And yes, I went there, yesterday (22 July). It was a totally crazy place. The Central ‘Lending Department’ is located in Basement 1 and it was crowded with a whole lot of people, at least thrice the number of shelves in the library. And yes, I guess just that section holds as much books as a typical community library do, much better than the previous National Library (Why, of course, they took so darn long to build it).
So you’ll probably be asking me, then what are the other floors for, especially when the library is a stand-alone building that is so tall? From my perspective, majority of the floors are redunant, probably built to prop up the Reference Section, which is the next place where books are present other than the Central Lending Section. And this section, is located on the 7th floor, exactly 7 storeys away from the previous section. Scary. In addition, this sections extends up to 13th floor, with book shelves standing side-by-side, in a less creative manner than NIE Library but definitely holding much more books. This section, dubbed ‘Lee Kong Chian Reference Library’, houses the largest collection of books in the social sciences aspects with regards to South East Asian Studies and would contribute very much to my personal research if it had opened earlier.
I took a photo from 4th storey, but I have no time to upload it now, so I probably be putting up sometime later. In any case, the photo isn’t very cool. Unfortunately, I was there at 8.40pm, exactly 20 minutes before they close, so I was unable to look through the huge building. And one warning, the elevators really sux big time. I waited darn long for the elevator to reach the storey I am on before realising that it was simply too packed to fit another being. To be fair, I got to mentioned that then was when everyone was going home, and hence, trying to go back to the first storey. Yah, I think that’s all.