The average person thinks of government as having a monolithic character. If she does not know better, she believes that different government agencies are merely the Vishnu-like arms of one great, unified body. But the opposite is true. Government is, in fact, a cluster of little bureaucracies. Each governmental agency, and each department inside that agency, and each division that department, has its own agenda. Call it the Will to Power. Call it the Imp of the Perverse. Whatever you call it, the result is the same: Different governmental entities often do not cooperate. That is why the notion of joint use is exciting. Joint use is a common-sense idea that two or more separate public agencies can save money and, in the lingo of bureaucrats, "achieve efficiencies" if they combine their money and build things that both need, such as libraries, swimming pools, and public safety facilities. But how do you divide costs, maintenance, responsibilities and security issues among two very different entities? The downtown San Jose library is one project that stretches across the Balkans of non-cooperation, joining together the City of San Jose Redevelopment Agency and San Jose State University. What is most interesting about the San Jose library, which is under construction with completion due in early 2003, is that the facilities are largely shared — rather than creating, what is in effect, two separate libraries under one roof. "We decided against the duplex model," says San Jose City Librarian Jane Light. The decision to combine resources, especially books, was a philosophical one. "It's ‘in for a penny, in for a pound,'" she says of the joint-use approach. "You are not going to get the benefits if you are not going to do it all the way." Another benefit is that the library becomes a crucial link between the university and downtown San Jose. On May 21, 1998, the San Jose City Council and Redevelopment Agency Board (which are alter egos) approved a Memorandum of Understanding with San Jose State University. The MOU is a voluminous document that sets out the rules for the way two very different entities will share a 575,000-square-foot library with a collection of more than 1 million volumes. This document does far more than decide who pays how much for maintenance and furniture: The MOU effectively creates a new type of library. Under this agreement, non-students will be able to check out books from the university collection, which is larger and more in-depth than that of the public library. (As is traditional, university instructors have the right to reserve books related to course work.) The city and the university will share a database, enabling patrons in branch libraries to request books from the main library, or at least put a hold on them. The MOU sets out the obligations of both parties. The university and the city jointly own and use the building as tenants-in-common. Of the total square footage of the building, roughly two-thirds is allocated to the university and the remaining one-third to the city (although this seems a little bit symbolic to me, because much of the library and its collections are open to all). Again, the university and the redevelopment agency jointly own all the furniture, splitting the replacement costs 59-41, with the university picking up the biggest part. The two entities run the library together. Significantly, no staff members of either the city or university library system are to be laid off, ensuring the facility has an unusually large staff to assist library users. The 59-41 split also applies for the library's repair program. To cover facility maintenance costs, the city is obliged to pay the university $6.45 per square foot, or about $1.025 million annually. For sheer economic savings, the joint-use library is a winner. Under the MOU, the city owns 158,990 square feet of the library. Assuming a construction cost of $300 per square foot, which Light says is conservative, that portion alone costs about $47.7 million, while the university's portion costs about $94.7 million. Total construction costs are pegged at $177.5 million. Beyond dollar savings is the considerable boon that the library will have on the urban design of downtown San Jose. The library may become a sort of portal between the city and the school. This portal becomes all the more important when one realizes that contact between the downtown and the campus has been surprisingly rare. Although the university is located directly next to the downtown area, much of the campus is fenced off, and there are only a few pedestrian connections to downtown. (The front doors of nearly all the university buildings face inward toward the quadrangle, turning their backs on downtown. "I have met many people in town who have never set foot on the university campus, and students who have never left the campus," Light says. The location of the library at South Fourth and East San Fernando streets is right at the meeting point of the campus and the city, which connect through a pedestrian walkway. Light says that location was a crucial decision: By straddling the boundary between city and university, the library remains convenient to the campus while providing plentiful pedestrian activity in a downtown area starved for people on foot. The library site is a few blocks from where the city plans to build a new Civic Center/City Hall designed by Getty Center architect Richard Meier. It's a remarkable, if unlikely, achievement: A university research library becomes the driver of pedestrian activity in a formative downtown area. Obviously, problems are possible, such as in the area of labor relations. Librarians employed by different entities may chafe if they believe that their counterparts are receiving better salaries or benefits. The most potent difficulty, perhaps, is what happens if one of the parties runs into financial trouble: the city, being more vulnerable to the ups-and-down of tax collections, may be forced to renegotiate the agreement, cutting staff and hours. Those potential problems, however, seem piddly compared to the benefits. And while we should be cautious about leaping to embrace joint-use agreements across the board, Light draws a provocative analogy between the world of information and the world of public agencies. After all, she points out, both libraries and universities are tax-supported institutions. "In the information age, these kinds of jurisdictional boundaries are kind of laughable. If you are giving resources to people for life-long learning needs, we have to unlock these boundaries that we have helped to erect." Amen, sister, and pass the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature.