year call for the instal­la­tion of a mul­ti­me­dia cre­ation area for podcasting/vidcasting/etc. and a “genius bar” type of setup for tech­nol­ogy help for the public.

None of which pre­cludes the pro­vi­sion of and help find­ing print mate­ri­als and ref­er­ence help. Staff are smartly sit­u­ated through­out the build­ing, and books are every­where. Mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers are eas­ily acces­si­ble, housed in a bril­liant design of cubes that makes the most cur­rent edi­tion vis­i­ble and recent issues avail­able with­out staff inter­ven­tion. While there are fly­ers and hand­outs on top of var­i­ous shelv­ing, the walls are not plas­tered with hand­made signs of rules and nav­i­ga­tion. Of course, there isn’t a sin­gle “no cell phones” sign to be found since they actu­ally com­mu­ni­cate with patrons via mobile devices.

I could go on all day about how DOK gets the big things and the details right, but you can see some of this for your­self in my Flickr set. It is every­thing the big, fancy Amer­i­can libraries want to be but just miss. If your library is plan­ning a new build­ing or a ren­o­va­tion, I highly rec­om­mend you talk to the peo­ple at DOK and if at all pos­si­ble, visit this amaz­ing library. You will be amazed at how much bet­ter than a book­store a library can be at mer­chan­dis­ing and aes­thet­ics, let alone the social experience.

Adden­dum: Even bet­ter pic­tures from the DOK folks them­selves here, and an arti­cle in Mar­ket­ing Library Ser­vices about inno­va­tion at DOK here.