So Thursday night they're gonna party like it's 1999

This morning's Kansas City Star reports that the KCK Public Library-the last big library system in the metro that hasn't unwired-will celebrate the remodeling of its main downtown branch this coming Thursday evening.

Interesting, their plans for accommodating the coming wave of high schoolers with district-supplied laptops. They're apparently looking to shoehorn them into three "study rooms" instead of doing what simple logic dictates would be the right way to deliver services to students equipped with modern wireless-capable mobile devices. Don't inconvenience them by making them choose between your online and printed resources-instead, light up the building so they can take their computers into the stacks and then access both from there. Why spend all that money buying laptops if you're not going to leverage them to their fullest extent?

This kind of twentieth-century thinking speaks volumes about why KCK has fallen so far behind, and why the digital divide yawns wider in Wyandotte County than just about everywhere else in the metro. Did it occur to anyone with the library or school district that besides fake trees and a fish tank-among all the other things you bought with the $3.4 million you spent on this makeover-that a wireless network, at least for the school laptops if not for everyone else, might be a useful addition?

What on earth do you think is going to happen when all those laptop users show up at once? Here's a hint. It'll be the same thing that happened at UMKC after they remodeled their main library's reference department into a cramped, outmoded "information commons" along the same lines as what you're planning, in order to placate a big donor. It simply became a woeful, underutilized bottleneck that hastened the necessity of the library's subsequent unwiring.

And since you'll obviously have to provide wireless access to the high schoolers eventually, what possible reason could there be not to provide it for the public at large? By all rights, you should already be doing that now. As I said at the beginning, you are now the only large public library system in metropolitan Kansas City that doesn't offer at least some kind of access for patron-owned laptops.

It's not still 1999, you know. That's why Prince doesn't sing that song any more.