Shoving books aside to create community-centered coworking spaces doesn’t sit well with some library loyalists.
It’s 9:45 on a Monday morning, and Jonathan Marino has just arrived at his tech startup in D.C.’s Chinatown neighborhood. The 30-year-old director of content for Map Story–which aims to be the Wikipedia of interactive maps–greets his two interns with a huge smile, joins them at an open table tucked inside a glass-walled pod, and fires up his laptop. Hunched over their computers, the group looks like any other early-stage startup, with one key distinction–their “office” is merely a meeting area inside Washington, D.C.’s main public library.