Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

The future of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library is one of those contentious issues that surprisingly gets people riled up. And so it will again in November, when a group of urban planners and library scientists gather to decide what to do with the aging building that houses the District’s flagship public library.

According to the Post, the gathering, which is being organized by the Urban Land Institute, will meet from November 13-18, after which the participants will present recommendations on what, if anything, to do with the MLK Library. Library officials seem ready to entertain a proposed move:

Library spokesman George Williams said that as long as there continues to be a central library that retains the King name, the system was open to options including sharing the building or moving to another location.

“We have to start thinking about what is best for this building,” Williams said. “What that panel is going to do is say whether the building is providing the best value. Are there ways the building could give the District more value? And how might that look?”

With newly renovated libraries popping up throughout the city, the continuing debate over MLK’s future may seem odd. It is, after all, housed in a building that has seen better days, is expensive to maintain and could likely fetch the city a pretty penny if put on the open market.

But it’s not any building, as former DCist contributor Kriston Capps argued in the City Paper earlier this year — it’s a Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, and the only one in the District, to boot. Still, plenty of people, including senior city officials, think the library could stand to move to another location, both to allow some who can afford to renovate the building to do so and to cut the District’s costs in having to operate it. (The Post notes that replacing a window can cost up to $16,000.)

Of course, it’s one thing what the group proposes, and another what the city’s legislators opt to do. When Mayor Anthony Williams tried to move the library a block north in 2006, the D.C. Council chose not to act.