The new Cerritos Library is simply the most exciting public library I've visited in years! You've undoubtedly read and heard about it, and if you're fortunate, you've done what City Librarian Waynn Pearson hoped you would do: gone to Cerritos, CA, to 'experience it.'

Pearson was smart and lucky. He enlisted a very talented team to bring his remarkable vision for the library to fulfillment. He had the full support of an enlightened government in an affluent city that could afford excellence. Together, they gave that vision a stunning physical and architectural presence, coupled with a special, indeed customized, scenario, a story line. Their creation carries everyone who enters it through a unique encounter until they arrive at their own particular learning, entertaining, or informing destination.

To pull off this amazing feat the team managed to meld the newest and best in media with the most traditional stuff of libraries, the books. Decor ranges from the oak-paneled, 19th-century reading room, with a glowing, if virtual, fire in the fireplace, to a fantastic futuristic late 21st-century setting fully loaded with new technology. The interiors are brilliantly designed to carry the visitor from place to place, period to period through what Pearson calls the 'levels of learning' in this living library.

Along the way one sees a huge aquarium, a variety of media presentations, an art deco young adult center, life-size dinosaurs, a fine collection of art and artifacts, and hundreds of public access terminals. The place is obviously popular, and nearly always busy. It was teeming with young and old citizens of Cerritos on the hot August afternoon of my visit.

The library is also a theme park, a circus, and a museum. It delivers a history of Earth, communication, and libraries and a view of one version of the future. While it is not the model for every community, it will be an inspiration for all. It is the custom-made, creation of a team of artists, orchestrated by Pearson to bring a total community experience and an individualized learning center to an area just a few freeway minutes from Disneyland, Hollywood, Los Angeles, and the Pacific. This new, monumental work of art is already a unique yet integral part of the histories, cultures, geography, and lifestyles that we know as Southern California.

Make no mistake about it, you can get hundreds of ideas for your own library of the future out there in Cerritos whether you come from Chicago, New York, Miami, or Broken Bow, OK. Pearson's vision has taught us all, in libraries everywhere, that to bring universal truths to local folks you must localize that vision. You must shape it and sculpt it into a landmark that stands out above the hometown crowd, but one that fits well with what stimulates civic pride and celebrates the familiar cultural background and monuments of the place and time. I wouldn't try to drop a theme park library in a Yankee suburb in New England, but that art deco YA area might pack 'em in anywhere.

The Cerritos Library beckons the individual into a totally new library experience. Yet on the way, the visitor also finds a comfortable library literally decorated by books. The physical and artistic configuration and the abundance of surprises that greet the visitor in the library carry that individual into the future by way of a seamless yet visible odyssey through the past and present of the human story to one version of what lies ahead.

Successful articulations of a vision for the library of the future, like that beauty in Cerritos, integrate the universal truths we share as a nation and world with the special cultural, social, and historical characteristics that define our local community. Complicating that challenge but making it possible as well is the limitless reach and infinite virtual possibilities from the ever-changing new information technologies.

There are great new ideas from Cerritos, and they will inspire and find application everywhere. Library planners, however, must remember that there is no single model for the library of the future. It will take special creative genius like that of Pearson and his Cerritos team to shape and mold those ideas to integrate them with the unique local history and future of each community where they are tried.

Comment on this editorial