Other facilities include a small children's library, exhibition spaces, lecture halls, a school for information sciences and a planetarium, this last being a separate, spherical structure poised at one end of the vast outside plaza like an orbiting satellite.

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Inside the 76-story tower's rippled steel exterior lies a lifeguard-manned swimming pool and sun deck, a boxing studio, a children's library, a grilling terrace with "dining cabanas, " a billiards room, a squash court and a golf simulator, just to name a few.

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Disney recently began selling subscriptions to its large online library of children's books.

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Bird says she only has time to blog four to five hours a night, given her full-time job as children's librarian at the New York Public Library.

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To boost literacy rates in certain ZIP Codes with lesser affluence, New York City signed up with the Dolly Parton Imagination Library to send popular children's titles into homes of children up to age 5.

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Liverpool children's author Alan Gibbons, a rigorous campaigner against reductions in library services, said there was a pattern of expenditure on large libraries while smaller branches closed.

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Children's authors David Almond and Alan Gibbons are due to speak at a public meeting against Newcastle library cuts.

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The library, which is open to the public, now contains 3, 000 children's books and 5, 000 books for adults, in French, Arabic and English, a mix of fiction and nonfiction that focuses on the humanities.

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