Qretch is a delight, as usual.
I really like how all the Library options go all out 110%. Capacity is for all the books, Comfort is a library-town, Preservation makes the library calamity-proof, Security makes the library an adventure's dungeon, etc. Every choice goes way the heck overboard for their chosen feature.
Dwarves.
My thoughts on the various library options:
[ ] Capacity
You could focus on sheer size, making a library that can be conveniently scaled pretty much indefinitely. Your library is always going to be able to grow, but if you want to go completely off the rails and dedicate yourself to collecting literally every written work ever made, this library will be able to handle that without any problems.
Capacity is unlikely to become an issue for at least the next few decades even
if we put every book we can possibly find in the library. This should be considered not so much as an immediate practical concern, as it is an aspirational goal to strive towards - this is telling the fledgling library staff that yes, we do want to collect
every book ever.
[ ] Comfort
You could focus on a library that will be a delight to visit or even study at for prolonged periods, with a focus on easy accessibility, well-lit reading areas, plentiful study rooms, private quarters, and built-in taverns and restaurants.
This one is interesting - it encourages visitors, both from abroad and from the K8P locals. Especially in the early days, this will help the library gain a reputation among scholars in general. We could see travelers from across the Old World and beyond show up far sooner than they otherwise would. Seems both practical and narratively interesting.
[ ] Holy
Most libraries are dedicated to one God or another, so why not follow the trend? Carve dedications to Verena, Valaya, Quinsberry, and Hoeth into the very bedrock alongside subtle nods to Ranald, and make allowances for large public shrines to the more acceptable Gods.
The choice to pick if you
really want to do the suggested "help Ranald make amends to Shallya's mom" plan from way back when. That said, I'm fairly ambiguous on this? The library will be "reasonably pious" regardless, so if you just want a secret ranald cross easter egg, you don't need to pick this option to get it.
[ ] Order
Despite the best efforts of librarians, practically every library eventually has to resort to The Stacks when the amount of books outstrips the ability to impose order on them. Every scholar has known the experience of delving deep into a maze of dimly-lit shelves many times their height in search of a volume that the library's records insist is in there somewhere. Seek from the outset to ensure that no visitor to your library ever suffers this fate.
It's worth noting that one of the things that makes the Library of the Tower of Hoeth such a vaunted place of learning is the way that the library automatically funnels scholars to what they're looking for - sort of a magical Google search. This is probably the biggest logistical hurdle inherent in running a library of this magnitude in this era, so deciding to bend all of Belegar's resources from the outset to defeat this foe is a very reasonable thing to do. As the library becomes larger and larger, being able to actually find things in it will become a bigger and bigger draw for any visitors.
[ ] Preservation
You could focus from the outset on the preservation of the gathered materials from both natural disaster and the march of time. The masons will use techniques meant for facilities built atop live volcanoes to create a library that could withstand being the epicentre of the beginning of a second Time of Woes, and a great deal of care paid to air shafts and ambient humidity will create separate sections of the library tailored for the different needs of paper, parchment, and papyrus, and a means of completely securing the entire facility such that it could last another few millennia of enemy inhabitation unbreached.
This is the unique bonus only available because this is a
Dwarven library. There is nobody in the entire world better at securing a vault than the Dwarves, and this would effectively ensure that the collective knowledge in the library will never be lost. This is great from a thematic standpoint, and could be useful in negotiations with other Libraries to help convince them to allow us to make copies of their collections.
[ ] Security
Your personal library is split into three sections: general access, Collegiate access, and completely secret. A larger facility will need a commensurately more complex system. Build the library from the ground up so that there will be different sections dedicated to different levels of access, and in such a way that every visitor will be convinced that the highest level they have access to is the highest level that exists.
And
this is the unique bonus only available because the Head Librarian is a Grey Lady Magister. The main benefits of this that I see are that having a more segregated level of access will make it a lot easier to convince various guilds (especially dwarven guilds) to share some of their knowledge for the Library. Plus, the aesthetic of having a super double-plus secret vault that we can put the Liber Mortis in.
My rough personal preference list goes something like:
Order>Comfort=Preservation>Security>Capacity>Holy
