Quiet, please, I'm dreaming

ASIANS OUT! a graffitist had scrawled on the back door of the toilet in the State Library of NSW. The brazen stupidity of the remark was unsettling but one finds such drivel on toilets all over Australia and nobody expects it to be cleaned up in a hurry.

This is different, though. This is the State Library and one of Sydney's more cerebral dunnies, a place for quiet reflection, on Wittgenstein or Gibbon, or the cultural significance of Nick Cave. This is the throne of the Sydney thinker.

Yet for weeks the graffiti remained, an affront to our intellectual community. Graffiti of this calibre  so moronic it can hardly be called "racist"  does little to inspire one to return to one's desk to resume, perchance, reading a monograph on the haiku of the Tokugawa.

Brooding on this dismal thought, I returned to my desk to resume a monograph on the haiku of the Tokugawa. I was in the Macquarie Street Wing of the State Library, the "new" wing. But I couldn't concentrate; I found my mind drawn to other defects in our leading reference library.

Consider the Special Sealed Section. It is neither special nor sealed. On the contrary, the SSS is a noisy strip of space behind the staff desk where readers of limited or original or fragile books are cordoned off. Here persist the more exasperating pedants, the madder scholars, jumbled up with the inevitable study group, corralled together, it seems, for mutual torment.

The SSS is infernally noisy with the buzz of requests at the request desk and the hum of the photocopier. And soon enough, a study group arrives  usually a tribe of giggling HSC students who arrange themselves around a desk. Then their mobile phones start ringing; they've correctly assessed the librarians' failure to police the No Mobile Phones sign. One can't blame the librarians; they perform their thankless task with the patient merit of the unworthy. Yet some seem to have no concept of control, of being in charge. They're as mild as, well, a roomful of librarians.

Beyond the request desk are two rows of internet terminals where "clients" sit in headphones, playing computer games and telling us what they're doing on Twitter. Occasionally a user lets out a tweet or yahoo at something new on YouTube, oblivious to the fact that he or she can't hear his or her own voice.

In the basement, clients sit in a windowless corner known, in the modern euphemism, as a "study space". The space is as conducive to study as an industrial elevator shaft. Interrogative lights blaze down. It is bereft of atmosphere; the air musty, the mood grim. The clients, morlock-like, seem locked to their seats. Perhaps they're all being forced to read The Gulag Archipelago on a loop? I fled the scene in horror, to the brighter realm opposite: sunlight, windows and bookshelves!

And yet the banks of little, graffitied wooden cubicles there are reminiscent of the desks of Nicholas Nickleby's school days. The shrubbery seems to glower in at us, transmitting the faint sensation that we are the zoo animals and they are just passing by.

Welcome to the Macquarie Wing. It seems to have few redeeming features. A government figure recently gave me an insider's opinion: The State Library is suffocating, oppressive, musty, disorganised, poorly lit and noisy."

The library is a reproach to my idea of what a good library should be. But let me be clear about why.

The State Library is, of course, two libraries: the modern Macquarie Wing, built in 1988, home of the international collection of books and documents; and the Mitchell Wing, depositary of David Scott Mitchell's immense collection of Australian letters, which celebrates its 100th anniversary next year with a fanfare of new exhibits, cosmetic surgery and publicity.

A tunnel lined with sepia photos connects the two buildings but this rabbit warren merely underlines the fact that the Macquarie Wing was bolted on with scant regard for utility or aesthetic harmony.

The new building fronts Macquarie Street and links up with the Mitchell Wing above ground by an unobtrusive first-floor bridge and below ground at a number of points, states the library's website. It adds: Mr Andrew Andersons, the design architect, had excelled himself in designing an attractive and welcoming building flooded with natural light that will continue to endear itself to countless library users.

To my mind, Andersons has not excelled himself: there is no architectural sympathy between these two structures; nothing harmonises or suggests that you are about to enter a hushed temple of the mind.

True, the Mitchell has a grand entrance, some token austere rooms and an intimidating reading room but these scarcely compensate for the outdated floor plan, clunky old furniture (a nod at heritage), resounding echo, prehistoric stack and streams of yabbering tour groups who tend to gather beside readers (or clients, as we're called, even here) and swoon about the grandeur of the ceiling.

