By Amanda Gordon

Patience and fortitude are still keeping watch at the New York Public Library’s flagship Fifth Avenue entrance, but the world is changing around them, and so, in a fashion, are they.

The Library has a new logo developed in-house and based on its iconic lion statues. It is a bold graphic inspired by the design of stained glass, complete with a circular frame. The former logo was also a lion, but with finer detail that apparently made it difficult to read in contexts like Twitter.

The logo isn’t the only thing changing. At its annual gala last week, the library introduced new messaging in the official gala video (available on YouTube), this year produced by a new team of outside vendors: Mark Katz of the Soundbite Institute, Tim Miller of Big Chief Entertainment, and James Percelay of Get Real Productions. The goal, Mr. Katz said, was to position the library as “an unrivaled ‘human-powered search engine,’” in an age of Google, Yahoo, and Monster.com.

Three librarians appear in the video to tease out the point. After Mayor Bloomberg describes a librarian’s human touch, career specialist Janice Moore-Smith says, “Online job sites, they can’t do that.” Reference librarian David Smith says helping writers requires creativity and “if you’re pro-active, you anticipate what their needs are.”

And children’s librarian Julia Chang explains the difference between her and an Internet search engine: “Even though Google will give you the thousand hits that they give you, a children’s librarian can always refine your search and always track the right sources for you and be able to analyze those sources.”

It’s the last minute of the video, though, that feels ready to be repurposed into a primetime public service announcement. It begins with a question that makes a great tagline, “What are you searching for?” Cue the inspirational music, and watch more than a dozen people of diverse ages and ethnicities answer: “A job in fashion,” “a really good mystery,” “references for my thesis,” “my family tree…” Mayor Bloomberg’s answer is, “What’s going to take this city forward” Hilary Knight, Eloise’s illustrator, says, “New ideas.” One of the antique expert Keno brothers answers, “The next great treasure.” The author E. Annie Proulx says, “Information on the kauri trees of New Zealand in the 19th century.”

The video ends with a woman’s voice repeating “What are you searching for?” with a black screen showing a skinny white rectangular box, mimicking search boxes on Web sites. This minute has emotional impact and captures the incredible range of ways people use the library. It’s about time it got its own fancy commercial.

I’ll be searching for it, along with those snappy new lions.

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