D.C. Public Library officials say they're reinventing the neighborhood library by culling their shelves, restocking with popular titles and focusing on digital media and self-help books. But some activists say the library is dumbing down its collection in a city where cultural standards and literacy rates are already shameful.

"It's condescending," Hill East neighborhood activist Bryce Suderow said. "It's making an assumption that we're incapable of reading better books.

Loriene Roy, the president of the American Library Association, said that libraries have been moving toward the "bookstore" model for more than 20 years.

"If people are looking for a good book to read, let's make it easier," she said, explaining officials' thinking. "Help the browser."

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In D.C., though, that's meant pulling books that aren't checked out frequently. That includes world classics such as Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," but also of home-grown authors including Noah Trudeau, Suderow said.

"Trudeau's 'Like Men of War' is the best book on black soldiers in the Civil War ever written," he said. "And now it's gone."

Suderow spoke to The Examiner from within the brightly lit, newly remodeled Southeast Library near the gentrified Eastern Market neighborhood.

The library was closed in April. When it was reopened in June, 8,000 books were missing, reducing the library from 58 shelves to 28. The shelves were dominated by brightly colored books in their jackets. The biggest single section was the self-help "For Dummies" series. There were only a few books in the "History" and "Science" sections. There was one book on the Civil War.

If library officials have their way, every library branch in D.C. will look like Southeast. Library officials say they want the branches to look more like bookstores, with colorful titles, new and popular titles, and an increasing emphasis on computers and the Internet.

Suderow wasn't completely dour about the situation. He said he found it hilarious that the ornate glass panels on the shelves at Southeast carried quotes from Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" even though the branch doesn't carry a copy of the book.

Library spokeswoman Monica Lewis said in an e-mail that she agreed that "too many books were weeded" from Southeast's shelves but many of them were in "bad shape."

Nancy Davenport, D.C.'s interim director of library services, said that under the new plan, classic and "hard-core research" books will be moved downtown to the Martin Luther King Jr. library. The branch libraries will focus on books that people want to read, she said. They're also developing an online collection that will open a brave new world for D.C. bibliophiles.

"You'll have the classics in your kitchen," Davenport said.

That's cold comfort to longtime patrons such as Wendy Blair, a Capitol Hill resident and president of the Literary Friends of the Library. She said she has always enjoyed the library because it challenged her with titles that she wouldn't find in a bookstore.

"I'm well aware of the reasoning. It's just a little disconcerting," she said. "Why should anyone care about the classics? It's self-explanatory: They are their own reward."

One-third of D.C.'s residents are functionally illiterate, according to a study that was published last month. That means they can't even read a bus schedule, let alone Tolstoy. For critics like Suderow, it's up to the library to challenge the public and to raise cultural standards.

"The capital of the United States deserves a first-rate collection that can stand alongside the greatest cities in this country," he said. "Instead it has a collection of books that is inferior to Alexandria and Fairfax."

Davenport, who admitted that she was "embarrassed" by the Chaucer gaffe at Southeast (and promised to send six copies immediately), said she can understand some people's emphases on classics. But, she said, not everyone can agree on what a classic is. "And how are you going to force people to read them?" she asked.

Roy, the Library Association president, said that the debate in D.C. is age-old. When the Boston Public Library was founded in 1850, one of its board members threatened to resign immediately because the libraries didn't carry enough popular works, she said.

"It gets to the heart of what a library is," Roy said.

bmyers@dcexaminer.com