The two structures form a wretched hybrid of mock-Victoriana and grim, late-20th-century architecture that yawns out at the road like a pair of jaws. As a library, it is in urgent need of a big overhaul.

After lunch I returned to my desk in the Macquarie Wing to read a book about the making of the atomic bomb. Behind me, a study group ignored several courteous requests for silence. I conceded defeat and made a request of the request desk: Er, do you suppose I could read these books in the Mitchell Wing? It's a bit noisy here.

The librarian, a sweet, bird-like creature of infinite patience and seething courtesy, noted my six foreign books, hesitated and finally, after a little special pleading, agreed. "But you must follow me, sir." I followed her through a subterranean passage of Dickensian charm, via a back office of grazing desks and old photocopiers, until we emerged, like Watson and Sherlock Holmes, in the midst of the Mitchell Reading Room: ah, the Great Hall of Australian Letters!

"Normally we wouldn't do this, sir, but we do understand that it can get noisy back there with the study groups, she said.

One consolation is that the cogs of change are slowly being cranked. They may even manage a full revolution if Regina Sutton has her way.

Sutton is the State Librarian and chief executive of the State Library of NSW. She has an intriguing past, for a State Librarian, one that asks us to re-align our preconceptions of what it means to be a librarian. She is an American-born former executive at IBM, Telstra and Eastman Kodak and General Motors. At Kodak, according to her CV, she "realigned the field sales model, restructured and repositioned the business into a profitable growth mode".

Her academic career is without reproach: a graduate of INSEAD (a very proper Euro-management school), she holds a degree in industrial administration from General Motors Institute and an MBA from Rochester Institute of Technology, as well as professional certifications in production and inventory control (CPIM) and purchasing (CPM). Her pastimes are travel, art, literature and fitness.

No one questions her suitability to run a State Library but, with this background, genuine lovers of books may quietly wonder whether she plans to reposition the business into a profitable growth mode. What, one yearns to know, does she think of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater? Or Pope's The Dunciad?

In August, Sutton returned from a grand tour of the libraries of Europe to acquaint herself with the finest in the business. She concentrated on Scandinavia, where she visited the Black Diamond library in Copenhagen, the Malmo Public Library in Malmo and the KTH Library in Stockholm. All make excellent use of light, connect with their heritage and rely on a circular or open atrium that serves as a central hub from which the various library services radiate. If these excellent modern libraries are a sign of what Sutton has in mind, then we shall be eternally grateful to her. But one wonders what, exactly, she has in mind  and to what extent the State Government will agree to finance it.

Sutton declined an interview for this piece. But this much I know, thanks to a few library "insiders" and interested architects: Sutton is determined to make a big splash to mark the Mitchell's 100th birthday next year, and the celebrations will be launched later this month. She's leading the drive to transform the look and feel of the Macquarie Wing and has commissioned an update on the "master plan" of 2007. The idea is to generate a new plan to pitch for the tens of millions necessary from the State Government to restructure the library  not next year, when we will see only cosmetic adjustments, more posters and a "rearrangement of the deckchairs", as one employee put it.

No, the bigger vision will take some years and depends on the government overcoming its sclerotic inertia and spending a lot more on the library  something few believe it will do.

Nonetheless, on paper things look promising. I've met someone who has seen the 2009-10 plan. And it is a wonderful thing to behold. It calls for a major transformation of the entire structure, to create a library that is "visitor-oriented rather than self-focused"; to improve vastly the circulation of books and people; to overhaul and render safe the wretched stack.

Best of all, even the most deranged scholars will be given a proper, quiet, airy realm, while the general public will have a big space with free wireless access, interactivity on all levels and a proper cafe  a heaven for study groups. All this will emanate from a central, sun-drenched atrium and the whole structure will serve Sydney as it so desperately needs to be served, as a literary paradise and the "living room of the city", in my friend's masterful summary.

Paul Ham is the author of Kokoda and Vietnam: The Australian War.